Noise Reduction
quiet reflections on life in a loud worldArchive for In the news
Single-Payer Nonsense
Often, people ask me if I miss England. “Not really,” I usually say, and then, after a second’s thought, I add, “Actually, that’s not true. I miss my friends, our flat, the public transportation, and the health care system.”
“The health care system?” most people ask, laughing. “Are you joking?”
“Not at all,” I reply. “In fact, after my friends it is the thing I miss the most.”
What I don’t say, but what is equally true, is that some weeks, I miss the health care system even more than I miss my friends. (Forgive me, friends.) Why, you ask? Well, take this week for example. Take Wednesday even, when just a few hours after suffering through an opinion piece in our local paper by Patrick Buchanan that, with depressingly typical rhetoric, accused Obama of trying to create a health system comprised of “bureaucrats deciding what care each of us shall receive, when we may receive it and whether we even ought to have it” (as if that isn’t what we currently have), I tried to make an appointment with a new doctor and was refused, because I didn’t have all of my insurance details at hand (we have new insurance and the husband, who had the details, was unavailable at the moment I was trying to make the appointment).
And then, as if that wasn’t enough to get me going, I read that congress did not invite even one advocate for a so-called single payer system (i.e., what they have in England) to testify at congressional hearings on health care reform. Not one. Zero. And that several of those that did try to attend were arrested.
Why? Why, why, why? Why are so many Americans – including the friends who laugh when I say I miss the system – so skeptical if not totally dismissive of a single-payer system? (Just consider the tone of this WSJ report on the congressional hearings.) Surely it is related to a general suspicion of all things government, and probably it has something to do with the way we value individual freedom, but let’s face it, we’re talking about health care, and when it comes to that, the freedom we can enjoy is the freedom to be healthy or unhealthy. When we get sick though (and as we try to avoid getting sick) we need health services, and in my experience, the National Health Service delivered health care far more effectively than what we’ve got here. And with plenty of choice, much less hassle from bureaucrats, good quality and good results. (And they say the national systems in France and Germany are even better.)
What was good? Well, how about how absolutely, beautifully simple it was to access it? With our Visas, we got National Health Service (NHS) numbers. With our NHS numbers, we had a choice of neighborhood practices based on our post code. All we had to do was check them out, choose one, fill out a couple of forms and that was that, we were patients, with access to doctors, nurses, prenatal care, postnatal care, lactation consultants, baby clinics, smoking cessation classes, geriatric clinics, STD clinics, travel clinics and so on. Were there more forms to complete than in U.S. practices? Not by a long shot. There were, literally, two or three. Were there more bureaucrats? Hah, now that is funny. Was I number without access to doctors? Not at all. Here’s how it worked if I had a health concern: I could either go to the neighborhood practice or I could call, be put on a triage list, and receive a call back from one of the practice doctors, sometimes within minutes but never in my experience in more than an hour. This was the case at any time, including in the middle of the night, as when the Hobbit was only days old and could not be consoled because I’d run out of breast milk – the doctor on call arranged for the husband to pick up some formula at the nearest hospital to get us through the night, then saw us first thing in the morning.
Then there was being pregnant and having a baby in England, which was great, first of all because there was no concern about getting care: we had a National Health number so we had coverage. Too, we had a choice of local hospitals, each of which gave tours so we could see what we would get. It was great because, throughout the pregnancy, I was seen by a team of midwives at the hospital, and if I’d had any complications would have been seen by physicians. Because, when it came time to give birth, I had a choice of a birthing center (low tech) or a labor ward (high tech). Because I had total confidence in the doctors’ care of the Hobbit in his first check ups. Because within three days of delivery, a community nurse came to the flat to see how things were going and give tips on breastfeeding, avoiding jaundice, etc. (This was followed by two more visits.) And because there was no scramble to get a pediatrician – our neighborhood practice was the Hobbit’s neighborhood practice, and from birth, he and I were welcome to attend weekly clinics where he could be weighed and I could receive new-mom support.
Was it perfect? No. The facilities were not all gleaming; but they had all the necessary equipment and the doctors and nurses were every bit as professional as any I’ve had in the U.S. Also, though we did go outside the system, we did so only for optional treatment – I, for insomnia treatment and the husband for sports injuries when he didn’t want to wait for NHS physical therapy.
