The Rake Magazine

There are a few gaps in our health coverage.

I went to the dentist this morning for my semi-annual cleaning and check up. Sometimes I go 8 or 9 months between, mostly because of my schedule and his. But I always go eventually, and sooner, rather than later. I'm glad I can afford it.

I had a quack dentist when I was a kid, and he made things a lot worse for me in my middle age. Luckily, the dentist I have now is excellent, although not cheap. I estimate it's cost me about $20,000 over the last 15 years to repair the damage wrought by too many sweet cereals and that earlier charlatan.

Just last night I was reading the latest New Yorker. Among the dearth of Target ads this week was a story by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite New Yorker writers, and the author of The Tipping Point and this year's Blink.

The story starts with a clinical, albeit horrid, description of the beginning of tooth decay, they segues into a description of our health care system in the United States. Gladwell does a particularly good job of scrubbing away the faulty logic that those who would keep things as they are use to maintain their advantage.

Read it. Then floss. Then think about the sort of country we live in where the executive of the local health care giant makes over $100 million per year, and over 40 million Americans have no chance to protect themselves from physical and financial ruin under our current system.

The brush and floss again to see if you can get the taste out of your mouth.

THIS is football

Everyone who's got a brain, and there are damn few of us left, is not even that upset about Pat Robertson's calling for the assasination of Hugo Chavez. That sort of boorish behavior by Americans is pretty old news, after all.

In case you haven't been paying attention, Robertson and his ilk are all for the revival of that odd mixture of overt theocrats and covert murderers who once dominated Latin American politics.

Yup, let's overthrow the legally elected government of Venezuela. After all, it worked so well for us in Chile. (Remember Pinochet? He's the one now being tried for crimes against humanity.) And how about El Salvador, where our boys murdered Bishop Romero while he was saying mass, raped and murdered a van full of American nuns, and dragged 12 Jesuit priests out of their beds one morning and shot them all in the head? All that in the name of putting a stop to godless Communism (today, read godless Islam.)

Of course, most of the victims were Catholic Christians, instead of the good ol' American Evangelical Christians, so they probably had done something to deserve it, such as speaking out against the army's murdering of the campesinos...or, even teaching them to read.

But, I didn't want to belabor this. What I did want to belabor is something I read about in the Sunday Strib sports section. This was a story about the assault of some American pro football players who pissed off the wrong Germans.

It seems a bunch of American football players went into a Dusseldorf club, didn't receive the adulation they are used to getting on First Avenue, spit on a bouncer, and left. To nobody's surprise, except the Americans', the Germans didn't like this much and responded with clubs and various other weapons.

Duh.

I've spent some time in Germany. I've lived in Italy and Spain. And, if there's one thing I've learned for certain, it's that 98 percent of all American tourists walk around these countries as if they owned them. Most make no attempt to speak the language at all, not even to the point of learning that beer is cerveza and wine is vino. Or that please is por favor, per favore, or bitte. Not that hard.

But, we're used to being the big dogs with the dollars. It hasn't sunk in yet that the Euro is galloping ahead of the dollar in value every day. This, thanks to our government's assumption that we're too big to actually pay our own way in the world and that everyone else will gladly lend us the money we're too decadent to tax ourselves to pay for the Iraq war. When we act like the big shots we think we are, the home towners somehow resent that Americans don't even seem to acknowledge that they aren't in Kansas any more.

In contrast, I've never been treated rudely in a foreign country. (Well, almost never. I have been to Paris.) But I can order beer in five languages and can carry on a conversation about football (the kind you actually play with your feet) in two and a half.

Strangely, people seem to respond nicely when you are making an effort to understand them, instead of getting pissed off when they don't undertand you.

When you call yourself football players, or call for killing their president, they somehow find that rude. Go figure.

The right to bare arms...and more

I was sitting around with a few wags yesterday and we were talking about the problems the Iraqis (if there is such a thing--as opposed to Sunni, or Shiite or Kurd, that is) were having in getting some agreement on a constitution. Aside from the squabbles over oil revenues and autonomy of regions which make the differences in 1787 between Virginia and Massachusetts seem...dare I say...tame by comparison, there's the sticky problem of Islam, and all the implications for dress codes, tonsorial customs and which way is east conundrums.

