Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

          The sign painted on the side of the Vietnamese restaurant: “As for me, give me a bowl of pho and I am happy. Anthony Bordain.” And I wondered what he ate on that final day.

          When my young friend turned around, I could not help but notice the shiner under his left eye. Some guys tried to rob him as he got out of his car. A scuffle ensued, with my friend adamantly maintaining that he got in some good blows, but clearly, he also took one. The would-be robbers ran off when a shopkeeper came out of his store, and my friend lost nothing. I commiserated with him and told him about various incidents involving me, the spouse, and the nonbinary progeny. I asked him if his girlfriend had been with him. “No,” he said, but he saw her the next day. He said that she had been very sympathetic. He hesitated for a moment. A slight grin appeared—his first smile of the evening. Then he said, “Sympathetic sex is very good.”

          I read Habakkuk today. I found some beautiful poetry. I should read that Bible book more.

          All those TV sports shows in addition to just interviewing college athletes about the game ought also to ask the athletes about their favorite professors and then produce clips of those teachers in the classrooms and interacting with the athletes outside of classes. (Or does that not happen?)

          How did a woman in a hoop skirt get into, much less use, an outhouse? The spouse’s answer, “She didn’t.”

I am Donald J. Trump.

Although I shunned the draft,

Patriotism I thump.

It is my great craft

To tweet out “treason”

For those who have good reason

To question what I have done.

It gives me no pause

To label as traitor

Those who don’t cater

To my evident flaws.

I may not have served

(My feet were so spurred!)

But to my critics, I would take out a gun.

          “The girl who can’t dance says the band can’t play.” Yiddish Proverb.

          “This is America, where you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.” Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.

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For Preexisting Conditions, Spouse Means Wife

The Democratic candidates for president all have healthcare. All would have protections for pre-existing conditions. One of Trump’s major 2016 promises was to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better although neither he, nor the Republicans, ever put forward a healthcare plan. Trump, however, has said that “we will always protect patients with pre-existing conditions.” Even so, he is currently asking the courts to strike down the Affordable Care Act, including its protections for pre-existing conditions, although we are still awaiting his healthcare proposal. (I am not holding my breath waiting for it. That would be bad for my health.)

I have had personal concerns about insurance coverage for a preexisting condition. (Funny word, “preexisting.” It seems to mean existence before existence. That doesn’t seem possible. When it comes to insurance, it really means an already-existing condition, but for some reason we use what should be the nonsensical “preexisting.”) I had a bad shoulder. I would have said that I had a dislocation problem, but that was not accurate. The bone did not come completely out of joint. I could pull the arm back into place with my free arm. I might have called it a partial dislocation, but the doctor who replaced my shoulder joint recently defined it as a subluxation.

The original subluxation had happened when playing football in college (that is how I usually explain it, leaving out the fact that it was intramural football), with the next one about six months later. When the bone partially slipped out of joint, it hurt like hell with residual pain for days afterward.  Over time, those disconcerting events happened with increasing frequency. Five years after the initial injury, it was time to get the joint repaired.

I did not have health insurance of my own. I was finishing what I hoped was my last year of schooling, and back then the only health insurance I was aware of was tied to employment. I had already accepted a job to start the following September. I would have health insurance through this employer, but I undertook the fun job of reading the policy and found the preexisting-conditions clause. The plan would not cover any health condition that existed when I first became insured.  Instead, the preexisting condition would only qualify for coverage two years down the road, assuming I was still in the same job. Waiting that long to have the shoulder surgery would not have been the end of the world. It was not as if I had cancer or imminent liver failure or was going blind. But it meant a couple more years of painful, partial dislocations and the awkward lifestyle changes that I had adopted to minimize them—not lifting my arm above my head, sleeping in ways so that rolling over would not cause the subluxation, and so on. It also meant living with a constant level of pain that could be tolerated but still was not exactly fun.

