Last Station Before Default

As the train wreck nears with no one at the controls, last-ditch outsiders are trying to get to the brakes.

Fitch Ratings puts the US on “rating watch negative” in the light of impending default.

Our biggest creditor China (we owe them $1.3 trillion) calls for replacing the dollar as the world’s reserve currency to “permanently stay away from the spillover of the intensifying domestic political turmoil in the United States” in a “de—Americanized world.”

Even our newest winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics pauses in the midst of the champagne cork-popping to worry out loud. “When I look around,” Robert Shiller says, “I see a great deal of foolishness, and I can’t believe it’s not important economically.”

To say the least. Yet nothing, not even an impending crash of world markets and a panicky Senate, is able to loosen the death grip of the Tea Party on the House throttle.

In these nightmare days, sane Americans may just want to go back to bed and hide under the covers, while the oldest among us keep thinking about those Saturday matinee serials at the movies where you could come back next week and find that somebody or something has braked the train to a screeching stop at the very last minute.

“The Perils of Pauline” was never this nerve-racking.

Update: Surprise, surprise. Congress finally gets back on the track.

Unseating Ted Cruz

Is he legislator or conspirator? During ten months in Washington, Ted Cruz has spent more time with House members than in his own chamber, culminating last night in being caught secretly huddling with a score of them at a DC night spot just before today’s Tea Party refusal to reopen the government.

In the face of five more years, there are fringe petitions circulating in Texas to recall Cruz, but shouldn’t owl-eyed old Washington hands be searching the arcane rules of Congress for some musty old statute that forbids such House-breaking?

If he is to survive as Speaker, John Boehner had better put a crew of toadies on the case full-time. Never in memory has there been such blatant inter-chamber subversion.

Meanwhile, the hours tick away and the nation is paralyzed. When I was writing a post on Bipolar Disorder yesterday, I went to the National Institute of Health for basic information on the condition and was greeted with this heading:

“Due to the lapse in government funding, the information on this web site may not be up to date, transactions submitted via the web site may not be processed, and the agency may not be able to respond to inquiries until appropriations are enacted. Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at USA.gov.”

That sums up where America is today perfectly. Even if you want to research madness, the Shutdown won’t let you.

If we are all to get out of this trap with our sanity intact, somebody had better find a way to get Cruz out of what used to be called the catbird seat.

Update: The internecine GOP war teeters at the edge of going public as Texas' biggest newspaper takes back its Cruz election endorsement and an anonymous Senate aide mutters aloud to a liberal blog, "Ted Cruz and his Tortilla Coast Republicans are leading us to a default.” What will it take to get his cohorts to speak up loud and clear? Time is short.

Downside of a Bipolar Decade

Start with a confession: In nearly 90 years, I have found psychiatry a mixed blessing at best. “Treatment” for myself and those I love has usually led to disappointment and at times alarming damage to our lives.

In only one instance have I seen a casebook recovery through therapy and medication, and even that, I suspect, was an inflation of garden-variety resistance to growing up to depressive illness.

My prejudices aside, what can a fair-minded person make of a 40-fold increase in the diagnosis (and misdiagnosis) of Bipolar Disorder in American children over the decade following the social trauma of 9/11/2001?

First is the self-interest of mental-health professionals and the advertising power of their partners, the pharmaceutical industry with interminable TV ads for concoctions that guarantee happiness, followed by a speed-reading of terrible possible side effects.

Then broaden the lens to a view of the culture at large. As a Netflix generation migrates to an in-the-know appreciation of the worst in human nature (pace “Breaking Bad” and the overwrought portrayal of Carrie Mathison in “Homeland”), an unearned cynicism replaces the dumb-but-happy dopiness of pre-World War II Hollywood. (When today’s movies revert to that happy-endingism as in Tom Hanks’ “Captain Phillips,” web sites rush to debunk them.)

From the far end of life, all this seems such a waste: a pill-propped antidote to facing and dealing with the anxieties, ambivalence and ambiguities that always have and undoubtedly always will challenge sentient human beings.   

