The Dylan Library III

"Blood on the Tracks" caused quite a sensation when it was released in late 1974.  People said, "We've got Dylan back."  He sounded once again like he did in the 60's  It's great listening to this classic album once again in the privacy of my car.  "A Simple Twist of Fate" is my favorite selection off this album.

Defining Dylan

Bookends


Bob Dylan: Musician or Poet? Published December 17, 2013
By Dana Stevens



Dylan’s songs are primal and modern, poetic and cinematic. Many consciously aspire to the condition of literature.





Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Dana Stevens



Like the handful of artists in whose company he belongs, Bob Dylan takes the notion of genre and cheerfully chucks it into the wood chipper. Is Shakespeare a poet or a dramatist — or, to descend into the smaller subcategories into which genre can never seem to stop fracturing, a comedian, a tragedian or a historian? Did Buster Keaton leave his mark primarily as an actor, a director, a stuntman or a clown? When Michael Jackson performed the moonwalk on television for the first time, did the crowd go into rapture because of his dancing, singing, songwriting or choreography?



Creative activity at a certain level renders genre categorization moot. Or rather, it pushes “genre” back toward its origin in an Indo-European root denoting procreation, “engendering” in the most literal sense. Dylan’s songs at their best seem to originate from some primal foundry of creation, a Devil’s crossroads where Delta blues, British folk ballads, French Symbolism and Beat poetry (to name only a few of his early influences) converge and fuse.



But his music reaches forward in time, toward more modern art forms, as well. There’s something distinctly cinematic, for example, in the crosscutting and temporal leaps of a narrative ballad like “Tangled Up in Blue,” which compresses a feature film’s worth of images, locations and encounters into four and a half minutes of bravura storytelling. If it’s a kind of sung movie, “Tangled Up in Blue” is one that, like so many Dylan compositions, consciously aspires to the condition of literature. In one verse, an erudite topless-bar waitress hands the first-person narrator — or in some versions of the song, a third-person stand-in — a life-changing volume of verse by “an Italian poet / From the 13th century.”



“I wasn’t yet the poet musician that I would become,” Dylan writes of his early folk-singing days in his memoir “Chronicles: Volume 1” (a vivid, surprisingly chatty book that nonetheless manages to disclose almost nothing about its strategically elliptical author, and that points to yet another potential career path: Dylan as prose writer). But elsewhere he has repudiated both those roles, most famously in a 1965 press conference in which — asked the same question that appears above this column — he laughed and replied, “Oh, I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know.”



That modesty, false or not, hasn’t kept us from trying to understand for the past five decades just what, exactly, Bob Dylan is, or from throwing ever-heavier symbolic mantles over his bony shoulders: prophet, shaman, enigma, bard. The more he evades definition, the more grandiose the titles we devise, all the while romanticizing his ability to keep us at a permanent distance. His very undecidability as a cultural figure — the sense that we, and he, haven’t quite grasped what he’s up to — is a mark of how much Dylan has given us as a — well, as whatever kind of artist he is. It’s too early to perceive the full scope of his contribution, and he’s not done changing yet.



The title of his fourth album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” seems funny 50 years and countless recordings later: How could we have known then that the man would turn out to have more sides than a mirrored disco ball? But it’s Dylan’s vision of his role as primarily that of an entertainer, a “song and dance man,” that perhaps drives the nonstop touring that’s dominated his life for the past two and a half decades. (Since 1988, he’s averaged more than 100 shows a year, with the longest stretch off the road only three consecutive months during a health scare in 1997.) For at least a decade, Dylan’s stage manager has introduced nearly every show with a florid, possibly ironic short speech identifying the singer as “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of ‘60s counterculture.” Then the poet comes out and does his song and dance.



Dana Stevens is the film critic at Slate and a co-host of the Slate Culture Gabfest podcast. She has also written for The Atlantic and Bookforum, among other publications.



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By Francine Prose



Dylan is the unlikely offspring of Rimbaud and Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman.





Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Francine Prose



If I had to choose my favorite Bob Dylan song, it would probably be “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.” That’s the one that begins, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez / And it’s Eastertime too.” It conjures up a “Touch of Evil,” Roberto Bolaño sort of situation, with a dark tourist urban legend embedded in one verse: “Sweet Melinda / The peasants call her the goddess of gloom / She speaks good English / And she invites you up into her room / And you’re so kind / And careful not to go to her too soon / And she takes your voice / And leaves you howling at the moon.”



I don’t know why I love the tune so much. Possibly because I’ve traveled to places that, in retrospect, I feel lucky to have gotten out of alive. But the song is more than a cautionary ballad about a corrupt, social-disease-ridden border town. It describes a state of mind. I never once taught at a summer writers’ conference without becoming obsessed with a line from that song, about someone named Angel, just arrived from the coast, “Who looked so fine at first / But left looking just like a ghost.” I’d hear it the way Dylan sang it, with a full stop after each word: Just. Like. A. Ghost! And then I’d look at my pale face in the mirror.



I started listening to Dylan when I was in high school, when he was a folk singer and not yet famous. It was fine with me when he “went electric.” I’d advise anyone who wants to see the gifted, angry kid with whom my generation fell in love to watch “Don’t Look Back,” D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film about Dylan’s 1965 British tour.



I’ve always been partial to “Blood on the Tracks,” from 1975: to “Simple Twist of Fate,” “Shelter From the Storm” and especially “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” — so much compressed narrative, such a profusion of catchy rhymes. Dylan has written many of our most beautiful love songs. And for the ironist there’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a rocker’s take on an E. M. Forster or Edith Wharton novel, with that funny line, “Got to hurry on back to my hotel room / Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece.” Once a friend told me that “I’ll Keep It With Mine” is a spiritual song, a sort of hymn. At the time I thought he was being pretentious, but now I’m inclined to agree.



The Dylan songs I keep returning to are the ones that spin out images like a surrealist or expressionist film, like Buñuel’s “Andalusian Dog” crossed with “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mister Jones? “Visions of Johanna” may be our most accurate, haunting evocation of the semi-hallucinatory insomnia that can be an unfortunate side effect of love. Perhaps I have a weakness for songs about the apocalypse (another favorite is Exuma’s “22nd Century,” performed by Nina Simone), but I’ve always admired “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” Dylan’s images cascading in the cadence of a children’s rhyming game: a partridge in a pear tree in a post-nuclear hell. Dylan is a master not only at translating rage into song (“Positively 4th Street” and “Idiot Wind” come to mind), but also at convincing us we’ve felt exactly the same kind of anger he’s describing.



He’s the heir, the unlikely offspring of Arthur Rimbaud and Walt Whitman. But he’s neither Rimbaud nor Whitman. He’s Bob Dylan. Is he a poet or a songwriter? The same answer applies: He’s Bob Dylan. I find myself falling back (again!) on Emily Dickinson’s remark: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Dylan’s songs can make us feel that pleasurable shock of being partially decapitated by beauty.

The Dylan Library II

So far I've listened to the first one, John Wesley Harding, and Self-Portrait.  I am amazed at how good Dylan sounds coming from 1961.  It's good to hear his song tribute to Woody Gurthrie, and the first song on the disc, You're No Good, are especially great.  The talking New York song is still entertaining and funny.  JWH sounds so good from 1968.  I had forgotten that "All Along the Watchtower" is from this album.  The Self-Portrait album did not receive great critical acclaim, but I remember it from the summer of 1970.  The Dylan voice sounds strong from so long ago.

The Dylan Library

Thanks to Freddy's generous and fantastic Christmas present I am enjoying the Dylan library with the complete 47 disc collection.  I will be updating as I go along.