Yes, there were budget shortfalls. Yes, there were problems. But, in general, the U.K. system felt healthier in every sense. Take this experience we had with the Hobbit, for example. When he was three months old, we were in the U.S. on vacation and he got sick with a chesty cough and fever. We took him to my parents’ primary care doctor and of course, the first thing we were asked was the very stress-producing, in no-way-related-to-his health question of how we were going to pay. Then, when the doctor saw him, he ordered x-rays and a battery of blood tests. He also told us that the Hobbit’s umbilical hernia was dangerously large and had to be looked at by a pediatric surgeon. In other words, he totally freaked us out and we spent several days chasing down a specialist over New Years only to be told exactly what we’d been told by our GP in England: that all was fine and there was nothing to be done other than monitor it. All told, the U.S. treatment, including the X-rays and tests (which revealed nothing) and the surgical consult cost thousands of dollars and a great deal of agitation and anxiety. In England? Just the cost of one regular health check with the practice doctor. In other words a few hundred dollars, with a much more relaxed baby, mom and dad.
According to the latest reports, President Obama said he’d go with single-payer if he were starting from scratch. I suppose that’s his way of admitting that they learned from the Clinton experience and they’d rather win some victory than totally lose, and I can’t say I’m surprised. Allow me to be disappointed though, will you? Because I can’t say that covering everyone with the system we have now sounds like a great idea. Not that I want the numbers of uninsured to continue as they are. It’s horrendous. But the thought of living the rest of my life in a place where I can’t make an appointment – just make an appointment! – with a doctor because I don’t have my insurance card in hand…well, that really bums me out. I suppose, if nothing else, I wish people would speak intelligently about the matter and not just swallow all the rhetoric.
End of rant.
Life Going On
Sometimes, when I want to post but can’t think of anything that moves me enough to make me want to write about it, I come back to “Noise Reduction” and spend some time thinking about what that means to me right then. The title, like any good title, is my anchor, and today, as I reflected away, I found that what I was most aware of was a din inside my head that has, for what seems like weeks now (I wrote “Lost in Space” after I’d already been feeling lost, and spacey, for some time), incapable of concentrating on any one thought for long, feeling any one feeling with strength, writing even one sentence with conviction. For a while I thought it was a symptom of seasonal transition; but Spring is well-settled now and I’m still feeling floaty. Sometimes I wonder if it has something to do with the childlike nature of the way I spend much of my time. My Hobbit – he doesn’t do a lot of analyzing or reflecting. He just experiences life, and life, at least his life, is not very complicated. Joyous, hilarious, interesting, sad, maybe confusing, sure – but not complicated. We go to the Top of the World Park and run around on the empty basketball court in the rain. It’s great. We go to the zoo and say “Hi Giraffy!” to a lanky, sunbathing giraffe, visit the gorillas, run over to the monkeys then eat hot dogs while watching flamingos walk back and forth along a path for no reason we can figure. We love it. While folding laundry, we make up a song about the Husband’s abundance of socks and sing it loudly, cracking ourselves right up. We sing our chicken soup song as we make our chicken soup then slurp it up three hours later saying yummmm.
Maybe. Maybe it’s that.
And maybe there is another factor: time. For me, just conceiving of a project takes time, and getting traction on a project takes even more time. They take time and concentration. And so do reflection, and idea-exploration, and the process of massaging reflections and reactions in search of kernels of wisdom and insight. It all takes time, and right now, on average, I have about enough quiet time to begin conceiving of projects. And that’s the way it’s going to be for a while, unless I give up sleep which, as a reformed insomniac, I won’t do.
So, along those lines, here’s something that jumped out at me this week. Something I haven’t quite had time enough to explore as I would like. On Thursday, there were three brief news reports in my paper, each about prison. One, was about Lori Berenson, a woman my age who was put in prison in Peru thirteen years ago after a trial before hooded judges. At the time, she was associating with members of the violent revolutionary group MRTA and was charged with being a leader of the group and therefore a traitor. I’ve watched her story through the years, and even read a book about her written by her mom. I always related to Lori in a way, probably because we are the same age, and because around the time she was arrested, I had many friends who were working for justice for poor people in Latin America. The most recent news? She had a baby in prison.
The second story was about a message found in a bottle buried underground in Poland. In Auschwitz to be precise. The message was written on material torn from a cement bag by six prisoners of Auschwitz who, in 1944, were forced to work building a bunker for the German military. The prisoners were sure they were going to die in the camp and wanted to leave something of themselves behind, so they wrote their names and numbers on the material. Several of them survived the camps, a couple are still alive. You can read about them here.
The third brief was about Roxana Saberi, the American-Iranian reporter who was arrested in Tehran in January and has been in prison since. She is a freelance reporter who works for NPR and the BBC among other outlets, and in a one-hour trial held behind closed doors she was charged with spying for the U.S. The report was about her decision to stop a hunger strike because of health reasons.
What was stirred in me by these stories was an awareness of a paradox of prison life, which is that in prison, life simultaneously stops and keeps going. I have a friend who was a political prisoner in Turkey for a decade. She was arrested when she was 18 and released when she was 28. During those ten years, she was all but completely cut off from the outside world and her life as she knew it simply stopped. Her university years, stopped. A career, nonexistent. Yet, within prison, a strange and usually horrible life went on, and that was what I was reminded of by these three stories.
