I have just finished my closest reading yet of Timon of Athens, and I am floored firstly by how difficult it will be to direct and secondly by how rich it is in lessons and questions about our modern political power situation.
I am convinced by the scholarship maintaining that this was not a finished script, though I am not convinced that this was a collaboration with Middleton or any other writer – but I’m not sure I care enough to devote overmuch time to an investigation of as much. The storytelling is so uneven (the main character only gets interesting in the fourth act, and that is when the drama becomes protracted and shoddy) and Shakespeare’s relationship to consistency so casual (various lines indicate very clearly features about the timing of the play and motives of the characters that are at direct odds with what other various lines and scenarios indicate) that I cannot believe this to have been a finished product of the same dramatist who composed such tidy stories as The Tempest and Measure for Measure.
In addition to the dramaturgy of the thing, the language is amazingly complex, with more mystifying phrases with no attractive explanations than all but the most esoteric history plays (King John and Richard II come to mind). It will really require the most top-notch Shakespeare-speakers to pull off making clear the ideas – often presented in off-meter lines – the characters mean to express. Also, there are about forty too many characters both for my budget and sense of how this drama has to be expressed – I propose conflating all Timon’s servants into the newly-beefed-up character of Flavius and doing away with the Poet, Painter, Jeweler, Merchant and all the small roles, including the bandits. I think the play can and should be done with Timon, a composite Flavius, Apamantus, Alcibiades and four composite Senators, incorporating all the Lords and other debtors, who consume their servants. It’s a very masculine play (about which, more presently), so I propose also cutting Alcibiades’ two prostitutes and the ladies at the masque.
At its very core, this play is the fullest, most honest look into the drivers of the social order in a society, the true power-holders. Even in plays about kings like Richard III, there seems to be a lot left up to historical processes (without a cataclysmic battle of Tewkesbury, would there have been the type of power-vacuum that would allow for the ascent of a despot like Richard?), where in plays like Macbeth, magic and the cosmos seem the real movers and shakers. In Timon, we are really glimpsing the back-rooms of the halls of power in Athens (the parties where the rich cavort with one another, the senate sessions where military decisions are controlled), and we get to see what would happen if, unlike in America, where whistle-blowers tend to be low-level officials who can write books about their inside knowledge, but cannot dismantle institutions, a truly powerful faction went, as they say, rogue.
I see the part of the play before Timon’s adoption of Apamantus’ churlish philosophy as being really some mixture of Bilderberg conferences, Skull and Bones rituals, C Street Family life and Wall Street cocktail parties. But before we get there, the question of who Timon is looms large. It is unclear how old he is and what he’s done in his life. What are his motives? Whence his wealth? The only real clue we’ve got to Timon’s past is Alcibiades’ reference in IV, iii:
I have heard, and grieved, How cursed Athens, mindless of thy worth, Forgetting thy great deeds, when neighbor states, But for thy sword and fortune, trod upon them,--
Some take this as an indication that Timon once had a glorious history as a soldier. But the paucity of remarks about that makes this explanation unlikely, as does the yet-lingering problem of how he was able to garner such riches. I choose not to read it as a sword Timon himself wielded, but rather take the phrase “thy sword and fortune” as a whole to indicate that Timon is a war-profiteer. It could be that he was a proto-Lockheed-Martin, but the Senators’ 11th hour effort to convince him to take Athens’ side against Alcibiades’ insurrection rests on the faith that soldiers would follow him as they would no one else in a war. I find myself wanting to think of him as a proto-Erik Prince, a financer of a private army who thrived on government contracts with the Athenian Senate.
These parties at Timon’s house are not just extravagant galas, in this context, but something rather more insidious: boisterous, drink-sodden gatherings of the highest powers in the nation: politicians, military brass, corporate interests and bankers. The ostensible democracy in Athens (to be clear, we are obviously talking about America here) is revealed actually to be an oligarchy, where a small number of very powerful men make all the choices (and men they are, indeed). I picture Timon’s house as a very expensive, all-white penthouse apartment with neon-lit pole dancers and thousands of candles. I picture the men drinking until they have some kind of fight-club. I picture secret rituals and conspiratorial horse-trading.