The Myth of Race

“Dreadful Deceit”: Race is a myth

A historian argues that one of the defining elements of American culture is merely a "social fiction"

by Laura Miller



Jacqueline Jones’ provocative new history, “Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From the Colonial Era to Obama’s America,” contains a startling sentence on its 265th page. It comes after Jones quotes Simon Owens, the last of five African-Americans whose life stories she describes in the book. Owens — an auto worker, labor activist and writer who died in 1983 — stated, “I understood as a Negro first, in the South, the North, in the union, in the NAACP, in the C.P. [Communist Party] and in the S.W.P [Socialist Workers Party].” Jones adds, “Because generations of white people had defined him and all other blacks first and foremost as ‘Negroes,’ he had no alternative but to acknowledge — or, rather, react to — that spurious identity.”



That racial identities are “spurious” is the foundational argument of this fascinating book. Race is a cultural invention, rather than a biological fact (on this scientists widely agree), and Jones, a history professor at the University of Texas and recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, wants to show how pernicious and persistent this falsity is. In the book’s epilogue, she points to an article from the 2012 edition of the New York Times titled “How Well You Sleep May Hinge on Race,” based on a study showing that living in high-crime neighborhood or having chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension can cause insomnia. But, as Jones observes, these are problems deriving from poverty, not race, and so the article “blatantly conflated socioeconomic status with the idea of race.”



Of the five people whose life stories are told in “Dreadful Deceit,” the first is essentially voiceless: an enslaved man named Antonio, abducted from his homeland in Africa and murdered while being “corrected” by a colonial landowner in 17th-century Chesapeake. As Jones relates, Antonio’s race “had no practical meaning” to the man who purported to own him, Symon Overzee. Describing in well-researched detail the economic and political milieu of the time, she argues that what created Antonio’s vulnerability to Overzee was not his skin color or any other physical trait but his uprootedness, “without a tribe or a nation-state to protect and defend him in the Atlantic world.”



In the revolutionary era, Jones singles out Boston King, born into bondage but able to escape the many designs on his freedom laid by opportunistic American and British whites during and after the revolution. He emigrated to Nova Scotia and ultimately to Sierre Leone. King was part of a group of black men and women who supported the Crown during the Revolutionary War in exchange for their liberty, although holding onto it could be tricky. But Jones is perhaps most interested in conveying the rationales that the wealthy South Carolinians of King’s day offered for holding onto their slaves. They “felt no need to justify human bondage by invoking race-based differences; they framed the issue of slavery as a matter of their own self-interest, one they could defend by force without bothering to explain themselves.”



It was only when whites felt real pressure to repudiate slavery on moral grounds that they began to concoct theories about how the “nature” of blacks rendered them suitable only for menial labor under the total control of white elites. Sometimes the challenge came from within, as was the case with Thomas Jefferson, whose desire to maintain his luxurious lifestyle forced him to reconcile “Enlightenment theories of liberty with self-interested theories of the limits of liberty.” Most propaganda about “race,” however (Jones frequently puts the word between quotation marks to emphasize its artificiality), came from the slave-owning classes trying to fend off abolitionists. The consistent refrain in “Dreadful Deceit” is just this: that the very idea of distinct races is a fabrication designed to provide the rich and powerful with a cheap, docile labor force.



None of the life stories in the book supports this argument more forcefully than that of Richard W. White, a Civil War veteran elected to the office of clerk of the Chatham County Superior Court in Georgia. One of his opponents in the election filed suit against White, charging that he was ineligible to hold office in Georgia because he was “colored.” White, who was relatively new in town and “from unknown parts and of unknown lineage,” appeared to be “white.” The evidence marshaled to prove that White was not white consisted, as the judge freely admitted, of “the reputation of the person in his community, that is what he says of himself — what others say of him — his associates and his general reputation.” In other words, Jones underlines, a man’s race in this community “would be a matter not of ethnicity or heritage or appearance or biology. It would be, purely and simply, a social fiction — one without any appreciable basis in physical reality.”



