Vitality Versus Security

I read David Brooks column by that title in the Key West Citizen recently and it's premise won't go away. Grrr! I have to lance the boil...

Funnily enough I don't disagree with him on this one because I have long since viewed health care reform (insurance reform whatever term suits you) as a step away from the devil-leave-the-hindmost attitude of Reaganomics. What the Right calls the rising tide that lifts all boats, dinghies and gin palaces equally. Early on when it became clear that health care reform was a possibility, and noise started to be made about a true public option, I too saw this as a step toward a more social-democratic state in the US. Social democracy as defined by Western Europeans is, broadly speaking a mixed economy as defined by some people in the US. Essentially social democracy offers the population at large a protective safety net of benefits, economic and medical below which the bulk of the population need not fear falling. It can consist of government paid for child care so mothers can work, extensive sometimes permanent unemployment benefits and of course free health care for all. Free in the sense that taxes are twice as high as they are here. In motorcycling terms I read in a magazine recently that a Harley Sportster that sells in the US for less than $10,000 might cost three times that much in Denmark. That's just another way to pay for government programs. We hear a lot of noise about extended European vacations, but Europeans have to pay back their free education with a lifetime of work to garner a modest government pension at the end. Making a sudden (albeit well earned) fortune in Europe is next to impossible compared to the US where large sums of money (used to!) routinely change hands in corporate buyouts and as rewards for creative thinking and hard work...

Brooks's point, and it's a good one, is that by seeking to provide coverage for all in the US we are starting down the path to government oversight in much more than just our health care. It is, as he says, a civilizing effort. As we try to remove the terror of illness or bankruptcy from the lives of ordinary people we inevitably increase costs and thus increase the need for more...taxes! He's right, I don't see how universal coverage can be obtained without increasing costs not matter what they tell us, but here's why I think it is fundamentally necessary, even though my wife and I have adequate coverage as I write (and low taxes in penurious Florida!)

The problem for me lies not with the notion of universal coverage, but the reason why we don't already have it in our free market system. If our private insurance based system worked I would stand alongside all those who sought no change- "If it ain't broke don't fix it!" But it is broke! There are too many horror stories of insurance companies failing us, too many and too well known to go on listing them here. Our system costs more per capita than universal coverage systems underpinned by other industrialized governments, our lives are constrained by lack of health care, by insurance tied to our jobs, by unaffordable premiums and by insurance companies who set the terms that cannot be debated. If you get an unfair or illegal bill to whom do you appeal? This system tortures Americans of good faith and less financial means. It tortures decent families and people forced not only to suffer illness and catastrophe but financial ruin. Something has to change, Senator Lieberman and the Catholic bishops notwithstanding. I have yet to hear a non-coverage horror story from a member of Congress or their families. We deserve no less than they.

And if, in so doing we take one small tentative step down the path to social democracy and away from free market piracy, so be it. If the insurance companies understood how badly they have mauled us we wouldn't need to fight tooth and nail for a strong public option. If I could shop for an insurance policy across state lines to find the cheapest competition we wouldn't need change...If a life flight helicopter to Miami didn't charge $23,000 for 40 minutes in the air...or a ground ambulance $800 for a five mile ride across Key West...If a heart attack didn't cost $70,000 to treat...If insurance companies had to present timely detailed explanations of charges...If co-pays were capped by law....If the chronically ill got government help...If...if...if. Instead we face medical and financial catastrophe like no other industrialized nation and our leaders won't lead us out of the wilderness. Universal coverage is sensible and compassionate, not socialism. And if it is the first step to socialism let the insurance robber barons shoulder the blame, not the sick.

End Of Eagle

The 3800 block of Eagle Avenue is a pleasant place, tree lined and distant from all the noise and bustle of Duval Street. It's ex-urban America, full sized lots, proper sized houses made of proper right angles, and nice driveways leading to real garages (used as such and not necessarily converted into worker housing).Once one gets over the cool factor of living in Old Town Key West a home out here could have lots of advantages. Price isn't necessarily one of them. They used to sell for millions but I doubt these homes will ever qualify as low income housing even in a housing depression. Nor should they.Granted these are technically "dry lots" (no canal access for boats and dockage) and the views are a bit limited, but for some residents that's no reason not to sit out of a cool Fall evening and check the fence line:A nice big wall could also be construed as an advantage, especially if flowery:

There is a house in there somewhere:

This one is for sale and they are working on tarting it up for some snowbird no doubt, down for a few weeks of winter and fancies a permanent place in the sun.