No one ever leaves congregations like these in America (and I’m clear that, yes, there really are such congregations), so we don’t know what it would look like if anyone ever did, though I’m given to suspect that things like assassination are not at all out of the realm of possibility. Much less have we a precedent for what would happen in America when an American equivalent to Alcibiades abandons and opposes the army. We see military coups much more in Latin America (less now than in the 1970’s, but Honduras had one very recently). Imagine a General Powell or Petraus (or better yet, both simultaneously, if we are to simulate the amount of military sway I imagine Alcibiades to wield) revealing the US government to be deeply corrupt and imploring the military to join them in overthrowing the government. That is the chaos that befalls Athens by the end of the play.
I am not sure how I see the second half looking, but I know I have some pretty radical ideas for certain moments, which I’ll keep to myself, and for some script re-ordering. I am very excited and terrified by this play.
The house did not release a robust public option, either. Specifically, the rates are not fixed, as I predicted last night they would be, at Medicare plus 5%, but now have to be negotiated with the corporate for-profit insurance cartel. Almost no hope now for very good health care reform. Lesson: give up.
A lot of people have asked me recently what I think of the health care bill. Here are my thoughts. Sorry there are no pictures or videos; just text. -JAM
I - On understanding the urgency of getting it right this time, and on what getting it right would mean
I am hardly the first to lay out the history of health reform in the United States, or, more properly put, the history of how the insurance cartels, drug manufacturers, hospitals and all other people and groups who profit from keeping people sick have thwarted that reform every time it is proposed. Truman first put it on the mythical and elusive “national agenda” and since his time in the White House, universal health care has constituted a plank in every national Democratic platform. If there is a cause that came to epitomize liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century, it was thirst for a national health plan.
Truman, of course, presided over the American years that immediately followed World War II, in which virtually every country in Europe was brought to the brink of extinction. Germany, France, England and all the rest had their national infrastructures decimated, their major metropolitan centers bombed all to nothing and their populations wiped out for a solid generation. Yet somehow, in the interim years, all of those countries have come to develop systems, not all identical, which ensure that every citizen in those countries is entitled to medical attention when they need it, with no further risk to their financial and social health beyond what the sickness or injury itself represents.
The United States has had its priorities elsewhere, as the many millions of uninsured Americans can attest. We have a number of things in this country that almost constitute health care systems. We have Medicare, a system whereby the government reimburses the private doctors and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies for the needs of the American elderly; Canada provides this for all citizens, not just those 65 and up. We have the Veteran’s Administration, which employs doctors and nurses and staffs hospitals and provides direct medical assistance to former enlisted men and women; England provides this for all citizens, not just those who’ve fought in the armed services. Apart from those two things, the rest is essentially an unregulated anarchy of corporate interests, whose primary goal is maximizing profits, colluding with one another to set prices and scheming new ways not to have to provide health care, which would cut into their windfall profits.
“Getting it right” would mean taking those disparate elements and forming them into a coherent national health care system which, even if it did not provide universal health care, would obviate the need for further large-scale overhauls. Imagine that the health care bill that President Obama signed into law extended Medicare to everyone 50 and up and 25 and down, for instance. While leaving people 25-50 to find private insurance, either through their employers or unions or on their own dimes, the organizational stage would be set for a massive broadening of Medicare’s scope, with an eye toward filling in that gap at a later date (a far smaller project, for which the organizational infrastructure would already exist).
I will spare you the arguments that a national health plan like England’s or a single-payer system like Canada’s would be the ideal, preferring to assume that what readership this blog gets is already convinced of those points. Without a relentless,15-year long, party-unified campaign for one of those systems, such a thing would be impossible in the United States, which is a far more conservative, corporate-controlled and larger country than those others. I am working from a stand-point of what is achievable in the current situation, without the alternative history O’Donnell outlines. Instead of such a campaign, we have heard again and again that once Democrats got filibuster-proof control of the Senate, we’d have our day. Well, we’ve now got those 60 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus, an enormous majority in the House, a new, popular president and a considerable majority of the citizenry on the side of a “public option.” The political circumstances have never been nor are likely soon to be preferable to these. If we do not enact the major overhaul now, it will not happen. And, of course, a great many more people will go bankrupt or die needlessly. That is the urgency of getting it done now. This is that swelteringly rare alignment of the planets, and the stakes are life and death, higher than which no stakes exist.