The other individuals Jones profiles include a woman who managed to amass enough real estate in antebellum Providence, R.I., to become the the town’s wealthiest black woman and William H. Holtzclaw, who founded a school, modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Tuskeegee University, in rural Mississippi in 1908. At times, her thesis gets lost in the particulars of their stories, but this isn’t a flaw. The strength of “Dreadful Deceit” lies in its wealth of detail and the precise picture it offers of specific places and times, towns where white workers embraced the ideology of race because it gave them an edge or, conversely, white shopkeepers turned out to be perfectly willing to countenance a black school in their area if good money could be made from doing business with it.



Jones’ central argument on the fictitious nature of “race” proves slippery, in no small part because many of the people she writes about don’t seem to have examined their own beliefs very closely. Many of them, for example, lacked a concept of the “scientific” and therefore couldn’t have made scientific claims about race even if they were so inclined. She clearly admires Owens for his belief that the shared interests of the working class and poor ought not to be divided by the fiction of race. (Owens rejected black separatists and nationalists as well as labor unions that failed to challenge their white members’ racism.) According to Jones, he thought of race as “simply a smokescreen — one that clouded the efforts of all people to secure justice and equality for themselves and their fellow sufferers.”



Jones is right, of course, that too much investment in racial division does disempower groups who need all the power they can get. Yet human beings amount to more than just their economic and political interests, and often a person’s cultural identification is what feels closest to his or her heart. At the same time, cultural divisions can be as bitter as racial ones.



Jones doesn’t address the rise of culture-based identity politics over the past several decades — a large gap in her account — but some critique is implied in her embrace of Owens’ idea that class identification should take precedence. Race may be a biological myth, but it has become a cultural reality, and it’s hard to regard the glories of African-American culture as merely the side effects of deplorable smokescreen. I doubt Jones would argue that they are, but just at the point where you expect her to tackle this knotty issue, “Dreadful Deceit” ends. Fortunately, the reader is left with the stories Jones has told, and they are more than enough.

Strategy

‘Strategy: A History’ by Lawrence Freedman


My strategy for this book was to read 150 pages a day over four days. On the fifth day I’d draft the review, on the sixth I’d polish it, and on the seventh I’d rest. The first day went perfectly to plan. Then the cat got sick, and a morning disappeared. Then my son needed help with an essay — an afternoon gone. Obstacle piled on obstacle. I eventually needed seven days just for reading. There’s a lesson here.



That lesson runs like a river through “Strategy.” Lawrence Freedman, once a foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair, is Britain’s foremost strategic analyst. His books manage to delight the experts yet are still comprehensible to the general reader, a rare skill in this genre. On this occasion, he has produced what is arguably the best book ever written on strategy (in its widest sense), but the overriding theme after more than 600 densely packed pages of text is virtually the same as what Robert Burns said in a few words:

.But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren’t alone]



In proving foresight may be vain:



The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men



Gang aft a-gley [often go awry],



An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,



For promised joy.



Strategies promise joy but seldom deliver. The plans we make are attempts to impose order on our world, but the most careful arrangements often run aground on the shoals of circumstance. As Mike Tyson once philosophized, “Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”



The inclination to strategize is hardwired into our genes. Freedman begins this fascinating study by showing how chimpanzees form quite complex plans, whether finding food, defending themselves or ensuring group harmony. Violence is common but seldom indiscriminate; chimps apply their cost-benefit analysis when using force. As with Burns’s mousie, however, capricious chance can render naught the best-laid schemes of Mr. Chimp.



After looking at apes, the author moves to the human tendency to strategize. He deconstructs familiar stories (David and Goliath, the Trojan horse, etc.) to tease out their underlying strategies. His analysis of the 10 plagues in Exodus is a thing of beauty — perceptive, articulate, sophisticated but wonderfully clear. Each plague, he shows, constituted a gradual turning of the screw in a program of strategic coercion. That reminded me of Lyndon Johnson’s limited-war strategy in Vietnam, except that God succeeded and Johnson failed.



