Current Affairs – Page 42 – Infospigot: The Chronicles

September 10, 2009

That Day

A semi-annual semi-tradition here, reposting an abridgment of a passage from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” that Scott Simon read on NPR the weekend after September 11, 2001:

“I understand the large hearts of heroes,
The courage of present times and all times;
How the skipper saw the crowded and rudderless wreck of the steam-ship, and Death chasing it up and down the storm;
How he knuckled tight, and gave not back one inch, and was faithful of days and faithful of nights,
And chalk’d in large letters, on a board, Be of good cheer, we will not desert you:
How he follow’d with them, and tack’d with them—and would not give it up;
How he saved the drifting company at last:
How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves;
How the silent old-faced infants, and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men:
All this I swallow—it tastes good—I like it well—it becomes mine;
I am the man—I suffer’d—I was there. …

I am the mash’d fireman with breast-bone broken;
Tumbling walls buried me in their debris;
Heat and smoke I inspired—I heard the yelling shouts of my comrades;
I heard the distant click of their picks and shovels;
They have clear’d the beams away—they tenderly lift me forth.
I lie in the night air in my red shirt—the pervading hush is for my sake;
Painless after all I lie, exhausted but not so unhappy;
White and beautiful are the faces around me—the heads are bared of their fire-caps;
The kneeling crowd fades with the light of the torches. …

I take part—I see and hear the whole;
The cries, curses, roar—the plaudits …
Workmen searching after damages, making indispensable repairs … the rent roof—the fan-shaped explosion;
The whizz of limbs, heads, stone, wood, iron, high in the air. …

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.”

September 4, 2009

Spent the morning — Friday morning, I need to say, with Saturday morning fast approaching — out at the Bay Bridge construction project. I’d love to describe it in detail, and will, but right now I’m just plumb tuckered out. This is the scene at the Coast Guard boat landing on Yerba Buena Island. None of the construction is in this view, and it’s a little out of focus, but it does convey a little bit of the beauty of this morning. More later.

September 2, 2009

Smoke

We have a fire in Southern California, and everyone gets to share in the fun. Above is a map from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Satellite Data Processing and Distribution (original here) showing the extent of smoke from the Station Fire in the mountains north of Los Angeles (and from a series of fires burning in the mountains of British Columbia). Here’s a snippet from the Smoke Text Product (actual name) put out by NOAA’s Satellite Services Division:

Monday, September 1, 2009

DESCRIPTIVE TEXT NARRATIVE FOR SMOKE/DUST OBSERVED IN SATELLITE IMAGERY
THROUGH 0400Z September 2, 2009

Southern Canada/North and Central Plains/Midwest:
Remnant smoke was seen covering a very large portion of southern Canada,
the Northern Plains, most of the Midwest, and parts of the Great Lakes
region. Most of this smoke is remnant from multiple large wildfires
that have been burning in southern British Columbia over the past few
days. Smoke stretched west to east from British Columbia to south Quebec
just north of Vermont, as far north as central Hudson's Bay, and as far
south as the Central Plains where it has been mixing with the dense smoke
from the southern California wildfires.  Several areas of moderately
dense to very dense smoke were present, mostly along and north of the
US/Canadian border with one of the largeest areas of very dense smoke
northwest of Lake Superior and another over southern Alberta/southern
Saskatchewan.

For more on how the smoke situation is evolving across the country, see NOAA’s Air Quality Forecast page, then check the smoke forecasts accessed through the table on the left side of the page. (NOAA’s graphical forecast pages are awesome, but they require either a tutorial or a lot of time just messing around with them — the latter is my method — to discover everything that’s there).

September 1, 2009February 7, 2022

Health Reform, Meal Reform, and Wal-Mart

My friend MK Czerwiec — she’s an R.N., M.A. (in medical humanities and bioethics, from Northwestern), and comic-strip artist — wrote a while back that the elephant in the room in the health-care “debate” is one of the principal reasons we get sick and our medical costs run so high: the Great American Diet. You know: the massive number of calories we consume, the processed food, the fat, the salt. She points to writers like Michael Pollan and David Kessler who discuss our diet’s impact on both personal and societal health. And she’s in the midst of cartooning the issue (here).

Enter Wal-mart, by way of a commercial we saw tonight while watching a recorded episode of “Monk.” It was a short thing, and the theme was how busy, budget-conscious moms can feed their families while saving big bucks. Here’s a sequence of sloppy screen shots:

Step 1: Mom’s shopping for breakfast at the fast-food drive-thru. Here’s how much it’s going to cost her to shove a pile of greasy, empty calories down her kids’ maws.

Step 2: But wait. Mom’s got something up her sleeve. Or actually on a plate that at least her daughter seems to be less than thrilled to see.