The spouse, however, had a job, and she had a health insurance benefit. I read that policy, too. It said that spouses of the insured were covered, and since she had been working for a while, the preexisting limitation did not preclude my shoulder surgery. I went to a famous shoulder surgeon who was ready to do my repair, but both he and the hospital wanted a notice from the insurance company that my treatment would be covered. We went to the benefits administrator at the spouse’s work, who, to our surprise, said that the company’s insurance would not cover me for anything. “How can that be!?!” I exclaimed. I showed her the clause in the many-paged policy mandating coverage for “spouses” of the insured. The wife was the insured, we all agreed, and she and I were married, so I was the “spouse.” Ergo, I was covered. “No,” the administrator patiently explained, “‘spouse’ meant ‘wife.’” That is what it had always meant, the bureaucrat stated. We learned that female spouses were considered beneficiaries under the plan because, apparently in those distant days, no husband of a female employee had ever sought to be covered under this provision of the policy before. The women utilizing the plan were either single, or if married, had husbands who had their own insurance or were too proud to seek spousal coverage.

I was flabbergasted, but not so much so that I could not pronounce the word “sue.” There are advantages to being a lawyer, even though back then I had little idea how to bring a suit. But the threat produced a further consideration by the wife’s employer and insurance carrier. With much grumbling, they decided that they would cover my shoulder surgery.

The wife left that job a little while later. After I had the surgery.

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Marathon Bingeing

          On the morning of November 3, I will wander down the block and watch the strange sight of thousands and thousands of people running by on a carless street. It will be the New York City marathon, and the intersection where I will stand is mile eight of the more than twenty-six-mile course.

          Watching people run by whom I do not know should be boring, but for the forty-five minutes I will spend it is not. The sidewalk will be jammed with neighbors, guests, and visitors. Music with a strong beat will be playing. The first competitors we will see are the disabled participants in racing wheelchairs who start separately from those who are ambulatory. They are wildly cheered and encouraged by the crowd. Then an empty street with anticipation building for the first runners. A phalanx of motorcycles and trucks carrying cameras roars up Lafayette Avenue, and we become alert because we know that right behind these vehicles are the elite marathoners, one of whom hope will win the race. Many will be from African countries, and they will largely be in an Indian file at the center of the road. Then a small group of runners appears a hundred yards back. They are awfully good runners but are not going to win. Each year I wonder how these people feel—better than 99.99% of all those who run—but who will never come in first or even third or fifth. Does their ability make them feel good or are they just frustrated?

          Now we are on the lookout for the first women runners, also the elite. As a cheer went up for the first men, another erupts when the first woman is spotted.

          Soon the runners no longer appear as individuals. They stream as groups, but for a while longer almost all are still clustered within five feet of the street’s centerline. This changes every moment as more and more runners are in sight. Soon they cover the pavement from curb to curb. We can’t even glimpse he opposite side of the street, and it will remain out of sight for an hour or more as thousands and thousands of running people go by. This river of runners may be made up of many individuals but together it forms a new flood flowing east anticipating the turn north. It will then leave Ft. Greene and enter Williamsburg.

          I find myself noticing the colors that bounce by. This is not a uniformed sport, and the running clothes comes in many hues, often indicating the nationality of the wearers: Rumania and New Zealand, Japan and Nigeria, and almost every country in between. Some carry messages—“World Peace,” “Fight Climate Change,” “Marry Me Becky,” “My Kids Are the Greatest.” Some run in costume—every so often I spy a bunny rabbit or a Santa Claus. At one time there were a lot of Obamas. How many, if any, Trumps will there be? A few simultaneously juggle as they run. I have seen a guy running backwards. For years, a man in a tuxedo ran carrying at shoulder height a dining room tray with a glass on it as though he were going to serve champagne at the finish line.

          I watch the gait of the runners. Some have a high knee lift while the feet of others only clear the ground by a few inches. Often the different styles are side by side so it seems as if each is equally efficient. Some are awkward as a new-born colt; some are as graceful as a gazelle.

          Many of the runners seem to be in their thirties, I but find myself looking for the outliers. I am somehow when I see those who are sixty or seventy, and I spot many.

          Even though the run is not even a third over where I watch, some of the runners will look as if they are straining, and I wonder if they will make it. Some look as if they are merely coasting and do not care about their time. Others seem as if they are pushing themselves, chasing a PB—a personal best.