II – On where we stand right now
The first presidential candidate I can remember proposing what we now call a “public option” as central to his health care policy was John Edwards, and it was a major reason I supported him. His version was a lot like the one Ron Wyden of Oregon proposed in the Senate Finance Committee, viz. the government establishes a massive health insurance plan of its own that anyone can buy into or switch to, creating marketplace competition with the insurance cartel and thereby driving down costs and driving up standards. The insurance companies would have to lower rates and stop rejecting people based on pre-existing conditions and the like, or risk losing their customers to this government-backed plan. This would not be a for-profit plan and it would not have to lobby or advertise or do any of the other non-health-care-administering functions that cost private insurers so much money. Its attention would not be divided between its customers and its shareholders.
At the risk of undercutting a central Democratic claim about the public option, I have to say that I think such a thing would indeed lead to a government take-over of health care. The private insurers, having all those other needs that would disable them from competing with the government plan would necessarily topple, leaving a singly-payer system, like England’s, in its wake. That would be good.
Edwards, during his 2004 campaign, was very clear about how he intended to get a plan like that passed: if the congress did not create it within 100 days, a President Edwards would strip members of congress of the lavish health care they enjoy. If it’s good enough for the American people to have to sweat and strain to find health care, it’s good enough for Congress. Likewise, if it’s good enough for Congress to have its health care paid for by the government, it’s good enough for the American people. President Obama is not nearly so combative. As a result, we have had the health care debate that we have had, with endless numbers of types of public option floated and unsuccessfully explained, with angry town halls in August and a ludicrous and undemocratic Gang of Six in the Senate Finance Committee holding the country hostage. Finally, we now know what the Senate and House bills will look like.
The House bill will look a lot like Edwards and Wyden’s proposals. Anyone can buy in, and the rates would be fixed at Medicare’s rates plus 5%. This is what is meant by “robust,” when politicians and pundits refer to a “robust public option.” Chris Dodd, sending out a mailer to supporters, called what Harry Reid, Rahm Emanuel, Max Baucus and he created in conference out of the two Senate health care bills a “robust public option.” He was lying. It is not a robust public option.
For example, it is only available to those who are uninsured. It is, of course, good to ensure the uninsured, but it is too small a percentage of the population to give the government plan the clout and market share it would need to compete meaningfully against the insurance giants. To take on wolves, you need a wolf, not a really pesky bobcat. To take on wolves this evil, you need a fucking rhinoceros. People would not be able to switch from the private health care they already have to the public option, which is how the whole competition thing works. If the government plan is not competing for the customers the insurance industry already exploits, the industry can continue to exploit those people (It’s like how, without a big and powerful socialist or green party, the Democrats can be just as corporate and conservative as they want, without risking a single defection from the left – no one else is competing for us, so we are stuck with our dissatisfaction, and they can keep raising the rates, to switch the analogy back).
And for another example, the Senate is proposing an opt-out option for individual states. This is such bad governance that it’s difficult to figure out how to begin arguing against it. First of all, the “public option” is already optional, for its potential customers (that’s how come the word “option” is in the name). So the opt-out proposal gives the states the option on whether their citizens should have the option? How much more convoluted could it get? Federalism is not meant to work this way. The 10th Amendment outlines the whole thing really beautifully. Those powers the federal government doesn’t mention go to the states. To create federal bureaucracy, laws and systems that states can ignore on a whim breaks down the union and undermines the philosophical underpinnings of the American government system.
The Senate bill, if it were to become law un-amended, would definitely provide more people with health insurance, which would be a good thing, but it would essentially be more Medicaid and not the type of overhaul whose need I argued for earlier. It does not foundationally change the institution of health care in the United States and would ensure the need for later overhaul. Not only does it not achieve universal health care, it does not even put us on track to achieve it later. It merely mollifies a bit of the rage, enables politicians to congratulate themselves on a job well done and kicks the can down the road, presumably for even larger Democratic majorities to deal with. Majorities that will never come.
III – On the way forward, given the current political circumstances
So that’s where we stand. A good bill in the house, a lousy bill in the Senate. There are 8 important steps now. 1) The House has to pass its bill. 2) The Senate has to overcome a Republican filibuster and end debate. 3) The Senate has to pass its bill. 4) The House and Senate bills have to enter into conference to create a single bill. 5) The House has to pass the bill finally. 6) The Senate has to overcome a Republican filibuster and end debate on the bill up for final passage. 7) The Senate has to pass the bill finally. 8) The President has to sign the bill into law. And all of these steps have to happen by Thanksgiving. So let’s go through them.