Step 3: Turns out Mom’s gotten out of rancid old Mr. McGreasy’s breakfast line and done what any good mom should. She went to the store and loaded up on what Alex Trebeck and the “Jeopardy” crew would call comestibles. Let’s see: There’s Yoplait, Jimmy Dean sausage, egg and cheese croissant sandwiches, and a jug of Sunny D non-juice.

Step 4: Mom saves. Over $600 a year. And if you could read the fine print in the ad, which is pretty hard to do even in a still photo, you might be able to understand how that $600 is derived.

Now, it would be easy to say, “Let’s not be a snob about other people’s food choices.” Or, “Let’s not be a hypocrite.” And I’ve got a friggin’ mountain of breakfast pastries, cookies, brownies, Dairy Queen shakes, and lots more under my belt to make me humble about what I say about Wal-mart’s suggested breakfast menu.

But look at the Sunny-D ingredient list from the company website. Note that the company chemists have mixed in a variety of artificial sweeteners to cut down on the amount of high fructose corn syrup that they dump into the bottle. Yoplait does have identifiable food in it along with the inevitable high fructose corn syrup. The Jimmy Dean croissant sandwiches? Jam-packed with caloric goodness. (In fact, if one limited one’s self to single servings of each one of these products for breakfast, you’d be talking about 700 calories.) And the croissant features a “War and Peace”-length ingredient list:

“Croissant: Enriched Bleached Flour (Wheat Flour, Malted Barley Flour, Niacin, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate [Vitamin B1], Riboflavin [Vitamin B2], Folic Acid), Vegetable Shortening (Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and/or Cottonseed Oils, Water, Salt, Mono- and Diglycerides, Annatto Extract [Color]), Skim Milk, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Yeast, Water, Contains 2% or Less of: Salt, Eggs, Wheat Gluten, Enzymes, Sugar, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Mono- and Diglycerides, Calcium Propionate and Potassium Sorbate (Preservatives), Soy Flour. Cooked Sausage Patty: Pork, Water, Contains 2% or Less of: Sodium Lactate, Salt, Sugar, Spices, Sodium Phosphates, Monosodium Glutamate, Sodium Diacetate, Caramel Color. Precooked Egg Patty: Whole Eggs, Water, Soybean Oil, Nonfat Dry Milk, Modified Corn Starch, Salt, Xanthan Gum, Natural and Artificial Butter Flavor (Butter [Cream, Milk], Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil Soybean Oil, Lipolyzed Butter Oil, Natural and Artificial Flavors), Citric Acid. Pasteurized Process American Cheese: American Cheese (Cultured Milk, Salt, Enzymes, Artificial Color), Water, Cream, Sodium Citrate, Salt, Sodium Phosphate, Sorbic Acid (Preservative), Lactic Acid, Artificial Color, Enzymes, Soy Lecithin.”

The point being: You’re not a criminal to make this stuff, buy it, eat it, or feed it to your family. We all do it, or have done it, and we all have had good reasons for it. But ignorance shouldn’t be one of those reasons any longer. It’s one thing for people to eat this way because they feel they have to — it’s a cheap way to eat, at least at first, and it’s perceived as convenient. It’s another matter altogether to promote the idea that this is good, wholesome, nutritious food that also happens to be inexpensive food. That’s an untruth on a par with selling the health benefits of cigarettes.

August 26, 2009

Teddy Kennedy

A memory, and just one. Robert Kennedy was shot on the night before our last day of school in 1968, my last day of eighth grade. I remember going through that day not quite able to understand how life seemed normal for so many of those around me. But it did. A neighbor had planned a picnic for that night, and it went on as scheduled. But life that evening did not seem normal; all the adults were stricken. After midnight, Bobby Kennedy died.

Then we re-enacted the ritual remembered from the president’s assassination five years earlier, repeated with the killing of Martin Luther King just a couple months before Bobby was slain: a lying in state, a public funeral, a farewell.

It fell to Ted Kennedy to give the eulogy at his brother’s funeral. I was sick that day and so beside myself–talk about things you never get over, and this was one for me–that I don’t remember much of what he said. The bulk of the text came from Bobby himself, but mostly I recall the end, when he struggled to finish without breaking down. What a loss for him and his family, what a loss for us all. And despite all the personal stumbles, missteps, and humiliations Teddy suffered later, what strength it took for him to go on.

(The text of his Robert Kennedy eulogy is here, and the MP3 is here; you can also find it on YouTube with a variety of slide shows that range from the almost cloying to the bizarre.)