          As the crowd of runners increases and seen more and more blur by, I feel something akin to a vertigo. It’s time to go home. I will turn on the TV because even though runners are still going by my viewing spot, eighteen marathon miles away the elite runners will be approaching the finish line. I can hear through my windows cheering for those at the end of my block commingled with cheers on TV from Central Park, and I will be struck as I am every year that soon there will be a winner while many still have two-thirds of the race to go.

          And through all of this, I always feel a bit of pride that I, more than once, ran this marathon, and I wonder if I am happy or sad that my body no longer will allow it.

          But to all those run on Sunday, I wish you good luck, or I suppose more appropriately, God speed.

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Snippets

          After I came out of Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie, Pain and Glory, I thought about the term “adult film.” It is used for movies with graphic depictions of sex even though teens and pre-teens and not particularly mature adults are interested in the subject matter. On the other hand, there are many films where the young and immature do not have the experience, knowledge, or empathy to be drawn into the movie. They are just bored if they go. These are films for adults, which, of course, is quite different from adult films.

          I wonder how many adults knew who Stormy Daniels was before her connection with Donald Trump hit the news. Yet she was identified frequently as an “adult movie star.”

          The first Almodóvar film I saw was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. How many of you thought that the title was redundant? Hold up your hand if you think that question is offensive? How many of you have nail polish on that hand?

Overheard at a Feminist Conference

Sisters, this may sound ominous,

But we all have a touch of the mom in us.

                   Richard Moore

          As I passed two young men on the sidewalk, I heard one demand, “Well, who then brought the urine?” If there was a reply, I was out of earshot.

       I ran into the postal carrier in front of my house. I said that I would take the mail up the stoop and save her some steps. She thanked me, and I asked her how many steps she did during her work. She tapped her watch and said, “According to this, about 16,000.” (Just in case you ever wondered.) I asked her how many flights of steps.  (It is twelve steps up from the sidewalk to my mail slot. Sometimes my Fitbit registers this as a flight of stairs but sometimes, aggravatingly, not.) She said her device did not have flights of stairs.

          I read the handout that I was handed, and parts of it gave me concern about the performance I was about to see. The bio of the playwright said, “He’s been honored to receive commissions and developmental support from institutions like [emphasis added] The Kennedy Center/New Voices New Visions, The Eugene O’Neill Conference, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Actor’s Theatre of Louisville, and Berkeley Rep’s Ground Floor Residency.” I assumed that the playwright had written this. He probably meant that he got support from the listed institutions, but he wrote that he got aid from institutions that were akin to the ones mentioned. My concerns about the production further increased because the artistic director for the theater company wrote, “It is a pleasure to produce a playwright who creates well-defined and complexed [emphasis added] characters.” Is there such a word as “complexed”? Does it mean something different from “complex”? These are people whose careers involve good writing. But in spite of my concerns, the play was quite good.

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Chasing Waterfalls (concluded)

While conversations among guests in a hotel or motel are usually sparse and fleeting, bed and breakfast guests often chat with each other. Perhaps we all want to feel we are in one of those novels from a hundred or more years ago where the characters are in a boarding house, as in Balzac’s Pere Goriot, or in an Italian pensione, as in Forster’s A Room with a View. With the shorter stays in a B and B, the deep character-revealing conversations of the novels are not the norm.  Primarily the conversations are started with: “What did you do today?” “What have you planned for tomorrow?” “Where are you from?” “What do (or did) you do?” “Where are you going?”

The first morning I was in the Idlwilde bed and breakfast, I was reading on the porch in the chilly air. Another man appeared, and I learned that he was from a small town in western Wisconsin. I grew up in eastern Wisconsin, and he quickly reminded me of some of my relatives as he told me in exacting detail the route he had driven from his home to Watkins Glen, emphasizing at length how he had successfully skirted Chicago. I don’t remember how he shifted the topic, but soon I heard him telling me that his wife did not really like wine, but she had sampled wine in Door County, Wisconsin, that appealed to her. It was made from cherries, and yesterday the good wife was pleased to find a winery that had sweet wines. The Finger Lakes region has many wineries and has been primarily known for its Rieslings, many of which are far from dry. The Wisconsin woman, however, did not like Rieslings. I was assured that they were not sweet enough, but she was happy when she found, as her husband put it, a wine like soda and was even happier when another place offered her a wine slushie. I made a note not to join that couple for dinner.