And that’s that. I’d like to have more to say about it, but I can’t quite get my head focused enough to corral my thoughts into coherence. Maybe another day.
In the meantime, I’ll note that Roxana Saberi’s appeal trial is scheduled for tomorrow. Oh, how I hope that it will go in her favor and that soon she will be free to start her life again. What a glorious mother’s day gift that would be for her mom.
Guantánamo, Guantánamo
Wherefore art thou, Guantánamo?
While the Hobbit learned to speak Spanish this morning, I sat in a cafe reading about the last days of the Guantánamo prison camp. It was an article in the SF Weekly, and actually it was as much about the first days of Guantánamo as the last. The first days, the first months, the first years – when torture was the norm and the Bush Administration was totally out of control. The dissonance between the clink and clatter and thrum of the cafe, and the descriptions of the abuses at Guantánamo was so great, I had to keep setting the paper down in order to keep my mental balance. And each time I did, I thought, Guantánamo, Guantánamo. Why, why, why?
As my mind wandered, I thought of the men who’d been held there. Who are still being held there. Of the people who’ve been guards there, of Abu Ghraib, of the veterans coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq and the suicide rates among them. I thought of the prisons scattered all over this country and all the violence and degradation they contain. And I thought about my little Hobbit. My sweet little creature, who knows nothing of violence and degradation.
I couldn’t help wondering, What will I tell the Hobbit about Guantánamo when he’s older? How will I explain how we let it happen? How I, who have worked with torture victims, listened to their stories and helped them put their stories down on paper; who knows something of the lasting harm that torture does and the utter uselessness of it – how I have done nothing, other than cast a couple of votes, to stop it?
I don’t know, I thought. I really don’t know. And then: Perhaps now is a good time to do something more.
Panetta, Katrina, A Road Trip
I had an occasion to drive up to Sacramento and back by myself the other day. How nice it was to be able to listen with unbroken attention to National Public Radio. And to have time to reflect. And to have time to do some writing in my head. I listened to a report about Leon Panetta’s naming to be the next head of the CIA. In case you missed it, there was a brief storm of controversy about the proposed apointment earlier in the week. Why the controversy? Because he’s not a CIA man – he’s an outsider – and because the Obama transition team, either accidentally or intentionally, neglected to let Senator Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, know about the selection of Panetta before they spilled the news to the press. Anyhow, as I listened to the experts talk about the pros and cons of a Panettal directorship, my mind wandered back to the natural, human and administrative catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina.
Back when Katrina hit, the husband and I were living in London. As we read the stories coming out of the U.S., especially those about FEMA’s total failure to manage the situation, we talked a lot about what it revealed about the Bush Administration generally. I remember well the husband giving credit to the Bush Administration for making him realize that yes, it is difficult to run the United States of America. Before George W came into office, we realized, the government had basically worked the way it was supposed to and consequently, we’d taken it for granted. In running it so badly however, Bush gave us a wake up call and an incentive to give some thought to just what it takes to run it well.
I suspect we weren’t alone in experiencing this awakening. Too, I suspect that awakenings of this sort, happening as often as they did over the last 8 years, had quite a lot to do with the energy, the involvement, the hope and the outcome of the Obama campagin and election. From the disputed election of 2000 right through the war in Iraq, the Bush Administration worried us and underscored the importance of choosing someone who we think can actually do the job.
Which leads me back to Panetta, Leon, who, by all accounts, is an intelligent, thoughtful, experienced person of integrity. And the NPR conversation about the CIA and its workings. What was most exciting to me was being engaged with the conversation. It wasn’t just an abstract report about abstract happenings in Washington.
August Dispatch
While the hobbit naps, I type. It’s been many weeks since I posted anything to the site and even now I don’t have much to add. I try to write, I do, but most often I end up reading instead. I figure this has to be good in long run. After all, “Read everything” is age-old advice for aspiring writers. But dare I admit here that I don’t even feel like an aspiring writer any more? I feel like a mom, a woman, a human being. An observer of nature – this morning, for example, I watched as my mom’s cat pawed and pawed at the baby squirrel she’d caught. The poor little squirrel was dying slowly, burrowing its head into a pile of fallen leaves, while the cat just kept poking at it – and a consumer of food, the written word, red wine and the Olympics. I just visited the blog sites of several writer friends and even as I felt proud of them and longed for their company, I felt 100% like a nonwriter. Funny thing is though, I felt only moderately upset by this. Mostly I didn’t really care. I like my life at the moment. I’m doing the best I can to participate in the world. I laugh more with the hobbit than I’ve ever laughed in my life. Russia and Georgia are at war, but what can I do about it? I mean, just the other night I saw George Bush and Vladimir Putin sitting three seats away from each other at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, laughing it up together. Surely, if the problem was going to be solved quickly, they could have solved it. No?