There are fewer for sale signs than one might imagine considering how much property is for sale around Key West these days.And those garbage bags filled with garden clippings- this is the time of year when everything has to be made pretty for the owner's return. More gates:Check this, an actual garage:This garage has a nice long driveway, unusual for many homes in this city:The 3800 block is nothing if not varied:And this is where it ends:

South Roosevelt Boulevard. Turn left for the triangle and Stock Island, turn right for Smathers Beach and the airport. And at this point you are all of four miles from Duval Street. A 15 minute bike ride, or ten minutes by Bonneville if you know your way. Pretty civilized, all in all.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs.

Our Dear Leader is holding a summit to discuss how top reduce the dire unemployment figures in our country. He's got business people, academics, economists and union members all sitting around figuring out how to reduce unemployment. It's a conundrum isn't it, how to reduce unemployment? After all unemployment wrecks lives, wrecks election prospects and makes us all look bad. Australia hasn't even had a recession, those nasty socialists with their well regulated banks and socialized medicine. Italy has had gruesome budget deficits for decades and yet look how well Italians live. Of course they are hemmed in by government regulations and lack of prospects but they get free health care and free education so I suppose it's not all bad for them either.

Here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we are enjoying 10.2 percent official unemployment with new numbers out tomorrow. Official unemployment and under employment stand at 17.5 percent and unofficial unofficial estimates of people who've just given up and are scrounging indicate we may well be past the twenty percent mark. Now it used to be said that a country was in a Depression if unemployment reached 25%, because there is no official measure of an economic depression. A recession is measured by "negative economic activity" and we've been doing a fair bit of that the past year. Lately we saw a slight upward blip thanks to the cash for clunkers program so we are officially out of Recession, even though unemployment is nudging Depression levels.

What's more you need to be brave to be unemployed in these United States, because unlike our down trodden friends in the socialist states of Europe we lose our health insurance when we lose our jobs. We don't get guaranteed government payouts to keep us alive. Our "dole" runs out after just a few weeks and you know Congress is reluctant to extend those benefits because of the Federal Budget Deficit. Bummer, I guess we will see soup lines back in the land of the free. Cool, it will be like a living history museum. "See children. This is why FDR got us started with Medicare and Social Security. Remember his four freedoms? Want, fear, of religion and free speech." And we will stand on the sidelines and watch the starving in our midst shuffle up for soup like someone out of the 1930s.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt had this to say in his first inaugural address to the nation:

“Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men…They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.”

Our Dear Leader says he wants the most bang for the buck when dealing with unemployment relief. Sensible I suppose but not exactly inspirational. The most bang for the buck? It's easy. The solution to unemployment is to hire people. If you give people jobs they are no longer unemployed. Let's get them working through a new Works Progress Administration. It worked for the man who spoke those inspirational words of leadership in italics above, it might well work for Mr "Bang For The Buck." Easy peasy. Let's move on to figuring how we are going to punish the financial louts that got us here. Oh what's that you say? The deficit? I know it's awful isn't it, running up debt and ruining the future and everything. Yup. Well, let's hoard our cash, kill a few more Afghans and then perhaps the unemployed will have had the decency to die of starvation like gentlemen. I mean really if we have to choose between starving Americans and the budget deficit I choose the deficit every time. No More Deficit! And if that means soup lines and starvation and no health insurance and tons of homeless everywhere so be it. Future generations will thank us.


This message brought to you by an employed American with health care and a roof over his head.

Johnson On Sugarloaf

It happens form time to time that life serves up little disappointments and one has to be brave and take what one is given. North Johnson Road was a nothing place it turned out.It sits on the north side of the Overseas Highway just south (or west of you are going to be pedantic) of the restaurant known as Mangrove Mama's on Sugarloaf Key. I'd noticed it for years as I trudged between the restaurant and Sugarloaf School on this straight stretch of Highway One, but I never stopped to check it out.That's the thing about yielding to temptation. Sometimes the result doesn't live up to billing! I saw a winding, mysterious little lane leading off into the mangroves. What I found after 100 yards (90 meters) was a double barrelled No Trespassing sign. And a pretty little flower by way of compensation.