On Saturday morning, both a prospective bride and prospective groom were breakfasting. I thought this a tradition-breaker until I learned they were not marrying each other. Two marriage parties were at the bed and breakfast. We exchanged only a few words with the bride-to-be, but the soon-to-be husband came over to talk with us. He had hours to go before his ceremony, and he was already hyper and told us about the family car business he was in, the merits of Toyotas, how he was marrying a childhood sweetheart, how they had drifted apart when they went to separate colleges, how they got back together, and like that. He scrolled on his phone until he could show us a picture of the wedding location. To the delight of the spouse and me, he was going to be married in front of a waterfall.

The spouse and I most enjoyed talking with a couple from England. He was retired from the UK’s Foreign Office. They had been posted to various places in the Mideast and to Calcutta. He was, however, a little vague about what work he did in these locations, making me think, “Hmmmm.” He had gone to school in Washington, D.C., when his father, also in the Foreign Office, had been posted to Washington, but this was her first trip to the United States. The trip had been timed so that they could go to the U.S. Open tennis tournament. She was especially happy to sit in Arthur Ashe Stadium. As a schoolgirl, she had seen Ashe play at Wimbledon and found him “elegant.” He remained a favorite.

They had been four nights in New York and then four more to Boston. From there they went to Stowe, Vermont, an apparent must-see for Brits visiting the states. They had driven from Vermont to Watkins Glen, and as with other Europeans I have met, they were surprised how big the country is. After the Finger Lakes, they were heading to Niagara Falls, and we discussed what we had liked there. After that, they were going to Toronto and then home. They were lively, charming, knowledgeable—you never know from a few brief conversations, but they seemed like people I would like to be friends with. It was only slightly disconcerting that the spouse found him to be among the most handsome men she had ever met, something the spouse remarked upon repeatedly.

While our stay at the Idlwilde was interesting, our point for being in Watkins Glen was to chase waterfalls, in this case the waterfalls of Watkins Glen State Park. A deep gorge ascends over a mile-and-a-half up a thousand feet and it boasts nineteen waterfalls. We did not have to do much chasing to find the waterfalls. It was a gorgeous walk—a spectacular end to our chase.

After hiking the gorge, we headed to Hammondsport, a nearby town where we found the Glen Curtiss Museum. As a young man, Glen Curtiss was a bicycle builder and racer. Soon he became a motorcycle builder and racer. And then he became an airplane builder and flyer. The museum contains artifacts and reproductions from all aspects of his career including his earliest plane and his seven-foot-long motorcycle upon which he set a speed record of 136 miles per hour in 1907, a motorcycle record that stood until 1930.

He is largely unknown now, but he was especially important in the early stages of aviation. The Wright Brothers may have been first, but Curtiss was next, and his many innovations were essential for the early growth of the flying industry.

The Wright Brothers were very aware of Curtiss. The secretive brothers had obtained patents for airplanes, and in the opinion of many, excessively broad patents. One of the patents was for the methods of controlling a plane in flight. The Wrights depended on wing warping, the twisting of the wing, to help steer a craft. Curtiss improved on that by putting ailerons, the forerunner of what now exists, on the wings. Orville and Wilber yelled, “Patent infringement!” This fight went on for a decade and was only resolved when the patriotism and necessities of World War I demanded a resolution of the conflict. Animosity, however, lingered on for years.

A dinner in a popular local restaurant, breakfast the next morning, and our trip of chasing waterfalls concluded. We returned to our own summer community and our own waterfalls. Buck Hill Falls has several beautiful ones, but that is a story for another day.