If I am sour about psychiatry as a profession, my life has been enriched by its most gifted practitioners as writers.

In the 1960s, the psychoanalyst-philosopher Erich Fromm was preoccupied with what he called "The Myth of Care." Amid social upheaval and rage about Vietnam, the author of "The Art of Loving" and "The Sane Society" kept searching newspapers and TV screens for images of people reaching out, helping and comforting one another. His thesis was that such impulses are deeply ingrained in all humans and waiting to come to the surface when circumstances call them up, that they are their true feelings below a surface of selfish discord.

In next decade, Willard Gaylin wrote a book titled “Caring,” in which he made the case that ”Civilization is, at least in part, a form of crystallized love.” Dr. Gaylin’s persuasive argument was that “Man survives because it is his nature to care. Man survives because he cares and is cared for.”

We need such wisdom now in our lives rather than peace of mind that can be bought at a pharmacy.

Gagging on the Obamacare Glitch

Six months ago, the chief digital architect of the Obamacare rollout was worried. “Let’s just make sure it’s not a third-world experience,” he warned colleagues.

It hasn’t been. It’s been worse. Yet given a malign history and a GOP dedicated to aborting the law before it breathes, how could it have turned out otherwise?

In 2009, rather than go all out on job creation, Barack Obama went all in on health care. Then, instead of asking for up-or-down votes on key provisions, he threw it into a Congressional snake pit from which a 2000-page bill emerged, larded with a sickening display of tradeoffs for constituents. (The public saw too, and thus was the Tea Party born to take over the House the next year.)

The President's mistakes did not end there. Brushing off charges of care rationing and death panels, he kept stressing the altruism of covering millions of uninsured, expecting Americans to respond with empathy rather than fear of less care for themselves.

So many miscalculations, so much political damage. When it was over, health care reform was a Phyrric victory for Democrats. Voters didn't understand most of it, didn't like what they did and were sold a bill of goods by GOP liars that Obamacare was an expensive government takeover. Even keeping children covered until 26 and barring disqualification for pre-existing conditions were lost in the shuffle as the law’s pluses.

Now, trying to understand how the rollout turned into disaster, a New York Times report concludes: “The serious technical problems threaten to obscure what some see as a nationwide demonstration of a desire for more affordable health insurance...

“The response was huge. Insurance companies report much higher traffic on their Web sites and many more callers to their phone lines than predicted.”

What would-be enrollees got, instead of information and help, were frozen computer screens and interminable telephone holds.

Such “glitches” from the most tech-savvy Administration in American history must have more meaning than “Oops!”

Was it just too much to ask Americans to penetrate a screen of opaque choices, obscured by a cloud of partisan distortions and lies? Or is what’s happened to the Obamacare rollout just another symptom of a deeper malaise that afflicts us all. Would-be Obamacare enrollees may get a technical fix for their problems, but the prognosis is not good for the body politic.

Is the Pope Rooting for Hillary?

By now, the world won’t be surprised by anything Francis I says, but was there a subtle Papal nod to Hillary Clinton 2016 hidden in his now-famous interview?

In these ugly days, the hopeful heart searches for every bit of humanity to be found, however tenuous, anywhere. Amid all the heartless rant in Washington, Mrs. Clinton and the first Jesuit in the Vatican are among the few positive voices being heard.

In his wide-ranging talk in America magazine, one less-noted section was the Pope on women:

“The feminine genius is needed wherever we make important decisions,” he said. “Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. The church cannot be herself without the woman and her role. The woman is essential for the church. Mary, a woman, is more important than the bishops.”

But, one would ask, is a woman prepared to be America’s political pontiff? Hillary Clinton’s supporters certainly think so, and there are growing signs that she agrees.

Accepting an award at her alma mater Yale Law School last weekend, she was introduced by the dean who asked if she was ready to “add one more elusive line to her resume.“

The answer is clearly yes, although she says she will decide “sometime next year.” In her talk, Clinton was nostalgic: “It’s really hard to believe it’s been 40 years. I was driving a beat-up old car. I had a mattress tied to the roof. I was wearing my bell bottoms.”