But I digress. I just wanted to log in and say hello to anyone who still takes time to visit the site. (blog stats reveal that just yesterday two nice people stopped by) I wanted to say I think about writing all the time and even have a few ideas, I’m just not in a position to compose at the moment. I think my point of view is still a little blurry and my time too limited to filter anything but the essential. The light where I am is so different from the light in London, the horizon so far away, the happenings so new to me. I’d like to write about rural life but I’m not going to be living rurally much longer. In a few weeks I’ll be relocating to San Francisco and maybe then I’ll have more to say. In the meantime, if you’re looking for something to read, I can report that The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon is one darned good and powerful piece of literature.
Sweeping Insights
Some of you are familiar with the hobbit’s love of sweeping. However, some of you might not be, so I will tell you outright: my son, AKA the hobbit, loves sweeping. He’s loved it most of his little life and as far as I can tell, sweeping’s only rival for his heart is “talking” on the “phone” (where talking = babbling enthusiastically and uttering the occasional “umm” and “bye”; and phone = anything that can be held up to the ear (e.g., mobile phones, cordless phones, fisher price phones, refrigerator magnets, ipods, pieces of chocolate, clothes, stuffed animals…) I don’t know where he picked up his phone habit, since, as friends and family will attest, I am not much of a user, and the husband, well, he does most of his telephone communication at the office. However, I am pretty sure he got the sweeping habit from me since, as it happens, the hobbit and the husband have a crumb-dropping habit in common. But I don’t love it. Not like he does.
Take the other day for example. It was a gorgeous spring day, with a blue sky, warm sunshine, chirping birds, delicate blossoms – the works. So, I was not surprised when, arriving to pick up the hobbit at nursery, I found all the children playing outside in the yard. I could hear the happy laughter, squeals and squawks even before I turned the last corner into the lane, and it was all so cheerful I started to feel quite happy myself. As I approached, I sought my hobbit among the twenty or so little people running around the yard, talking to each other, talking to themselves, laughing, skipping, and so on. Was he running with that group? No. Skipping with those? No. Swinging on the gate? No. Hiding under the picnic table? No. Bobbing up and down on the little seesaw they have there? No. Clinging to the trousers of a teacher? No. Wandering around lost and wondering when his beloved mommy was going to arrive?
No.
Sweeping?
Sweeping! Of course! Just as I started to take a second look over the scene, there was a break in the crowd and at last I saw him: my little hobbit, contentedly but with great focus, sitting in the middle of all the chaos, sweeping the ground with a dust broom. Crazy baby!
I thought of this story this morning as I read about the latest crisis news coming out of the U.S. – about the grounding of hundreds of airplanes after 8 failed FAA inspections. Or, hang on, maybe it was that other crisis news coming out of the U.S. – about the collapse of the lending industry? Or, no, it must have been the news about that other crisis – about Iraq? No? Or that absurd letter I got from the IRS the other day, describing Bush’s Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, which, as far as I can tell, is predicated on the notion that the best thing that Americans, many of whom are actually in debt, actually at risk of losing their houses, and/or actually at risk of losing their jobs, can do for their country is…spend more money.
No?
Well, anyway, something made me think back to the sight of my hobbit sitting there so contentedly, but what I couldn’t and still can’t decide is whether his sweeping was an instructive demonstration of how to keep one’s head in difficult times or a frighteningly accurate enactment of George W. Bush’s unique leadership style.
Anyone?
One Reason I Like Thanksgiving More Than The Fourth Of July
This won’t be my most coherent post ever, because it’s about feeling muddled. Sorry about that.
A couple of weeks ago I went to visit a Turkish friend at her new flat. While we were having tea and talking about life in Turkey and life in London, the CIA and torture (as one does), she thoughtfully gazed at me over the coffee table and said, “I can’t imagine what it’s like, being from a country like yours. I mean, in Turkey we have our problems. We are poor and the people, we have no hope. But to be from such a rich country like America? With so much power over everyone? I don’t think I would like that.” She went on to ask me what it felt like, and I have to admit, I was stumped. Not because I’d never thought about the U.S.’s power in the world, or about my own complicity as an American citizen in the good, bad and ugly of American foreign policies and practices. But, simply, because when she asked the question so directly, and so comparatively, all I could think (and say) was that it was strange. Strange, and, well, not something I could really like or dislike, since, after all, being American, like being Catholic, and being from a big family, and being from San Francisco, and being a woman, and being White (or pale-pink-peach, as the case really is) is inextricably part of who I am.