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued from October 21)

The trip chasing waterfalls moved from Mt. Morris, New York, the jumping off place for the falls of Letchworth State Park, to Watkins Glen, a short drive away. But the day was drizzly, and we detoured to the Corning Glass Museum in, surprise, surprise, Corning, New York. This is a world class institution that in addition to the museum offers classes in glassblowing throughout the year. But the museum itself is worth the trip. The mainstay of the permanent collection is a historical exhibit of glass making over the last five thousand years, but the display of what modern artists do with glass is mind blowing. (A little bit of a pun.)

Museum goers could watch an artist at work. We watched a glass blowing exhibition. I have seen such a demonstration before, but this narration was different. The English narrator’s words were translated into Mandarin by a Chinese woman. I don’t know if that happens every time, but on our visit a large number of Chinese people were visiting the Corning Museum, too. The demonstration captivated me. It continues to amaze me what people can do with a lump of glass.

After lunch at the museum and a perhaps too-extended stay in the gift shop, we took the short drive to Watkins Glen, which sits on the western shore and very near the southern tip of Seneca Lake, the largest of New York’s Finger Lakes. Watkins Glen is situated her because of the nearby geological wonders, but I would have founded the town on the eastern shore. As one who grew up on the western side of Lake Michigan, I know there are advantages to being on the eastern side of a lake. I watched a full moon rise over Lake Michigan many times, and it was always a magnificent spectacle, but if you are on the eastern side of the lake, you can watch a sunset every clear night, and I still marvel at a beautiful sunset. I know that I would lose those monthly moonrises, but I would take the trade.

Even though I would have preferred the eastern shore of Lake Seneca, the setting of Watkins Glen is still spectacular. Steep hills climb from the shore allowing for magnificent views of the lake, and our stay was enhanced by at a place that once was the house of Watkins Glen, or at least the house of the person who was once the man of Watkins Glen.

We stayed at the “Idlwilde Inn,” a bed and breakfast up six vertiginous blocks from the lake. (More than once the spouse and I wondered what the roads were like in winter. It was scary enough going up and down the hills in September.) As with other B and Bs where we have stayed, the owners had had previous careers. Marcus had been a TV writer on the west coast, and Elin had worked her way up to become president of a well-known corporation. Both were originally east coast people—he from New Jersey and she from the Finger Lake’s region. Her parents were still in the area, and Elin and Marcus had moved back to be near them.

Marcus introduced us to Idlwilde. In giving us a small tour of the inn, he had pointed out a bound set of pages lying on an end table and said it was a master’s thesis about the house, joking that it was mandatory reading. One night, after others were afoot out of the house or abed, I was alone in that parlor and skimmed the writing.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, after the house had been vacant for a decade, new owners sought to restore the house and its gardens to their glory days. A candidate for a master’s degree in landscape architecture set out to find out about the past plantings. She worked hard, but she could find nothing in the house that indicated anything about the gardens. She searched local newspapers for descriptions of the gardens. Nothing. She sought pictures but found only a standard photograph of a wedding held at the house that revealed almost nothing about the gardens. She sought out but could not find neighbors and notables who might have been in the gardens. She did find one or two people who had lived in the house as children, but the men were in their eighties, had not lived in the house for upwards of a half century, and had not paid much attention to the gardens when they lived there. All in all, she simply struck out.

But I admired her. She could not produce pages of garden designs or descriptions or planting schedules or pruning regimes. She had clearly spent a lot of time but had nothing that would advance her to her degree. So she shifted course and a produced a history of Watkins Glen and the house. I learned about Watkins Glen’s emergence as a summer resort, and the hotels that came and went in the nineteenth century. That history I could get in many places. I was more interested in what she wrote about the house and its most famous owner.

The Idlwilde Inn, the bed and breakfast where we stayed, was built in the late nineteenth century and bought by one Warren Clute in 1911 when he was forty-seven. Clute was then the leading citizen of Watkins Glen. He was the president of the largest employer in the area, the Watkins Salt Company, which he had founded when he was only twenty-five. Who knew that western New York state was a major source of salt? At his death in 1938, the company was labeled “the largest independent salt producer in the United States.” The grad student who wrote about the house and gardens said that the Depression had not affected the salt business as much as other enterprises. Refrigeration had not made inroads into many parts of America, and salt remained needed for the preservation of food. Hence, the demand remained high.