Soon afterward she met “a Viking from Arkansas,” nodding at Bill Clinton who had surprised her by turning up for the ceremony. But for the most part she talked about how Yale had opened her eyes to child abuse and poverty and the importance of early childhood development.

“Because of the government shutdown,” she said, “nearly nine million women and children will soon be unable to buy healthy food and baby formula.”

While Clinton was at Yale back then, a newly minted Jesuit named Jorge Mario Bergoglio was studying in Buenos Aires after as a seminarian having been “dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle's wedding."

"I was surprised by her beauty, her intellectual brilliance,” he recalls and, “well, I was bowled over for quite a while...I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing."

Bergoglio did, went on to minister to the poor and now he is Pope Francis I. Hillary married her “Viking from Arkansas.” Now history may bring them together in a world neither could have imagined back then.

The year 2016 could produce a final scene for one of the most fascinating boy-meets-girl scripts ever written.

Ted Cruz Wins the Shameless Olympics

Will somebody put a net over the ten-month Senator from Texas and give him a saliva test for political rabies? Under attack from Conservative Republicans of all stripes as a destroyer of his party, Ted Cruz goes to the White House and lectures the President on how he must modify Obamacare.

What’s Spanish for chutzpah and meshuga?

If there is a thin line between brilliant and balmy, Cruz keeps crossing it with no apparent awareness he is leading an invisible army into battle. With no evidence whatsoever, he has convinced John Boehner that Tea Party troops are under his command and holding the White House hostage.

Yet JohnMcCain tells Fox News that Cruz is “not representing us,” and would-be Presidential candidate Rep. Peter King tells Wolf Blitzer, “President Obama should send a campaign contribution to Ted Cruz. He has done more to boost Obamacare than anyone." Even Grover Norquist is feuding with him.

The Shutdown and debt-ceiling crisis have yet to be resolved, but Rafael Edward Cruz has won the 2013 Shameless Olympics hands down.

“It’s one thing to have a reputation as a loudmouth,” says a respected Conservative, “it’s quite another to have a reputation as a loser. That’s what the shutdown fight has done to Cruz. Among true believers he’ll be the one who was a leader in a fight that surely would have won if the squishes hadn’t sold them out. But for most party actors, including many sympathetic to Tea Partyism, he’s going to be the guy who ran up the wrong hill.”

Like the loony who huffs up the stairs in the old movie “Arsenic and Old Lace, dressed as Teddy Roosevelt, waving a wooden sword and yelling, “Charge!”

Banana Republic Burlesque

As pre-teens a friend and I slipped into a Manhattan burlesque house with high expectations but, instead of earthly delights, we found tired old strippers sashaying around amid a succession of clowns doing pratfalls on imaginary banana skins.

Republicans must be feeling that way these days. Tea Party acts by John McCain-labeled “wackos” have degenerated into a mix of low comedy with sad consequences for the GOP. The American audience is not buying.

Chief bozo John Boehner is bombing with his too-familiar patter as customers head for the exits, asking for their country back. Almost all of Washington is sour with bipartisan disapproval. Only member of the Religious Right, still in a stupor, are in their seats applauding Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

The Capital will have to book new attractions next year once the current crew loses its lease next November. If the consequences were not so tragic, we could just chalk it off as the end of an era of low comedy.

But these days it’s hard to be optimistic about whatever new talent will replace them. Can’t we just turn the whole place into a revival movie house showing classics like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life?”

Can Politicians Be Scared Straight?

Fact-checking, a new study suggests, can be an effective club to bat down political lies. Who knew?

Experimenting on 1100 legislators in nine states, political scientists at the New America Foundation found fewer subsequent fibs by those who were warned about the existence of PolitiFact, which checks on their veracity: “Politicians who lie put their reputations and careers at risk.”