Her question stuck with me though (obviously, since here it is, guiding my blog post a couple of weeks on), and has sat on my shoulder ever since, like a parrot that doesn’t parrot so much as whisper almost inaudibly in my ear while I read the news and walk through my life as an American in London. I think now that if I’d been asked such a question by such a person in such a context earlier on in life, I would have said something along the lines of “It feels awful”, or “It’s embarrassing.” Alternately, I might have said “It makes me angry and ashamed.” Now though, as I enter my wiser years, everything, including what it feels like to be from the big, rich, powerful country that is the U.S., seems far too complex to be summed up by such answers. Let me illustrate -
The other day, I read an article in the International Herald Tribune about a book by Trevor Paglen. The book is about his research on secret U.S. military programs, and I should note that the article was not a book review, but a news article about a book, the news being both the secret programs described in the book, and the book itself, which is newsworthy because of the fact that it was written at all, it being all about secret military programs and all. I found the article to be both fascinating and disturbing, as well as, ultimately, both upsetting and reassuring. It was fascinating because secret military programs of any kind fascinate me, and because Paglen did some pretty amazing sleuthing to uncover all that he did. Similarly, it was disturbing because secret military programs of any kind disturb me, and because I’ve done my own snooping around secret military programs, and I know well that more often than not they lead to budget bloat, waste, myopic thinking, bad decision-making, and significant destruction of nature and/or human life.
The article was upsetting for a few reasons. First, because from it I learned that the budget for secret military programs is $32 billion. Thirty-two billion! All classified! Second, because after thinking about it a while, I started wondering about the quality of the press. Why did it take a photographer-geographer to write a book about these programs in order for them to get covered in the news? Why aren’t there investigative reporters hammering away at the story all the time? After all, we’re talking about $32 billion in unaccounted for government funds which is, according to the article, as much as the budgets of the Food and Drug Administration, the National Science Foundation and NASA combined. At the same time, I was reassured, because, however it got there, the story was in the mainstream news, and because the book was published, and because to date, no harm has come to Paglen from writing it. Quite the contrary. He is free to publish photographs of secret bases, take his book on tour, do interviews and so on. Comparing this to, say, Turkey, where the Nobel Prize winning author Orhan Pamuk is hounded by the government for discussing unpleasant matters of Turkish history, I’d say the U.S. looks pretty good.
I chose the secret military program story, but there were other stories I could have chosen – stories that similarly triggered conflicting emotions. The contested Zimbabwe election for example – in a few ways it reminded me of the U.S. presidential election of 2000 and thus made me feel both disturbed and disgusted by what occurred in the U.S. then, and encouraged and excited by what is happening there now. The fact that President Bush was booed when he threw the first pitch at the Washington Nationals opening baseball game made me feel simultaneously sad, angry, ashamed and again, reassured that people could express opposition to a sitting president without fear of arrest or punishment of any kind. News from home about my friend’s organization that works to get kids into college made me excited about the real opportunities there are for people in America. News from Germany about a friend’s deployment to Iraq made me mad about the stupidity of the war and ashamed that it was my government that not only started it but then made such a mess of it.
So then, how does it feel to be from America? Strange, I tell you. Strange. And I think that’s why I like Thanksgiving so much more than the Fourth of July. There is room for complexity at the Thanksgiving table. It is about giving thanks, for whatever it is you might be thankful for. It celebrates the confusing, turbulent, fruitful coming togethers of early English immigrants and Native Americans. And it takes place in autumn, when everything is in flux. The Fourth of July on the other hand, is all about certainty. It takes place in July. People wear clothes in colors as crisp as red, white and blue. There is bright sun, baseball and good cheer. I like it, but in all honesty, it makes me a little itchy. And why am I writing about this now? In April? Because the question’s been on my mind for a couple of weeks now, and I had to do something to answer it.
How Similar Are They?
I admit it: I’m a one-project-at-a-time writer, and again this week I was working on fiction. In other words, I don’t have much available for the blog. But I do want to point out something I noticed in the paper yesterday.
Anyone who’s been following the US presidential campaign knows that there are a handful of themes referred to repeatedly in the news coverage (race, gender, whether the extended Democratic contest is hurting the party, whether John McCain really is a straight talker, and so on), but none seems less contested than the idea that when it comes down to policy, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama really aren’t that different. I’d accepted this. They were different in other ways, I’d thought, important ways, but not policy ways.
Then yesterday morning my husband directed me to Obama’s speech on the economy, which I read just minutes before I sat down with the paper to read an article about it by New York Times reporter Michael Powell. In the middle of the article, Powell wrote: “Much of Obama’s speech, however, served as a reminder of the thin policy differences that separate his views from those of his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton gave a speech this week in Philadelphia on the housing crisis, and as often the two Democrats have walked in step.”