August 25, 2009

Health Care ‘Debate’: The Complications

By now, most who have a voice — meaning journalists, broadcast rabble rousers, pundits, lobbyists, think tanks, and public officials both elected and unelected — have turned the current attempt to address shortcomings in our health-care system into a Clintonesque quagmire. What ought to be a simple, focused discussion–Everyone must have health insurance as a matter of national well-being. That insurance must not bankrupt anyone. How do we do that?–has become a mash of impenetrable rhetoric and hysterical charges. It’s amusing that the right has even taken to trying to make the problem of the uninsured go away by manipulating numbers. Zap those uncovered folks with a calculator, and they go away!

George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley, is a pioneer in the field of cognitive linguistics and an authority on the workings of framing in public debates. His well-publicized take in The Huffington Post is that the president and his people have blown it by making the health-care debate a pure policy discussion. He urges the administration to reframe its health care program “as An American Plan” that “guarantees affordable care for all Americans.” He then proceeds to lay out a messaging strategy to communicate that simple idea. The HuffPost piece is also worth reading for its critique on what Obama’s chief advisors do and don’t get about communicating with the public. If you think Lakoff’s argument is a little lofty and disconnected from reality, bear in mind that in February 2008, long before the issue was decided, he was predicting Obama would win the Democratic nomination and presidency, in large part because of the deftness with which he framed his candidacy. The guy’s got some cred.

Yes, the details of covering all the uninsured and making coverage affordable for everyone are complicated. But making that goal clear and repeating it at every opportunity is probably the only way to overcome the fear-mongering of those who would like to kill the plan and cripple Obama’s presidency.

August 1, 2009

Food, ‘Food,’ and Health

My Chicago friend MK observes the current debate over the medical industry and how care is delivered (my formulation, now hers) fails to address a basic topic: “how we are getting sick in the first place.” She cites an estimate from Michael Pollan, the food industry critic and author of “In Defense of Food” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” that two-thirds of the medical expenses we incur as a society are directly linked to what we eat and drink.

That reminded me of an hour of KQED’s Forum that I heard about a month ago with Dr. David Kessler, former head of the Food and Drug Administration. He recently published a book called “The End of Overeating.” It’s an attempt to expose how we respond physiologically and neurologically to processed food (i.e., fat, sugar, and salt). Borrowing from advanced neurological research, he argues that the constant availability of, bombardment with, and ingestion of foods high in fat, high in salt, and high in sugar programs us to want more and more of the same (and boy, do we get more and more). The ultimate prescription is to disrupt that programming with a focus on what Pollan and others call ‘real food.’

Pollan’s formula is deceptively simple: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” (Written immediately after a breakfast that consisted of coffee and a ClifBar.)

July 29, 2009

Guest Observation: William T. Vollmann

The New York Times has a story today on William T. Vollmann’s new book, “Imperial.” It’s not a review, really; more of a travelogue, a return to the places Vollmann has visited since the late ’90s while reporting and writing the book and taking pictures for a companion photo volume. The story spends some time talking about Vollmann’s appetite for adventure and for what those leading rather safe, “predictable” lives–me, for instance–might call the seamy corners of life. The story says, “He explained his preoccupation with the marginal and downtrodden matter of factly:

“When I was a young boy, my little sister drowned, and it was essentially my fault. I was 9, and she was 6, and I was supposed to be watching. I’ve always felt guilty. It’s like I have to have sympathy for the little girl who drowned and for the little boy who failed to save her — for all the people who have screwed up.”

July 24, 2009

Journal of Self-Promotion

Contributing to my lack of rest this week was a small radio story I did on locals watching the Tour de France. Through Yelp!, someone at KQED steered me to a little place in Richmond called Catahoula Coffee Company. Originally part of the draw was the news that the cafe opened at 1 a.m. so that people could come watch the Tour. The truth was that it actually opens at 7 — with the Tour playing in mid-stage. Earlier this week I went up there and the owner gave me the run of the place for one morning and part of another. Three minutes of thrilling (and I hope entertaining) audio ensued and aired on KQED’s California Report Magazine this afternoon. Here’s the link to the story page (where the audio will eventually be posted, I think):
http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R907241630/e

And for anyone who’s impatient, who doesn’t want to go to the beautiful California Report site and comment, you can play the story right here:

July 20, 2009

Who’s Your Cronkite Now?

You could call this “All Cronkite’s Children.” Not to blame him, or to praise him, but just as a nod to the news wreckage we’re left with world that evolved in his wake.

(Featured on the ABC News home page right now: Nude Video of ESPN Reporter Stirs Controversy; Will ‘American Idol’ Bid Adieu to Paula Abdul?; Do Circumcised Men Do It Better?; Woman’s DIY Plastic Surgery Nightmare; ‘He’ Becomes ‘She’: Husband’s Transformation. ‘Nuff said.)