So we took a look at our own Bill of Rights and offered the following hints for articles they could adapt:

Article 1: Freedom of religion. It's alright to kill anyone who doesn't like my brand of Islam. Christians and Jews, you better take off now.

Article 2: The Right to Bare Arms: Women north of Baghdad get to wear sleeveless dresses. Women south of Baghdad get to wear sleeveless dresses only if they have no arms, which we can arrange.

Article 3: No soldiers in your house. Soldiers destroying your house, that's ok.

Article 4: No unreasonable search and seizure, unless it's a world power looking for weapons we don't have.

Article 5: No one shall be forced to testify against himself after we rip out his tongue for blasphemy.

Article 6: You have the right to a speedy trial, after we hold you in Guantanamo for as long as we damn well please.

Article 7: You can sue anyone you like for any amount over 20 dollars, or blow him up with a car bomb, whichever is more convenient.

Article 8: No cruel or unusual punishment, unless we think the pictures are funny.

Article 9 and 10: Anything else you can think of, but if it ain't in the Koran, forget about it.

Since this is sort of the way things are running over there now, we figured they should have no trouble agreeing. And, once this constitution is in force, Bush will have his exit strategy. I say we give them all the encouragement we can to adopt our suggestions so we can get the hell out of there.

The news that counts

Barcelona, Spain

One of the things about being out of the country for a week is you see how the other half lives without the constant bombardment of propaganda from our government. (They have their own to BS them, of course.)

There has been the news of Britain's crack down on Muslim extremists, and the Iranians saying "You must be on crack" when the nuclear powers threaten them over their nuclear program. But so far, a glorious absence from the Spanish papers of George Bush.

Imagine the bliss of living over here and not having your papers full of his crap every day.

I did make the mistake of picking up the International Herald Tribune yesterday, though. (I just wanted some baseball scores, which I could have had on the internet, but there is some tactile pleasure of seeing box scores in print.) But there to spoil my day, was Bush on the front page (no picture, thank God) but just a quote about Iran.

The one paragraph story was about his comments, evidently delivered after he'd leveled some more brush at the ranch, that "all options were on the table" regarding Iran, "including force."

He continued, "But force is always a president's last option."

Is this guy so stupid? Ok, don't answer that. First, does he think anyone believes that he isn't willing to use force at the drop of a falsified intelligence briefing? And second, does he not know why Iran wants nuclear weapons? Maybe the same reason why Saddam wishes he'd had them--so they can protect themselves from Bush?

If there's anything that should be clear, it's that Bush's attack of Iraq has made every other country in the world eager to join the nuclear club. In the opinion of every other country in the world, it's Bush who's brought the world to this, not Iran.

Now, back to the soccer scores. Barcelona 3, Betis 0.

I was just thinking we haven't had a good excommunication since Galileo

The only reliable bit about the Star Tribune, other than Katherine Kersten will provide some laughs to anyone who can think, is the cartoons of editorial cartoonist Steve Sack. This guy has gone too long without a Pulitzer prize.

Today's cartoon does the best job of sending up the "intelligent design" idiots I've seen in a long time.

My favorite columnist Paul Krugman follows on in today's NY Times. Krugman makes some great points: that the purveyers of the pseudo science of "intelligent design" are motivated by the same goals as the "economists" who have given us Supply Side Economics. Those guys, along with the conservative-funded think tanks who claim that global warming is a myth, are just two sides of the same coin.

And what's on the faces of that coin? Greed and political gain, baby. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Intellectual honesty is under constant attack, and the bad guys are winning. Pretty soon, we won't even have to have peer reviewed science experiments or economists with actual data to tell us what's what in the world.

Never mind the university libraries full of all those stuffy academic journals, all we'll need is a subsciption to the Wall Street Journal.

It will be the the repository for the best science all those coins can buy.