I read this as fact. I didn’t question it. I read the next paragraph – “Both Obama and Clinton spoke of an economy that binds the fates of financial institutions far more closely to those of Americans than many might guess.” – and looked forward to the evidence, which, when it came, gave me pause. Powell wrote,
Clinton said, “In today’s economy, trouble that starts on Wall Street often ends up on Main Street.” And Obama said: Americans must renew “that common interest between Wall Street and Main Street that is the key to our success.”
I don’t know about you, but in terms of meaning, perspective, tone and yes, policy implications, it seems to me these two statements are significantly different. Why does everyone keep saying they are the same?
Pearl Cornioley, I Wish I’d Known You
I like obituaries, and have for a very long time, probably for the same reason I like social history: I like learning about other people’s lives. I came across the following the other night as I read through the newspaper with a glass of wine in hand, the husband’s delicious chicken stew warm in my tum and the hobbit fast asleep downstairs. The headline alone was enviable, but to read on was to be transported back through the last century, and to be inspired. Funny enough, I came across it right after reading the latest about the Geraldine Ferraro Barack-Obama-is-where-he-is- because-he-is-black absurdity, and I liked imagining what Ms. Cornioley would have said to Ms. Ferraro. Something blunt and French, I thought. Something much more cogent than the feeble “Oh shut up already” I felt like saying when I read the story. I mean, come on. Is anyone else as sick and tired of this gender-race chatter as I am?! Both women and black people (which includes black women, I might add) get shafted in this world – even people who think this is the divinely inspired way of things know that this is true. So why is someone as accomplished and intelligent as Geraldine Ferraro spending time saying stupid things that pit them against each other? Why is she fueling a fire that threatens to destroy the tender green grasses of a re-energized, optimistic, confident Democratic Party? I came across a blog the other day that was raging with anti-Obama feeling, sourced primarily in the fact that he was a man. I just can’t understand that. I mean, sure, as a woman, I notice that Hillary Clinton is treated differently as a result of her sex. For example, in the YouTube/CNN Democratic debates that I watched a couple of weeks back (very interesting if you ask me, I recommend a view), when the candidates were asked to say one negative and one positive thing about the candidate to their left, John Edwards said he wasn’t sure about the color of Hillary’s coat. Ha ha, what a chuckle. Not. It was a relatively benign but obnoxious comment in my opinion, and it revealed that, regardless of what Edwards thinks of Clinton’s policies and politics, at some level, he also sees (and probably always will see) her as a woman, meaning, in this instance, an object whose clothes should have made her attractive but (in his opinion) didn’t. Did any of the other candidates have his outfit commented on? No. Did this annoy me? Yes. But did it influence my opinion of candidate Clinton in any way? No. If anything, it made me think less of Edwards, but it was just one of hundreds of details I absorbed from the debate and not even close to the most important one. As far as I’m concerned (yes, my rant is coming to an end here), Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both good candidates. They have different strengths and weaknesses, and they are Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, not White Woman and Black Man. To succeed as President of the United States, they will have to be able, with intelligence, articulateness, diplomacy, wit, experience, charisma, power and wisdom, to transcend their respective woman-ness and black-ness, so as to influence and lead with all of their capabilities. I think they both are able to do this, so what I’m evaluating is how and in what directions will they influence and lead.
Anyway, back to Pearl Cornioley, whose obit started this post and will end it. What a life! I do wish I’d known her, and I’m very glad she got to live to the ripe old age of 93. Hope you read right through to the end.
“Pearl Cornioley, 93, a British agent who led Resistance Fighters,” by Douglas Martin (as reported in the International Herald Tribune).
Pearl Cornioley, who parachuted into Nazi-occupied France to work as a courier between the British and the French resistance and rose to command 3,000 underground fighters, died on Feb. 24 in the Loire Valley of France. She was 93.
Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed to The Associated Press by Caroline Cottard, the secretary of the retirement home where Cornioley lived.
Cornioley, who was 29 when she was sent to France in 1943, commanded troops who killed 1,000 German soldiers and wounded many more — while suffering only a tiny number of casualties themselves. She presided over the surrender of 18,000 German troops.
Her unit interrupted a railway line that connected the south of France to Normandy more than 800 times in June 1944, the month of D-Day. It also regularly attacked German convoys.
Sometimes carrying a case of cosmetics to pose as a traveling saleswoman, she had many brushes with danger. She hid in a cornfield as German troops fired random shots into the field. She was almost killed by a resistance leader who doubted her identity. The Germans offered a million-franc reward for her capture.
Pearl Witherington, as she was known at the time of her wartime exploits, was British by birth and French by upbringing. Her code name was Wrestler, her nom de guerre was Pauline, and in wireless transmissions to Britain, she was “Marie.”