I did discover one thing though and this compound turns out to be......the nature Conservancy. That and three bucks will buy me a large con leche, but I never knew this was where these good people hung out. Now I do, and so do you.And in the back there was a tall house, possibly the residence protected by all the No Trespassing signs.Somebody got it into their heads that North Johnson is a real street and needed a real (and very restrictive) speed limit. I wonder what awful traffic violation was committed on this runt of a street that merited the installation of an actual speed limit?Casting around for something to photograph I saw this yellow International Jeep-like thing sitting under a palm tree all ready to go, everyone's idea of ideal Keys wheels.

And this, rather less evocative view is the maintenance yard of some utility or another, possibly the phone company I think.

And that, in summary is North Johnson Road.Not much to it really, so from now on I'll ride by and know that I'm not missing anything.

A Short Walk

It doesn't take much to turn my thoughts to my favorite author but the recent announcement of yet more Americans going off to die in Afghanistan put me in mind of A Short Walk In The Hindu Kush which was published in 1958 by the English traveler Eric Newby and it has been for a long time my favorite read. It is a book that has accompanied me around the world on my own travels and I know it from cover to cover, such that a quick dip into it at any time will restore my mood. It is a very easy read, very funny and as the novelist Evelyn Waugh famously put it, quintessentially English. The following is an extract (the complete chapter is much better of course!) from the book's final and most famous chapter when Eric Newby and his traveling companion Hugh Carless find themselves returning towards the starting point of their exploration of the wilds of Nuristan. They meet renowned explorer Wilfred Thesiger (another of my preferred travel authors, though a rather dry and austere one in this case). The Guardian newspaper's obituary for Eric newby included these pictures which I have nejoyed in my own copies of his most well known books:

Newby wrote a book about sailing to and from Australia in a square rigger in 1939, The Last Grain Race from which we see the crew of the Finnish barque in the left hand picture. The right hand picture shows the author on the slopes of Mir Samir, Afghanistan, during his travels in the Hindu Kush in 1958.

We came to cornfields and a village called Arayu, full of savage dogs and surly-looking Tajiks and mud houses like those of Egyptian fellahin. This patch of cultivation was succeeded by a mighty red-cliffed gorge where there were caves in which we sheltered from the midday sun. But not for long. The path to Parian and Shahnaiz led up out of it, high over the mountain. At the watershed we turned still more to the north, going downhill again now and into a final narrow valley where the wind threw the spray from a river in our faces. It was spray from the Parian, the Upper Panjshir. We had made it ...

'Look,' said Hugh, 'it must be Thesiger.'

Coming towards us out of the great gorge where the river thundered was a small caravan like our own. He named an English explorer, a remarkable throwback to the Victorian era, a fluent speaker of Arabic, a very brave man, who has twice crossed the Empty Quarter and, apart from a few weeks every year, has passed his entire life among primitive peoples.

We had been on the march for a month. We were all rather jaded; the horses were galled because the drivers were careless of them, and their ribs stood out because they had been in places only fit for mules and forded innumerable torrents filled with slippery rocks as big as footballs; the drivers had run out of tobacco and were pining for their wives; there was no more sugar to put in the tea, no more jam, no more cigarettes and I was reading The Hound of the Baskervilles for the third time; all of us suffered from persistent dysentery. The ecstatic sensations we had experienced at a higher altitude were beginning to wear off. It was not a particularly gay party.

Thesiger's caravan was abreast of us now, his horses lurching to a standstill on the execrable track. They were deep-loaded with great wooden presses, marked 'British Museum', and black tin trunks. The party consisted of two villainous-looking tribesmen dressed like royal mourners in long overcoats reaching to the ankles; a shivering Tajik cook, to whom some strange mutation had given bright red hair, unsuitably dressed for central Asia in crippling pointed brown shoes and natty socks supported by suspenders, but no trousers; the interpreter, a gloomy-looking middle-class Afghan in a coma of fatigue, wearing dark glasses, a double-breasted lounge suit and an American hat with stitching all over it; and Thesiger himself, a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose and bushy eyebrows, 45 years old and as hard as nails, in an old tweed jacket, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap comforter. 'Turn round,' he said, 'you'll stay the night with us. We're going to kill some chickens.'