Clute also became president of the area’s leading financial institution, the Watkins Glen National Bank. He was active in civic affairs and among other posts was president of the Board of Education. He sponsored the Watkins Salt band and Watkins Salt baseball club. He was a Mason and a member of many service organizations, and a delegate to the 1936 Republican National Convention. He was the kind of guy that when he died at his home in Miami Beach after several years of failing health, the schools and other institutions of Watkins Glen closed for his funeral. He was the kind of guy that a street and a park bear his name.

Clute’s home was admired in his day. The author of a 1918 publication cataloging the salt business in America said that “his residence high on the western shore of the lake, overlooking the village and the valley, is the finest situated in the neighborhood.”

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Snippets

          The subway poster for a CBS show said, “Some Mysteries Can’t Be Explained.” Well, duh. If it’s explained, then it ain’t no mystery.

          The host who invites someone known to be vegetarian or vegan to dinner is expected to accommodate the guest’s eating preferences (and to know all the differences among vegetarians and vegans.) Is the vegetarian or vegan dinner host expected to accommodate an omnivore guest by serving pork, lamb, beef, or goat?

          I was sooo surprised to learn that not everyone thinks that the very, very best place—the greatest place; the perfect place to make a perfect call—to be in America in June is Miami at an old golf resort.

          Sometimes I want to know what happened to characters after the story ends. Recently I learned that Goldilocks went on to become a genealogist. Then she was interested in forebears.

          Trump reassures:

Some may trust in God,

The Kurds must trust Assad.

I put our ally

Square in the bull’s eye

But please don’t wave them bye-bye.

I wrote that Turk a letter.

It has made things so much better,

And I am not upset

From the deaths I beget.

You should never forget

That I have just one plan,

Oh, how I love that man!

I am just rootin’

For Vladimir Putin.

          “Humans are inhuman, whether it’s by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.” Charles Frazier, Varina.

  

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued)

I came to the art gallery on our trip searching for waterfalls to look at art from the Depression, but to my surprise, I found myself thinking about economics and the future of the country. Also to my surprise, I found myself thinking about a disease that ravaged the world throughout most of our history.

The art gallery displaying WPA paintings in Mt. Morris, New York, was in a building that had once been part of a tuberculosis sanitarium. That disease, in earlier times called consumption, was a common disease throughout most of history. In the nineteenth and twentieth century it was often associated with artists. John Keats died from it when he was twenty-five. Franz Kafka died from TB when he was forty. The deaths of Amedeo Modigliani and Aubrey Beardsley were caused or hastened by tuberculosis. The disease, however, was not limited to the creative but widespread in all classes of society. And it was a killer; two-thirds who got the active form died from it. One in every four or five deaths in England and France in 1900 were from TB.

Until the late nineteenth century, it was believed that TB was hereditary. Something in the biological makeup of a person produced the disease. However, in 1882 the German doctor and microbiologist Robert Koch discovered it was caused by a bacillus and that it was contagious. This led to movements to limit the contagion in various ways such as posters warnin against the kissing of infants and laws against spitting. (When I moved to New York, the subways still had signs stating that spitting was prohibited. I did not notice when they came down.)

The sanitarium movement also began. It was believed that TB sufferers would best recover if they were removed from the general population to a place with healthy air, nutritious food, and the opportunity for exercise, which generally meant walking. Hundreds of sanitariums, often on mountains, hills, or in a desert, were established. Stays often lasted many years, and perhaps each facility developed its own society and culture akin to the one created in the maddening and marvelous novel Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

Still the hardships of the sanitariums were real. Families may have been allowed to visit, but for the most part the inmates were cut off most of the time from friends and relatives, and their access to constructive and meaningful activity was limited. Not surprisingly, even though the amount of money spent on them was enormous, the quality of the facilities varied, and they probably did little good. As with many medical treatments over the ages, no evidence shows that sanitarium stays were efficacious in the treatment of TB. A lot of money was spent and a lot of lives were disrupted with nothing to show for it. Instead, tuberculosis only waned in this country when antibiotics found in the 1940s were shown to attack the bacillus. The later discovery of a vaccine further controlled the disease. By 1971, when the Mt. Morris sanitarium closed, most such TB facilities were shutting down.