1) This is taken care of. The House bill will pass overwhelmingly. There is no argument about this point. And thank goodness!
2) This is really the whole game, right here, I think. The Republicans simply do not have enough members to sustain a filibuster. They need at least one member of the Democratic caucus to switch over and help them. Joe Lieberman has signaled that he will do this and be (read this part:) the first Senator ever to assist the other caucus in filibustering his own caucus’ bill. He will not be the first to vote with the other side on a single issue. Obviously, that happens all the time; members are free to have any views they want on any topic. But on procedural issues, like whether or not a bill gets to be voted on at all, members never switch. Joe Lieberman, that putrid fuckhead, intends to change it up on us. What he’s doing, as he’s done time and again, is holding the Democrats hostage. By letting us know we cannot count on his vote, he makes us court him by tailoring bills to his liking, thereby claiming vastly more legislative power for himself than a Senator from a state with slightly more than 1% of the national population should hold. In order to counteract this, a Democrat from the left, perhaps Russ Feingold, Sherrod Brown or Bernie Sanders, should also say he’ll vote with the filibuster, unless his needs are met. If the right can yank the Democratic Party, the left can too. More importantly, the Democratic Caucus should deliver this ultimatum to Lieberman (and Lincoln, Landrieu, Nelson and any other potential turncoat): if you support the other party’s filibuster of your party’s bill, we will strip you of your seniority (Lieberman chairs the Homeland Security Committee) and actively support a primary challenger in your next race. Too many people’s lives are at stake to approach this with the usual amount of Senatorial civility and compromise. Step two is surmountable by arm twisting, and that’s all there is to it. Twist away! (Side note: by using a procedural tactic called “budget reconciliation,” Harry Reid can ram the bill through, sidestepping a filibuster; I gather there is some substantive disadvantage to this approach, but no one has satisfactorily explained it to me yet.)
3) This one, too, is taken care of. For the up-or-down, the health care bill, no matter what it is, will not get 60 votes. But it won’t need them. A simple 50 plus Joe Biden will do just fine, and it will get those handily.
4) This is the other crucial point. I’m not entirely sure who all would be in the conference committee, but certainly Pelosi, Reid and some representative of the White House (hopefully not Rahm Emanuel, who is one of the more conservative members of the Obama Administration). Additionally, it would make sense to have the chairmen of each of the five concerned committees involved (three in the House, two in the Senate) – this can only be good since, as we know, four of the five produced bills with strong “public options,” and 80% is a good size. This would be the other step (along with breaking the filibuster) that would require a lot of citizen activism – writing and calling congressmen, doing citizen lobbying, &c. The demand should be to combine the bills in a way that showed greatly more deference to the House conference bill than to the Senate one. The worst thing that could happen would be the conference bill for final passage coming out of committee and back to the houses looking a lot like the Senate bill. That, again, would be a nice boost to the uninsured, but not provide the kind of overhaul that the health care sector so desperately needs.
5) This step, again, is taken care of. Even if the final passage bill is more conservative than the composite House bill, Pelosi will get it through.
6) If Reid can muscle his caucus into procedural unanimity on the Senate bill, he can do it on the final passage bill.
7) Taken care of.
8) So totally taken care of.
I’ve written this whole thing in one go, done no editing and doubtless left a lot of things out. Expect addenda. But, basically, this is what I think. You?
These are the people crafting health-care policy for everyone in the United States.
Clockwise from top left:
Harry Reid Race: white. Gender: male. Elected to represent: Nevada, less than 1% of US population.
Max Baucus Race: white. Gender: male. Elected to represent: Montana, less than 3/10 of 1% of US population.
Rahm Emanuel Race: white. Gender: male. Elected to represent: Nobody.
Chris Dodd Race: white. Gender: male. Elected to represent: Connecticut, slightly over 1% of US population.
No one mentions that this is racist or sexist, but you can bet that if the four participants were all black women, the right would be having a field day, bloviating about "reverse racism" and "reverse sexism."