The study’s authors conclude that “the letter was an effective reminder of the potential costs of a negative rating.”

If candidates take this finding seriously, it will bolster anecdotal evidence that truth squads following them and their opponents can be an effective deterrent to bald-faced campaign lies.

In the old days, the media used to serve this function, but that was before most so-called reporters morphed into stenographers.

This study makes a suggestive bookend for another showing that Americans, particularly younger ones, lag behind their counterparts in most developed countries, not only “in math and technology, but also in literacy.”

Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan warns that such findings “show our education system hasn’t done enough to help Americans compete--or position our country to lead--in a global economy that demands increasingly higher skills.”

Latest polls show voter finally figuring out that Republicans and the Tea Party are most responsible for the ruinous government shutdown, but the lies have been coming so thick and fast that no amount of literacy or fact-checking could possibly have offset them.

 Update: Michele Bachmann is cited as a prime example of a pol finally undone by fact-checking, although she will retire holding the record for public lies. In her last days in office, PolitiFact cites her accomplishment, adding, "Bachmann isn't leaving immediately, however, so we will keep the Truth-O-Meter turned on.

Claire Danes Drives Me Crazy

Reviewing movies for Esquire in the 1950s, Dwight MacDonald complained, “I can’t watch Audrey Hepburn, she makes me feel coarse.” I didn’t share that reaction at all, but watching Claire Danes now in “Homeland” recalls it.

Some actors, usually among the most gifted, bring out resentment in me, best explained as feeling invaded, manipulated by their intensity into responses inherently unearned by characters they are inhabiting. Dustin Hoffman is one (as he marvelously parodied himself in “Tootsie”). Meryl Streep is often another (check “The Iron Lady”).

Danes’ Carrie Mathison takes it all to a new level. Contrary to universal acclaim for her portrayal of a bipolar CIA agent, I find the performance disturbingly out of sync with the manipulative vehicle in which it takes place.

What we are talking about here is not over-acting but a mismatch of genres. As Hoffman’s Tootsie might put it, how juicily realistic can an actor playing a tomato in a commercial be?

In “Homeland,” veteran hams like Mandy Patinkin and F. Murray Abraham are doing their familiar schtick, while Danes is often acting in another universe. It’s easy to understand why viewers might be fascinated, but my ancient movie-loving mind is disoriented.   

“I think the more whole you are as a person—the more integrated—the deeper you can go into scary territory,” Danes tells John Lahr in the New Yorker. “It’s just amazing that we have a means of doing that safely. What better thing is there? It’s so cool to get that much more of an understanding of what it is to be a person.”

No doubt, but get Carrie back on her meds, please. And bring back Damien Lewis’ classically understated British embodiment of Brody soon to sooth our nerves.

The Shutdown's Stockholm Syndrome

In 1973, employees held hostage for six days in a Swedish bank vault refused police help and emerged to defend their captors. Such bonding between captives and their takers became known as the Stockholm Syndrome, and there as signs that Americans are succumbing to it now.

A new CNN poll shows 63 percent angry at Republicans for the government shutdown, but 57 percent are also angry with Democrats and 53 percent with President Obama as well.

Is insanity contagious or is there another explanation? In the 24/7 news cycle, a simple truth is not enough for the voracious media maw: The fact that Tea Party fanatics in the House, spurred on by Ted Cruz, are holding the nation hostage to their irrational rage is just not enough to feed the beast.

In a welter of truths, half-truths and lies being spread as the shutdown clock clicks on, all kinds of rationalizations take root about the motives of the captors and their cause. In this steamy atmosphere of tracking their tactics, the simple truth is easily lost.

It doesn’t help that the President has stepped back, allowing hoof-in-mouth HarryReid to do the talking. Railing at House conservatives as “anarchists” with a “Banana Republican mindset,” the Senate Majority Leader betrays his early days as a boxer not gifted at gab. Trotted out for TV cameras, he comes off less as a pitiful prisoner of the shutdown than someone you would cheerfully pay ransom to shut up.