Cornioley was an operative of the Special Operations Executive, which the British formed to support and coordinate resistance in the occupied countries of Europe. Agents from many walks of life, from business to journalism to academia, joined what was essentially a by-invitation-only club. Women were welcome because they might be viewed as less suspicious, and many proved to be excellent agents.
‘The girls who served as secret agents in Churchill’s Special Operations Executive were young, beautiful and brave,” Marcus Binney wrote in his book “The Women Who Lived for Danger: The Agents of the Special Operations Executive” (2002).
“At a time when women in the armed forces were restricted to a strictly noncombatant role in warfare, the women of SOE trained and served alongside the men,” he continued. “They fought not in the front line but well behind it.”
Cornioley stood out. In his book “Set Europe Ablaze” (1966), E. H. Cookridge called her “one of the main pillars of the network” of the SOE and the resistance fighters they supported. She was the only woman to become a network leader.
Cecile Pearl Witherington was born in Paris on June 24, 1914. A great-grandfather was a chemist who introduced the recipe for Worcestershire sauce to Lea & Perrins, and a grandfather was an architect in London, according to Binney. Her father traveled the world for a Swedish company that supplied paper for banknotes.
Her father’s heavy drinking and spendthrift habits shattered the family, obituaries in British newspapers said. As the eldest of four daughters, Cornioley started working at 17 as a secretary and made extra money by teaching English at night.
When the Germans invaded France in 1940, she was working for the air attaché at the British Embassy. The family left Paris in December and followed a circuitous route to London. There, Cornioley got a job at the Air Ministry.
But she burned with anger over France’s defeat and began searching for a way to fight back. Luckily, her French was superb.
“And anyway I didn’t like the Germans,” she was quoted as saying in an obituary in The Independent. “Never did. I’m a baby of the 1914-18 war.”
Through an acquaintance, she found her way to the SOE, which she joined on June 8, 1943. In training, she was recognized as the best shot, male or female, the service had seen. The commander wrote, “Very capable, completely brave.”
On the night of Sept. 22-23, she parachuted into France, near Châteauroux. Her two suitcases landed in a lake, where they were lost. Within hours, she was reunited with her French fiancé, Henri Cornioley, who had escaped from a German prison camp and joined the resistance. The two then worked closely.
This mix of love and war has caused many to see Pearl Cornioley as the inspiration for Sebastian Faulks’s popular 1998 novel, “Charlotte Gray.” In 2001, the book was made into a movie of the same name, directed by Gillian Armstrong and starring Cate Blanchett.
Cornioley insisted that romance was not her motivation for going to war. In an interview with The Telegraph in 2002, she said: “There was a job to be done. I didn’t put my life at risk just so I could be with Henri.”
But in October 1944, after being separated and almost killed, the couple made it to London, where they married. They moved to Paris, where Henri Cornioley worked as a pharmacist and Pearl Cornioley as a secretary for the World Bank.
He died in 1999. Pearl Cornioley is survived by their daughter, Claire.
In 1995, Cornioley published her memoirs, which she wrote with Hervé Larroque. One tale concerned a “really cute” rabbit she took everywhere with her. The rabbit was oblivious to machine-gun fire.
Cornioley received many honors, but the one that stuck in her mind was the one she turned down. That was Member of the British Empire, or MBE She had been offered the civil version, not the military one.
She sent an icy note saying she had had done nothing remotely “civil.”
Backing Away From The Brink, A Tale of Domestic Power Sharing
This week, like every other, there are many subjects about which I could write. For example, I could write about Hamas and Israel lobbing missiles at each other (again). About the Venezuelan troops approaching Colombia because Colombian troops entered Ecuador earlier in the week. About the underground vault that is being built in Svalbard, Norway to safeguard hundreds of thousands of plant species against disasters like climate change and chemical and nuclear war. On brighter notes, I could write about Drew Barrymore donating $1m to the World Food Program, about opposition parties in Kenya giving power sharing a go, or about the still-interesting race between Obama and Clinton in the U.S.
Yet, I choose to write about my life with my baby (again). Ho hum. Compared to all that, it sure does seem simple. However, the fact is, my life with baby is a pretty big part of my life. So can I really avoid writing about it for the sake of feeling grand? Nah. Besides, there are plenty of other people writing about the above, and maybe the following will resonate in ways I can’t imagine (she writes, hopefully).