Some of the institutions have been torn down. Some are just decaying hulks. Many like the one in Mt. Morris have been repurposed. Indeed, the building and grounds that once held hundreds of patients and medical personnel now makes a lovely campus for county offices.

I have heard that many of the old sanitariums are haunted. I did not gain any firsthand knowledge of ghosts in Mt. Morris. But we were still expecting more firsthand knowledge of waterfalls as our trip continued. . . .

(continued sporadically)

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Chasing Waterfalls (continued)

I had hope for Trump’s presidency because he promised vast improvements in our infrastructure. I knew that the GOP would block such spending, citing deficits, if a Democrat had been elected, but I thought that perhaps a Republican president could get Republicans to maintain and improve many needed things around the country. That, of course, has not happened. Instead we got more tax cuts and ludicrous promises. We were told that the tax cuts would benefit the middle class more than the rich. False. We were told that tax cuts would pay for themselves because they would turbocharge the economy, windfalling tax receipts. Independent analysts said that would not happen. The Congressional Budget Office said that even with a better economy, tax cuts would add $1.9 trillion to the deficits. Even so, conservatives ignored these expert opinions and maintained that tax cuts would pay for themselves. Instead, deficits are up by nearly 40% over pre-tax-cut days. The conservatives eschewed learning from experience; the deficit increased after Reagan’s tax cuts of 1980s and George W. Bush’s of 2000. This was also true in Kansas when that state slashed taxes a few years ago.

The Trump tax cuts were also supported by arguments that they would lead to increased capital spending by corporations and this would lead to jobs. This, too, was a surprising argument because even before the tax cuts, corporations had been making large profits. They already were sitting on bundles of cash. If they weren’t making capital investments, it was not for the lack of money. Not surprisingly, the tax cuts have not led to a surge in corporate capital expenditures. But now income inequality is greater now than ever recorded before in this country.

Perhaps a trip chasing waterfalls to Mt. Morris and Letchworth State Park is more than just an opportunity to see natural wonders and paintings done several generations ago. Perhaps it was also to be a lesson that the government can improve this country in temporary and lasting ways that might be better than reducing taxes. Our bridges and roads need work. Our broadband needs expansion. Our energy grid is frightening. Our elections need security. If these needed things can’t be done because they will lead to deficits, then perhaps we should think about the wisdom of our tax cuts.

And a recent column about a new book, Triumph of Injustice, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, professors at Berkeley, reveals something more that is shocking about our tax system. Now the four hundred richest families in this country pay a combined federal, state, and local tax rate lower than any other income group. (See: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html) The overall tax rate for this group is only 23 percent. The first half of the twentieth century saw increasingly progressive taxes, and the overall tax rate on the wealthiest Americans was seventy percent in 1950. Since then we have increasingly cut taxes on the rich. Their overall tax rate was forty-seven percent in 1980 and is now half that. The pitch for slashing taxes on the rich has almost always been that the economy as a whole will benefit and everybody will be much better off. (Of course, those who advocate slashing taxes on the wealthy don’t call them rich people. Instead other terms are used, such as “job-creators.”)

The rationale has been hogwash. David Leonhardt, the columnist, states, “The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last decades. G.D.P. growth has been disappointing, and middle-class income growth even worse.” As was true in the years before the Great Depression and now, “The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. . . . Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.”

(continued October 21)

Posted on by rjonakait

Chasing Waterfalls (continued)

The spouse and I went to Mt. Morris, New York, because it is a jumping off place for the beautiful waterfalls of Letchworth State Park. Only after we got to Mt. Morris did we learn that it has a unique art trove. A tuberculosis hospital complex opened on a hilltop there in 1936. The planning for it began when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was governor of New York, and Eleanor Roosevelt had a particular interest in the sanitarium. To brighten the lives of the 200 adult and 50 children patients, she had art created by the Works Progress Administration placed in the rooms.