When Barack Obama went to Oslo in 2009 to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, could he possibly have imagined that four years later his presidency would be defined by an irrational syndrome named for neighboring Stockholm?

If this doesn’t end soon, we’ll all be rattling our chains, ready for the loony bin.

Elections That Changed America

My granddaughter who turns 16 today has a high-school assignment: Was 1968 a critical election year that changed America? She will answer in her usually independent way but, as a delegate to that Democratic convention who was tear-gassed in Chicago, I can weigh in with an opinion.

In my lifetime, I would argue, there were three pivotal moments: FDR in 1932, Nixon that year and George W. Bush in 2000. The jury is still out on Obama in 2008.

Most elections reflect rather than divert social and political currents, but those few arguably made a difference in where the country was heading. One of the tests is what would have happened if the other guy won.

Without Roosevelt’s first victory and mandate for a New Deal, when and how would the Great Depression have ended and would social legislation that provided a safety net for the poor and old ever have been enacted?

If the 2000 vote had not been decided by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision on Florida, how would a President Gore have responded to or perhaps avoided 9/11 and the wars that followed? And how would he have dealt with impending economic collapse seven years later?

The case for 1968 is more complicated, as tantalizing as the outsized figure of LBJ, who started in the White House by waging a War on Poverty and passing a landmark Civil Rights law but ended by enmeshing the country in a Vietnam war nobody wanted.

Without Johnson’s downfall, the Richard Nixon who lost a gubernatorial race in 1962 after being beaten by JFK two years earlier would never been elected dogcatcher, let alone a President whose criminal behavior over Watergate led to resignation to avoid impeachment.

But the real changes in 1968 were more subtle. After a century of a Solid (segregated) South for Democrats, the Civil Rights Act brought George Wallace in as a third-party candidate to take those states away from Hubert Humphrey, cost him the election and start that section of the country on the path to being unalterably Republican.

The Democratic Party was fundamentally changed, too. The Northern liberal states went on to the fiasco of 1972, nominating George McGovern to be easily beaten by a not-yet-unmasked Nixon.

Neither major party has been the same since. As we face today’s horrors, what can we intuit about 2016? Can Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden on one side or Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or Chris Christie on the other stop our downward slide into chaos?

Meanwhile, to my beloved granddaughter, happy birthday and make up your own mind about 1968. When your generation takes over, you will need to show better judgment than we ever did.

Doomsday Liar's Poker in DC

Maureen Dowd offers a Planet of the Apes scenario for 2084 America, while Gail Collins goes the other way in a Frankenstein revival with Ted Cruz as you-know-what.

All well and good for reason-strapped observers, but future and past parodies can’t match what the Shutdown is doing now. In South Dakota at Mt. Rushmore, those huge stone heads of Presidents past are averting their eyes as cones are placed on the highway below to keep tourists from stopping to ogle them. Only a Black Hills blizzard gets the National Park Service to take them down temporarily.

No news about the nearby historic saloon in Deadwood where Wild Bill Hickok was killed holding those famous aces and eights.

Back in Washington, nobody has a winning hand, but John Boehner refuses to fold, raising the ante with yet another threat of default if the President doesn’t throw in his cards.

Call it Doomsday Liar’s Poker, the ultimate version of insanity in Michael Lewis’ 1989 book portraying how greedy, reckless Wall Street morons were inflating the stock market and heading it toward ruin. Only this time the game is being played in Washington, and the stakes are the nation’s economy.

Even some of the players are the same. The New York Times describes how Tea Party plotters planned the current impasse with Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese III leading the way. Meese was a bad apple even back then, who resigned his post after involvement in the Wedtech scandal, a bid-rigging scheme was uncovered by an independent prosecutor. Now Meese is a “Conservative” icon.

The infamous Koch brothers are back too, with a group linked to them disbursing over $200 million dollars for the anti-Obamacare campaign.

Stakes are enormous now, but at bottom, it’s still the same old Liar’s Poker Game. Except that this time it will be American taxpayers paying the tab for generations to come.