Strategy, Raymond Aron once argued, “draws its inspiration each century, or rather at each moment of history, from the problems which events themselves pose.” In other words, human beings adapt. But adaptation is usually reactive; strategy responds to the past more than it anticipates the future. Or, as the old adage goes: Commanders prepare for the last war. As a result, they find themselves struggling to keep up with change. A brilliant few have been able to guess correctly what lies ahead, but even a genius depends on luck. And, as Napoleon found in Russia, good luck can suddenly turn into bad.



“Actuality in the end proves unmanageable,” Thucydides observed. “It breaks in upon men’s conceptions, changes them, and finally destroys them.” Try as we might, we cannot make the world bend to our will. That is what commanders discovered in 1915. Before World War I, generals on both sides assumed that Napoleon had written the gospel on war in the age of nationalism. “Nobody,” Freedman admits, “could think of better ways of using great armies to win great wars.” Napoleon, however, did not have to contend with machine guns.



Nineteenth-century technological progress obliterated Napoleonic notions of mobile war, forcing men into trenches. Yet it is difficult to unlearn a gospel. Commanders in World War I are often condemned for fighting an unimaginative war of attrition, when in fact they should be criticized for trying to turn the war into something else — something Napoleonic.



Carl von Clausewitz famously remarked: “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult. . . . Countless minor incidents — the kind you can never really foresee — combine to lower the general level of performance, so that one always falls short of the intended goal.” Strategies often depend upon a cooperative enemy; failure can result when the adversary refuses to act as predicted. Thus, in Vietnam, the United States followed a logical strategy but faced an enemy wedded to a different logic. Ditto in Iraq.



“Strategy” is a book about war but also much more than that. Less than half of it is devoted to military history. A later section deals with politics, looking at the plans made by those with power and by those who seek it. Here, the same limitations apply; the best-laid plans are foiled by the unpredictable and the accidental. Freedman ends by looking at how the obsession with strategy has infiltrated everyday life. We are all strategists now. Starbucks has a strategy for selling coffee, McDonalds for selling burgers and my sister for losing weight. CEOs see themselves as commanders of commerce; they even read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” But where does all this planning lead? Freedman concludes that “the hype that accompanied the promotion of successive strategic fashions exaggerated the importance of the enlightened manager and played down the importance of chance and circumstances in explaining success.”



All this strategizing is, in truth, an attempt to impose individual will upon a recalcitrant world. When armies fail, strategists are blamed. When a product goes unsold, the marketing strategist is fired. We conclude from failure that, if only a Napoleon had been in charge, success would have been assured. In this way, we convince ourselves that we are, in fact, architects of our own fate. That is much more palatable than having to admit that we might be mere flotsam in a turbulent sea of circumstance. We pretend that we are big and powerful, when in fact we are small and weak. Strategy is often simply a charade — ersatz order imposed upon a stubbornly disordered world.





Gerard DeGroot is a professor of history at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His “Back in Blighty: British Society in the Era of the Great War” will be published in early 2014.

On Republican Health Care Talk

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December 14, 2013, 11:19 am 14 Comments

The Neo-paleo-Keynesian Counter-counter-counterrevolution (Wonkish)

OK, I can’t resist this one — and I think it’s actually important.



Brad DeLong reacts to Binyamin Appelbaum’s piece on Young Frankenstein Stan Fischer by quoting from his own 2000 piece on New Keynesian ideas in macroeconomics, a piece in which he argued that New Keynesian thought was, in important respects, a descendant of old-fashioned monetarism. There’s a lot to that view.



But I’m surprised that Brad stopped there, for two reasons. One is that it’s worth remembering that Fischer staked out that position at a time when freshwater macro was turning sharply to the right, abandoning all that was pragmatic in Milton Friedman’s ideas. The other is that the world of macroeconomics now looks quite different from the world in 2000.



Specifically, when Brad lists five key propositions of New Keynesian macro and declares that prominent Keynesians in the 60s and early 70s by and large didn’t agree with these propositions, he should now note that prominent Keynesians — by which I mean people like Oliver Blanchard, Larry Summers, and Janet Yellen — in late 2013 don’t agree with these propositions either. In important ways our understanding of macro has altered in ways that amount to a counter-counter-counterrevolution (I think I have the right number of counters), giving new legitimacy to what we might call Paleo-Keynesian concerns.