We tried to explain that we had to get to Kabul, that we wanted our mail, but our men, who professed to understand no English but were reluctant to pass through the gorges at night, had already turned the horses and were making for the collection of miserable hovels that was the nearest village. Soon we were sitting on a carpet under some mulberry trees, surrounded by the entire population, with all Thesiger's belongings piled up behind us. 'Can't speak a word of the language,' he said cheerfully. 'Know a lot of the Koran by heart but not a word of Persian. Still, it's not really necessary. Here, you,' he shouted at the cook, who had only entered his service the day before and had never seen another Englishman. 'Make some green tea and a lot of chicken and rice - three chickens.'

'No good bothering the interpreter,' he went on, 'the poor fellow's got a sty, that's why we only did 17 miles today.'

Soon the cook was back, semaphoring desperately. 'Speak up, can't understand a thing. You want sugar? Why don't you say so?' he produced a bunch of keys, like a housekeeper in some stately home ...

'That cook's going to die,' said Thesiger; 'hasn't got a coat and look at his feet. We're 9,000 feet if we're an inch here. How high's the Chamar Pass?' We told him 16,000 feet. 'Get yourself a coat and boots, do you hear?' he shouted in the direction of the camp fire.

After two hours the chickens arrived; they were like elastic, only the rice and gravy were delicious....

'England's going to pot,' said Thesiger, as Hugh and I lay smoking the interpreter's king-size cigarettes, the first for a fortnight. 'Look at this shirt, I've only had it three years, now it's splitting. Same with tailors; Gull and Croke made me a pair of whipcord trousers to go to the Atlas Mountains. Sixteen guineas - wore a hole in them in a fortnight. Bought half a dozen shotguns to give to my headmen, well-known make, 20 guineas apiece, absolute rubbish.'

He began to tell me about his Arabs. 'I give them powders for worms and that sort of thing.' I asked him about surgery. 'I take off fingers and there's a lot of surgery to be done. They're frightened of their own doctors because they're not clean.'

'Do you do it? Cutting off fingers?'

'Hundreds of them,' he said dreamily, for it was very late. 'Lord yes. Why, the other day I took out an eye. I enjoyed that. Let's turn in.'

The ground was like iron with sharp rocks sticking up out of it. We started to blow up our air-beds. 'God, you must be a couple of pansies,' said Thesiger.

· Extracted from A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (Picador), reprinted by permission of HarperCollins. To order a copy for £7.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop

Eric Newby died in England in October 2006 at age 86. He wrote many books, perhaps none quite as crazily wonderful as A Short Walk. All of them worth a read though.

Decrepit Waddell

This essay is about a block of a street in the Casa Marina district of Key West. Casa Marina is the name given by Flagler to the hotel he built in the city as a suitable destination for his railway travelers to the Southernmost City in1912, when he brought a rail connection to the islands. Not to put too fine a point on it, Casa Marina is the upper class neighborhood in Key West, what the realtors call "desirable." Imagine my surprise when I found this block of Waddell in something less than a desirable state, quite run down actually.There were two newer buildings across the street (behind my very desirable Vespa) and one had a for sale sign in front. Perhaps they got tired of looking at decrepitude, perhaps the vicissitudes of the economy.
On this side of Waddell we have this house with the splendid brick chimney and advanced state of decay:A neighbor with a wobbly roof line:And these flowers that i thought looked pretty even if unidentifiable (by me, as usual):Then there's this picturesque apartment building showing signs of wear and tear...

...with a student-like Volkswagen which reminded me of my impecunious youth in Santa Cruz, California, plastic bags on the seats and stuffing popping out everywhere:

I did like the shabby apartment building, I thought it excessively photogenic.It reminded me a bit of apartments I've seen in Los Angeles, relics of a more prosperous past perhaps, seedy with the passage of time, yet romantic in their shabbiness. I'm not sure I'd feel that way if I had to live here.I suppose a lot would depend on the quality of the neighbors.Winter sunshine produces a lovely contrast in colors around the Keys:Let us not end our look at this unusual block of Casa Marina with decrepitude:A place to sit and sip a gin and tonic as the sun sets on another splendid day in Key West:
Key West, city of contrasts.