Talk about diverse: one of them is under 65 years old!
As many of you know, while I am radical about a great number of issues, I am very conservative regarding others (like: children learning to sing should not learn to belt, soar, back-beat, flourish and vibrato; they should sing in choirs, learn the nexus of breath and resonance, develop an ear for pitch and clarity of tone -- I heard some KidzBop stuff last night that made me cringe).
One way I'm conservative is as regards grammar and the meaning of words. I'd like to announce two ways in which I'm adapting to contemporary standards before I gripe and groan about one I'm unwilling to compromise over.
The first way is demonstrated at the end of that paragraph. I am no longer puritanical about ending a sentence with a preposition. I could have said, "about one over which I'm unwilling to compromise," but I've come to value getting the point across over adhering to grammatical stricture. The thing is, many grammatical strictures have been established in the interest of getting a point across with clarity and accuracy. That's why I adhere to most grammatical strictures.
The second way is in allowing myself use of "they" as the gender-neutral singular pronoun. This is a much tougher one, but I feel on solid intellectual ground because of this July article from the NYTimes magazine. As a friend points out, though, I do use the plural verb form, despite using "they" as a singular. As in "If anyone wishes to speak to a clerk, they take a number and wait in line," as opposed to "they takes a number and waits in line." Again, though I can see intellectual justification in the second, I'm much more interested in getting the point across and the level of jarring the second would do to our ears would inhibit the point more than it transmitted it.
So: see? I am adaptable. I am not a puritan. I understand that language changes (in this digital era more rapidly than ever before), and I don't hang onto things of the past unless I find them really useful. But: here's one I find really useful, though I'm probably being nerdy and obnoxious in so doing.
That's Keith Olbermann, who's normally meticulous about his grammar. Apart from this being one of those slightly obnoxious ego pieces, which, although it's entertaining, is not nearly as interesting or useful as his attacks on Beck, the thing that irks me happens at about 1:49. "But Mr. Carr's point," Olbermann supposes, "begs a great question: do I really want to be like Glenn Beck?"
In this way, Olbermann uses "begs the question" to mean "raises the question," as he frequently does (and as everyone frequently does; virtually 99% of the time "begs the question" is used around me, it's used to mean "raises the question." The problem is, it means something completely different. From the Wikipedia article about it:
The fallacy of petitio principii, or "begging the question", is committed "when a proposition which requires proof is assumed without proof." More specifically, petitio principii refers to arguing for a conclusion that has already been assumed in the premise.
So, for instance, Dan Wilbur and I were recently talking about Andromache, when we got into a discussion about Greek and then American logic for imperial hegemony in the world. The argument goes:
The reason America must stay militarily strong enough to police the world, as it's done since the Second World War, is because it's ethically superior to undemocratic nations; America is able to make that claim to ethical superiority and the accompanying right to police the world since it was strong enough to defeat fascism in the Second World War. Or, more simply put: we must be strong because we are superior. What makes us superior? How strong we are.
That and nothing else is what "begging the question" means. I'm fighting a losing battle with this one, I know, and Olbermann is on the other side of the issue. But I really think it's a useful and specific phrase and ought to be retained on that basis.
In honor of laborers across the country, my instructional guide to President Obama regarding heath-care reform strategy in the coming days and weeks:
Mr. President:
1) Make the case for the public option in the joint session.
2) DEMAND the public option in separate closed-door sessions with the Democratic Caususes of each house of congress.
3) Meet with specific reluctant Democratic senators and twist their arms. You are the President, the party leader, and a lot more popular than any of these guys.
4) Get the Senate leadership in shape. They got a majority on your coattails. They need to be with you.
5) Send the Senate leadership to those same reluctant Democratic senators and have THEM twist their arms by threatening to revoke their committee chairs, &c.
6) Go on a relentless campaign at the grassroots level to explain why people WANT the public option, because they DO. Deploy Oprah and Will.I.Am and everyone else that was in on the campaign.
7) Go it alone in the Senate. The Republicans are bought and paid for. They will not vote for the thing. And when everyone has health insurance, no one will remember what the roll call was like.
8) Watch the popularity rise.
9) Wash, rinse, repeat on gay rights, labor rights, greenhouse gas emissions…
Sorry again about the neglect. I'm going to make a real effort once again.
