SUBVERSIVES: The FBI’s WAR on STUDENT RADICALS and REAGAN’S RISE TO POWER, by Seth Rosenfeld

I am reading SUBVERSIVES, the book it took Mr. Rosenfeld over 30 years to research and write. He recently won the 2013 PEN Literary Award for Research Nonfiction. As a member of PEN, I attended the ceremony that honored Mr. Rosenfeld along with all the other PEN Literary Award winners. I listened to him speak and afterward his was the first book I chose to read out of the “winners’ book bag” (the “book bag” being another story altogether). Mr. Rosenfeld’s book is proving to be an excellent first choice. Through his determination and dogged research he is illuminating one of the most tumultuous and important times in the history of the United States. I cannot put it down.

“EMA”

by DHC

copyright 10/17/2013.

(Post swim - The tyranny of the Tea Party and their “Speaker” Boehner)

1. I had a conversation this afternoon with a family member who lives in the beautiful state of North Carolina. North Carolina is one of the many states that chose to “opt out” of the ObamaCare Exchanges which means that unlike California where I live, North Carolinians must now purchase private health insurance without any assistance from the government which also means that rates will increase for baby boomers and older people because Blue Cross has a monopoly on health care in North Carolina. Rates for younger people will decrease, for now.

1A. Before some of you readers of mine bust a gut and envision strangling me with a blood pressure cuff, remember this: North Carolina, like the other states that “opted out,” did this because they assume North Carolinians are too stupid to figure out that “opting out” is a ruse designed to make North Carolinians rebel against ObamaCare and thus destroy it. AND, the question I always ask but no pundit or politician (sometimes both) never ask the Tea Partiers is: who is paying for health care now, pre-ObamaCare, for the uninsured who seek medical treatment in Emergency Rooms and in Urgent Care Centers and in inner city Clinics? The answer: We the taxpayers, and the hospitals and clinics and doctors who treat countless numbers of patients on a daily basis across the country who cannot afford to pay.

2. One of the top 3 reasons for filing bankruptcy in this country is due to catastrophic illness that strikes both the uninsured and the insured. And who pays for that? We, the taxpayers, in higher premiums.

I am an American.

I was born in Virginia to generations of proud Virginians on my mother’s side and on my father’s side to his eager parents who immigrated from Scotland to Canada, where my father was born, and then to California where my father was raised. Both sides of my family love this country, it has been good to us and we have been good to it, to America. Now, my country, the one I inherited from my people, is consuming itself like a flesh eating disease and I am sickened and saddened and furious about the reality show that has become our government.

It is not funny. The pundits all seem to think it is because it is reality television at its most dispiriting. It is all about the ratings.

Who is winning, they smirk? Who is losing, they opine?

For God’s sake.

The losers are the American people, our way of life, our existence.

Who is winning? Every nation who hates us, every individual enemy we have around the globe. They are winning.

Don’t think so? Hide and watch.

The Tea Party believes, as does our Supreme Court, that corporations are people. I can tell you this, not one of these petty Tea Party obstructionists would last a day if they were employed by “anyone” else than the government, the government they are destroying.

(to be continued after I take a swim)

The baby boomers have a firm hold on the Emmy Awards, as evidenced by tonight’s telecast. Failure on your part to prepare for the next two (2) decades of televised Emmys is at your own peril.

The baby boomers in Hollywood, I am one, will seize large chunks of the live show during the upcoming years so they can praise every creative baby boomer ever born with a career in television - from birth to death - death being the centerpiece of tonight’s Emmys. Television royalty die at an alarming rate it seems, I have heard up to several thousand per day, so forgive the Academy as it searches for footing in the parsing and praising of the dead talent and as it searches for new terrain on which to honor the talent, up to and including mini-funerals performed on stage, if tonight is any indication.

Me, I’d rather they show old clips of the dead performer than have a weepy living performer telling us about the dead performer which is really, let’s face it, not about the dead performer at all. It is about the effect the dead performer had on the living performer. From birth to present time. From birth to Emmy telecast. From laughter to tears.

From audition to getting the part.

11:02 p.m. PDT.

Graduate student, Heather, commenting on seventy-year-old writer, Arthur Schiller, about whom she is writing her thesis:

~~ The people she admired in his books were people who walked away from the lives that other people expected them to live - Ellen in his first novel, the bohemian painters in his second. He had dwelled - in those early books, at least - on the glory of choosing your own life, even when it takes ruthlessness to do it.

But now it occurred to her that he had only written about the beginning of the journey. He had never shown the consequences of the choice - never shown what happened to these people ten and twenty and thirty years down the line. And she felt that she was seeing the consequences , every day, in what she was seeing of him.

You seize your freedom in a spirit of rebelliousness, exuberance, defiant joy. But to live that choice - over the weeks and months and years to come - requires different qualities. It requires that you turn hard, turn rigid. Because it isn’t a choice that the world encourages, you have to wear a suit of armor to defend it ~~

I keep searching for dramatic and important things to say about the defeat of DOMA by the Supreme Court. Lo these many weeks later I find I have nothing profound or even interesting to say.

It was a right given back to me

that had been taken away

for no other reason

than discriminatory politics.

Maybe that’s why. The ruling makes sense. Means no more, means no less.

It makes sense.

He got it. 

Mayor Filner deserves due process and from what I hear he is about to get it. 

I’m still pondering this historical Supreme Court decision.  Please stay tuned for my reaction.