The sanitarium closed in 1971, and the five buildings and the land were sold to Livingston County, New York, for a dollar a year later. The WPA art, over 230 paintings as well as sculptures and murals, became the property of the federal government’s General Services Administration but remained on what had been the tuberculosis campus. Livingston County partnered with the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts to create an exhibition space for the art in what had been four apartments for the tuberculosis doctors and their families. This gallery contains the largest collection of WPA art in any one place.

 The Art Gallery is open to the public and free. My guess is that, at least in September, it does not get many visitors. When the spouse and I entered we initially saw no one. We wandered through four or five rooms looking at paintings. About half were painted under the WPA, and the rest were by local artists and for sale. We were about to go when the spouse startled a person working in what might have originally been a closet. We asked her questions, but she said this was only her second day on the job writing grants for the art council and had much to learn about the history of the place.

We poked around a bit more when a man appeared. He, like men in the antique shops we had met the day before, was retired. In fact, he said, he had been retired several times. He had worked as a graphic artist for General Motors in nearby Rochester, New York. With a note of bitterness, he indicated that perhaps this retirement had not really been voluntary, but I did not inquire further. He then worked at a printing company, and apparently, he left there voluntarily. He also said that at local fairs and other events he sold tee shirts with wildlife images he had created and printed. Clearly proud of this art, he said, “I put three kids through college doing this.” (I was struck by this pronouncement because I had heard two other artists say almost the same thing in the preceding month. Both were musicians based in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Neither was nationally known, but both made a living from their music, and said that they had put their children through college with their guitar playing.)

The man in the gallery now volunteered with the arts council several days a week coming over from his home in nearby Nunda. (The spouse and I had driven through this crossroad village, which we had pronounced Nun-Duh. He told us it was pronounced Nun-Day. I have yet to find a way to introduce this new-found knowledge into a conversation.)

Like the retired men in the Mt. Morris antique stores, he wanted to talk, and we learned a lot from him about the history of the campus after its decommissioning as a TB institution. He talked about a vibrant arts community in the Genesee Valley. He explained that the gallery had the space to display only a fraction of the WPA art at any one time, that the displayed paintings were changed several times a year, and that some of the paintings needed restoration. He told us that the council was now collaborating with a local college to digitize and catalog all the paintings with a goal of having images of all the art online, and, perhaps, then prints of them would be for sale. (The spouse had especially liked one WPA painting and had asked if there were any prints of it for sale. I had liked a painting of a cow by a local artist, but I would have had to return at the end of the exhibition’s run to get it if I bought it. It would have been a long way to go for $150 painting.)

Going through the gallery, I thought about the Works Progress Administration and what it produced. I am no art critic, but the paintings seemed to be of mixed quality, and only a fraction of them may be truly lasting art. On the other hand, the WPA did many other things, including building roads, bridges, and parks in almost every American community during the Great Depression, many of which we continue to use. We had seen beautiful stonework in Letchworth State Park, and we were told that most of it had been built during the Depression. The WPA gave jobs to those who then needed them and gave us today a rich legacy.

This country has changed. Our government during the Great Recession of a decade ago did authorize work on our infrastructure but not nearly enough to meet our country’s needs. Conservatives fought to keep the funding low maintaining that the resulting deficits would be harmful. They had no sense of irony when they made these arguments even though they had assured there would be major budget deficits without infrastructure spending.

Eight years earlier the conservatives had inherited a budget with a hefty surplus. They did not pay down the debt; they did not undertake needed governmental projects. Instead they enacted rounds of tax cuts even though economists said that these would cause large deficits. But conservatives then followed the lead of Vice President Dick Cheney who was reported to announce, “Deficits don’t matter.” The deficits grew enormously; income inequality followed.

Deficits did not matter to conservatives when Bush was president and tax cuts were on the table. The deficits, however, did concern them when Obama took office and the country could have benefited dramatically from increased infrastructure spending. Only a limited amount of funding was authorized, even though our infrastructure cries out for help and even though would have given jobs to workers. Deficits apparently don’t matter when the issue is tax cuts; otherwise they do.

(continued October 18)