Or to put it another way, James Tobin is looking pretty good right now. (Incidentally, this was the point made by Bloomberg almost five years ago, inducing John Cochrane to demonstrate his ignorance of what had been going on macroeconomics outside his circle.)



Consider Brad’s five points:



1. Price stickiness causes business cycle fluctuations: You clearly need price stickiness to make sense of the data. However, there is now widespread acceptance of the point that making prices more flexible can actually worsen a slump, a favorite point of Tobin’s.



2. Monetary policy > fiscal policy: Not when you face the zero lower bound — and that’s no longer an abstract or remote consideration, it’s the world we’ve been living in for five years. And Tobin, who defended the relevance of fiscal policy, is vindicated.



3. Business cycles are fluctuations around a trend, not declines below some level of potential output: This view comes out of the natural rate hypothesis, and the notion of a vertical long-run Phillips curve. At this point, however, there is wide acceptance of the idea that for a variety of reasons, but especially downward nominal wage rigidity, the Phillips curve is not vertical at low inflation. Again, a very Tobinesque notion, as Daly and Hobijn explain.



4. Policy rules: Not so easy when once in a while you face Great Depression-sized shocks.



5. “Low multipliers associated with fiscal policy”: Ahem. Not when you’re in a liquidity trap.



I do think this is important. Among economists who are actually looking at recent events, not doing a see-no-Keynes, hear-no-Keynes, speak-no-Keynes act, there has been a strong revival of some old ideas in macroeconomics. It’s not just new classical macroeconomics that’s in retreat; we’re also seeing, within the Keynesian camp, a distinct if polite rise of neopaleo-Keynesianism.



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December 14, 2013, 10:38 am 46 Comments

Inequality and Incomes, Continued

Some further numerical thoughts on the right of inequality to be considered a “defining challenge.”



Many of the participants in our economic discourse start with the working presumption that inequality is a second-order issue, that the effects of rising inequality — to the extent that these effects are considered worth mentioning at all — are minor compared with the effects of economic growth or the lack thereof. This presumption is so ingrained in the discourse that hardly anyone looks at the numbers. But when you do look at those numbers, you get a shock.



In my previous post I looked at income changes since 2000, and argued that for the bottom 90 percent rising inequality has actually cost more than the economic slump. Obviously that calculation depends on the starting date — and you might also wonder whether the period since 2000 is exceptional.



But look, first, at the long-term trend in inequality. Piketty-Saez have the income share of the bottom 90 percent falling from two-thirds in 1979 to one-half now; that’s roughly 0.9 percent lopped off their income growth per year, for more than three decades. CBO’s numbers aren’t exactly comparable, but they show the income share of the bottom 80 percent declining from 57 to 47 percent over 1979-2007, which means income growth 0.7 percentage point per year slower than in the constant-inequality case.



Those are big numbers. They’re big enough that even if we restrict ourselves to the period 2007-13 — that is, to the Great Recession and the Not-So-Great Recovery — they suggest that the decline in middle-class incomes owes as much to rising inequality as it does to the depressed state of the economy. And this is true even though we’ve suffered the worst economic crisis since the 1930s!



You might be tempted to say that the depressed economy still deserves priority, because recovery is in everyone’s interests, so we should be able to achieve consensus on good short-run macro policies even as we debate inequality. That is, you might be tempted to say this if you’ve been living in a cave these past five years. In practice, debates over macroeconomic policy are just as polarized as debates over inequality — and along pretty much the same lines. That is, the same people who screech “Class warfare!” if you bring up the rising share of the 1 percent also shriek “Greece! Zimbabwe!” if you advocate expansionary fiscal and monetary policies.



So once again, the focus on inequality isn’t a diversion. It’s the right way to move this discussion.