So. One thing you should know before getting into this post is that my baby, AKA “the hobbit” (so called because he is small, eats frequently with gusto, and has a generous, hobbit-like demeanor; not, as some have guessed, because he is hairy) really likes cleaning floors. I mean he REALLY likes cleaning floors. With big brooms, dust brooms, wet mops, dry mops, sponges, cloths, sticks, hammers, hair brushes, tooth brushes, whatever. He simply loves the movement. The sweeping of his arm back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The other day, I got a report from his day care teacher that said he’d spent part of his afternoon “cleaning the floor with the brush.” I had to laugh. That’s my baby! I’ve tried to figure out what it indicates developmentally, and maybe one of you readers will be able to illuminate this for me, but really, I don’t much care, because the fact is, sweeping makes the guy happy. It has for months and months, so much so that when my mom visited way back in October, she was inspired to buy him his very own, very attractive, very very zebra-striped broom, brush and dustpan set (which he LOVES). He is very focused when he’s cleaning. Very purposeful. He can do it for a half hour at a time, sometimes longer. Huffing and puffing as he maneuvers the big broom around tight corners or uses the tiny sponge to conquer the expanse of the kitchen floor. And I love watching him go at it. It’s great.
So, now that you know that, you should also know that we keep his zebra broom set behind a door just off the kitchen, at the top of the back stairway, of which the hobbit is afraid (because it is dark, steep and yes, a little scary).
And now that you know that, I can begin.
Starting in my teens, I spent a lot of time with children. I babysat often, worked at a day camp, played with my friends’ kids and spent a lot of time with my nieces and nephews (of which there are 8; 8 unique little creatures). From these experiences, I formed a couple of theories about babies and children, one of which says that they almost always understand what is happening or being said to them, they just take about 40% longer than adults to react. Taking this a step further, I concluded (based on very scientific observations, of course) that because most of us adults are usually in a hurry, we often fail to account for this extra time and consequently cause a lot of frustration for both parties.
I mention this theory as a lead-in to a sort of confession, a sort of public admittance that the other day I almost forgot it, and consequently, almost fell into a whole lot of frustration. Fortunately, I came to my senses just at the brink of a real power struggle, about which I’m still feeling a big Phew.
Here is what happened: The hobbit had just finished his dinner, and while I did some cleaning up and some snacking on the bits he hadn’t eaten (gross-sounding I know, but this is a confession, so full disclosure seems especially important), the hobbit walked to the door of the back stairway, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled with extreme caution to his zebra broom. Then he carefully dragged it into the kitchen. He’d never approached the back stairs this way, so I was a little surprised.
Anyway, as I snacked and tidied and listened to the BBC, the hobbit did his sweeping thing. What a merry pair we were. For a while.
Probably twenty minutes passed before I announced that it was time to stop cleaning and head downstairs for a bath. The hobbit looked at me earnestly while I spoke then went back to sweeping. This, I expected. After all, my announcement had come because I’d been watching the clock. The hobbit does not watch the clock. He just lives, which is great, if a little unpractical at times, and a pretty good argument for the existence of parents. Anyway, a few minutes later, I crouched down beside him and said, “I know you’re having a ball here babe, but you’ll be able to have a ball tomorrow, too. You’ll be able to sweep up a storm in the morning if you want to. But now it’s time for bath.” I smiled. I put my hand on the broom and applied a little pulling pressure.
The hobbit tightened his grip and applied a little pulling pressure of his own.
Uh oh, I thought, and then I took a deep breath. I said, “Sorry darlin, I know you want to keep sweeping, but really, it is time to stop,” and again I pulled at the broom, and again, he pulled back. My smile got tight, my tone a little less cheerful, I pulled at the broom. He pulled back, started to cry, and began moving toward the back stairs. I took the broom away. He threw himself down and pounded his forehead on the floor (as one does). My patience was just about tapped at this point, but then, suddenly, I remembered my little theory, and it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I had overlooked something. Maybe, just maybe, he was trying to return the broom to where he’d found it. After all, hadn’t I been trying to instill this virtue in him ever since he started moving things from one place to another?
I tapped him on the shoulder and offered him the broom, then waited.
He stopped wailing and looked up at me. I said, “Listen little one. If you are going to put the broom back where you found it, you can do that, no problem. But if you sweep just one centimeter more of this floor, I’m going to take the broom away no matter how loudly you cry.”
I waited.
He stood up and reached for the broom. Just for good measure, I repeated the terms of the deal before relinquishing it entirely. I was prepared for anything you understand, especially the unpleasant task of taking the broom away and carrying the very heavy, very strong hobbit kicking and screaming downstairs. But once again the theory proved its merits: With great sense of purpose, he took hold of the broom, dragged it to the back stairs, got down onto his onto his hands and knees and put it back where it belonged. Then, steadying it, he crawled back out, threw a terrified glance down the stairs, and came running into my arms.
That’s my baby!
(Okay, so I haven’t offered you a solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. Or a penetrating analysis of the US presidential campaign. But this is my life these days, and this is my blog. Maybe next week I’ll go to Norway to check out that seed vault. Or maybe I’ll just get out a little more. Until then, happy living.)