A Medal for Michele Bachmann

Years ago, a drug-addicted employee used a passkey while I was away and stole stuff from my apartment, including a Purple Heart. That feeling of violation comes back as Michele Bachmann and her Tea Party comrades, after shutting down government, strike poses and remove barricades for veterans at Washington’s war memorials.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Boswell tells us that Samuel Johnson said about such hypocrites in the eighteenth century. Nothing has changed. GOP poseurs are willing to take food from the mouths of children of furloughed employees but won’t stand for obstruction in parks that celebrate sacrifice for the good of country.

I yield to no veteran on patriotism, but I insist that the park police do their duty, including a few whacks on the backsides of those barricade breakers.

Then they can go back to Capitol Hill and award themselves Purple Heart for injuries suffered in the line of duty. 

Why Did Miriam Carey Die?

A 34-year-old woman suffering from post-partum depression was killed in Washington this week, leaving behind a child, bottles of medication and a human mystery.

If I were still editing a magazine, I would have a reporter spend the next few weeks finding out all about Miriam Carey, what brought her to that televised car chase and what her life and death can tell us about mental health in America, hers and ours.

The resulting article might start with that riveting moment when police, guns drawn, surrounded her automobile. As it has occurred to me during hundreds of movies, I would want to know why officers of the law fired at her rather than just shoot out the tires and end the chase. What were they thinking?

From there, I would want to go back and read all about how Miriam Carey lived as dental hygienist in Stamford, Connecticut, got pregnant and had her baby, became increasing erratic at work, acquired a medicine cabinet full of antidepressant and anti-psychotic drugs and began a downward spiral that took her to her televised fate.

Her life and death surely hold clues about how little we really know about a mental-health industry that has been taken over by pharmaceutical companies with their cheery TV ads ending with small print about terrible side effects.

Her story should be told, not to indict the psychiatric profession but to dramatize what’s behind the easy generalizations of the TV talking heads that always follow such bizarre behavior. If those titled doctors have anything more prescriptive to offer than descriptive afterthoughts, it would be comforting to know it.

Meanwhile, we are all in a darkness about such matters. If Miriam Carey’s full story can shed even a little light, it should be told.


Update: Now Miriam Carey’s sister, a retired New York City police officer, emerges to question the police use of deadly force, saying there was "no need for a gun to be used." She is not alone in feeling that way.

Oxymoron? Wiser GOP Heads Arise

With Republicans and the nation still held hostage by a Tea Party brat pack, there is finally a stirring of sanity among party elders. Wiser heads are starting to push back about life beyond Boehner.

The New York Times reports a GOP Senate lunch erupting into a “lynch mob” against Ted Cruz, with John Cain/Lindsay Graham’s third amigo, Kelly Ayotte, angrily waving a printout from a Cruz-friendly group attacking 25 Republican senators for a procedural vote that it counted as support of Obamacare.

Republican governors are joining the chorus. “This is a huge distraction,” complains Tennessee’s Bill Haslam. “Instead of that being the conversation, we’re talking about the government shutdown, and the average citizen can’t help but say the Republican Congress isn’t helping.”

Another wise elder, former Mississippi governor and head of the National Committee Haley Barbour, adds: “The story people see now is President Obama sinking like a rock for months, and the only thing holding him up are the Republicans.”

Meanwhile, the President himself holds firm. “We don’t expect 100 percent. But...it is not acceptable for one faction of one party in one chamber to say, ‘Either we get what we want, or we’ll shut down the government.’ Or even worse: ‘We will not allow the U.S. Treasury to pay its bills and put the United States in default for the first time in history.’ So the message I have for the leaders is very simple. As soon as we get a clean piece of legislation, that reopens the government.”

He follows that with an even blunter speech: "Speaker John Boehner won't even let the bill get a yes-or-no vote, because he doesn't want to anger the extremists in his party. That's all. That's what this whole thing is about."

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Republicans finally came to their senses and found the President too teed-off to settle with them?

Nah.