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December 14, 2013, 8:48 am 18 Comments

TPP and IP, A Brief Note

Dean Baker takes me to task over the Trans Pacific trade deal, arguing that it’s not really about trade — that the important (and harmful) stuff involves regulation and intellectual property rights.



I’m sympathetic to this argument; this was true, for example, of DR-CAFTA, the free trade agreement with Central America, which ended up being largely about pharma patents. Is TPP equally bad? I’ll do some homework and get back to you.



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December 14, 2013, 8:36 am 83 Comments

Inequality As A Defining Challenge

It has taken an amazingly long time, but inequality is finally surfacing as a significant unifying issue for progressives — including the president. And there is, inevitably, a backlash, or actually a couple of backlashes.



Read more…



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December 13, 2013, 7:55 pm 17 Comments

Friday Night Music: 2000 Miles

Tis the season for bah humbug — the Christmas muzak is almost unavoidable. And I suppose I should be presenting an antidote. Instead, though, I find myself hearing Chrissie Hynde in my head, which is OK:







By the way, for those who missed it, the finale to last weekend’s Lucius concert:





And while it’s not on their album, they did play “Genevieve” — awesomely. I wish I had a video of that!



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December 13, 2013, 10:36 am 185 Comments

A Health Care Mystery Explained

Ezra Klein is puzzled (or at least says he is; I suspect he understands it perfectly) by Republican hypocrisy on health care. For many years the GOP has advocated things that are supposed to bring the magic of the marketplace and individual incentives to health care: higher deductibles to give people “skin in the game”, competition among private insurers via exchanges — competition that would include reducing costs by limiting networks — and, of course, for cuts in Medicare. Now the GOP complains bitterly that some Obamacare policies have high deductibles, that it relies on the horror of exchanges, that some networks are limited, and that there are cuts in Medicare.



Klein suggests that Republicans are really upset by other aspects of Obamacare, but are going after the easy targets even though they’re attacking their own ideas. In a sense he’s right, but as I said, I suspect that he knows that the issue is both bigger and simpler than he says.



What underlies what Jonathan Chait calls the Heritage uncertainty principle? He describes it thus:



Conservative health-care-policy ideas reside in an uncertain state of quasi-existence. You can describe the policies in the abstract, sometimes even in detail, but any attempt to reproduce them in physical form will cause such proposals to disappear instantly. It’s not so much an issue of “hypocrisy,” as Klein frames it, as a deeper metaphysical question of whether conservative health-care policies actually exist.



The question should be posed to better-trained philosophical minds than my own. I would posit that conservative health-care policies do not exist in any real form. Call it the “Heritage Uncertainty Principle.”



Well, actually it’s pretty simple. The purpose of most health care reform is to help the unfortunate — people with pre-existing conditions, people who don’t get insurance through their jobs, people who just don’t earn enough to afford insurance. Cost control is also part of the picture, but not the dominant part. And what we’re seeing right now, in any case, seems to confirm a point some of us have been making for a long time: controlling costs and expanding access are complementary targets, because you can’t sell things like cost-saving measures for Medicaid and limits on deductibility of premiums unless they’re part of a larger scheme to make the system fairer and more comprehensive.



And here’s the thing: Republicans don’t want to help the unfortunate. They’ll propound health-care ideas that will, they claim, help those with preexisting conditions and so on — but those aren’t really proposals, they’re diversionary tactics designed to stall real health reform. Chait finds Newt Gingrich more or less explicitly admitting this.



Hence the rage of the right. Here they were, with a whole raft of ideas they could throw out, like chaff thrown out to confuse enemy radar, to divert and confuse any attempt to actually provide insurance to the uninsured. And those dastardly Democrats have gone ahead and actually incorporated those ideas into real reform.



Once you realize this, you also realize that people who warn that by opposing Obamacare Republicans are undermining their own proposals are missing the point. Yes, the Ryan plan to privatize Medicare looks a lot like Obamacare — but Ryan comes to Medicare not to save it, but to bury it, so the question of whether his plan could work is irrelevant.



There’s no mystery here; it’s just top-down class warfare as usual.



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