Inappropriate Content: August 2004

In Soviet Russia, blog reads you.

There Are Flashbacks...

As the GOP Convention opens, I thought it fitting to print the best criticism of the DNC I've heard, something Leonard Hollar came up with over at The Bar.

According to some, Kerry was set up almost perfectly by the speakers preceding him during the Dem. Convention. They had domestic policy and the economy covered like white on rice. Then Kerry got up on the stage and went into that Vietnam flashback. He's toast.

...Then There Are Flashbacks.

But let's talk the RNC. The opening night featured three notable speeches: Ron Silver, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani.

Ron Silver is a character actor; he's done nearly seventy movies I haven't seen. He also played Bruno on The West Wing and had a role on "The Stockard Channing Show." His speech:

This is a war we did not seek.

This is a war waged against us.

This is a war to which we had to respond.

History shows that we are not imperialists . . .

but we are fighters for freedom and democracy.

We will never forgive. Never forget. Never excuse!

Most of the RNC's speeches have abandoned the idea of a paragraph as "several sentences supporting a theme or idea." In fact, the idea that a single sentence can be two separate paragraphs seems to be gaining steam. Well, "sentence fragment," "paragraph," same difference.

I wonder how Guatemala in 1954 would respond to "history shows that we are not imperialists." I wonder how Jesus would respond to "Never forgive. Never forget. Never excuse!"

At the risk of being Snarky, conservatives who complain about Barbra Striesand or Martin Sheen getting involved in politics always strike me as a bit jealous that they can't get anyone more fameous than Kelsey Grammer or, well, this guy here. The Media Research Council has a long list of Richard Gere, Ted Turner, Dustin Hoffman and other actors being all leftist, then suddenly switches gears to congratulate Silver down at the bottom of the page.

On the subject of Barbra Striesand, the only effective criticism of her involvement in politics I've ever seen was John McCain doing a set of her greatest hits on SNL. "How's it feel to see me try and do your job?"

Speaking of John McCain, he too was afflicted by the sentence fragment/paragraph disease (hereafter "sif-pads").

But we must fight. We must.

The sacrifices borne in our defense are not shared equally by all Americans.

But all Americans must share a resolve to see this war through to a just end.

We must not be complacent at moments of success, and we must not despair over setbacks.

We must learn from our mistakes, improve on our successes, and vanquish this unpardonable enemy.

If we do less, we will fail the one mission no American generation has ever failed

to provide to our children a stronger, better country than the one we were blessed to inherit.

This all seemed strangely written for him. Especially the pot-shot at Micheal Moore. In fact, a couple of lines were cribbed from Barak Obama's DNC speech:

In that moment [on 9/11], we were not different races.

We were not poor or rich. We were not Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative. We were not two countries.

We were Americans.

Andrew Sullivan noted it too:

The only flaw in McCain's speech was the delivery. It was oddly flat, almost drained. McCain seemed tired.

I'm starting to fear that the only way to succeed as an American politician is to be a good actor; to deliver the speechs written for you well. (Kerry's Daily Show interview suggests he'll be good at this.)

Fortunately, my fears were allayed by Rudy Giuliani. Check out the video at CSPAN Perhaps it's my inner Woody Allen fan, but Giuliani's New Yorker anecdotes were a welcome relief from the big old capital-H patriotic Hubris tar pit that had ensnared every other speaker. Oh, for a Ron Reagan to give a speech on a specific issue.

2:24 PM 1 Comments

Monday, August 30, 2004

W&I©

(Or, why we love The Daily Show)

You'd be surprised how many people want to introduce themselves in public restrooms.

Sen. John Kerry

2:49 PM 1 Comments

Fear and Loathing of George W. Bush

Some pictures of my trip to Kentucky forthcoming. In the meantime, Reb Bacchus at The Bar recently asked:

Frankly, I haven't seen any real partisan behavior by Bush. I'm not using hyperbole here, I'm being as honest as I can. Thus from my side, to see the charges and the emotion doesn't make sense. I would consider it a tremendous favor if you could try to explain it to me.

Here's my response:

I think there are a few different things contributing to the anti-Bush fervor. I'm not talking about specific actions Bush has taken or failed to take, except to say how people feel about them (and, parenthetically, how I feel), but about the emotional reasons so many people feel alienated by a self-proclaimed non-dividing uniter.

There are two key feelings here. Number one has several contributing causes. The 2000 election fight left a bitter taste in everyone's mouth. So did the high-profile right-wingers pursing Clinton so obsessively. (This is not the place to discuss weather their zeal was justified; I'm merely pointing out that they were quite ... motivated.)

In a more general sense, I think there is quite a bit of free-floating anger at some of the socially regressive policies that have gained ascendancy in the Republican Party in the last two decades. The only thing a lot of people find more repulsive than burning the American flag is an attempt to ban same. And to the huge number of people who see little difference between "Left Behind" and "Lord of the Rings," there is a constant fear of those who would make governmental decisions based on religious beliefs. (That last one's not new, as Benedict de Spinoza's 1670 essay "Theologico-Political Treatise" demonstrates, also see Robert Ingersoll's 1890 "God in the Constitution." Or the Jefferson-penned Act for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia in 1785.)

In any case, this fear projects itself onto Bush. He is the leader of the Republicans, ergo, he must be the leader of the forces of social regressiveism. That's the first ism I've invented in months. It feels good. (The truth is just the opposite: Bush is in many ways a product of these forces. Sandy talked about self-interest as a political motivator. It's in Bush's interest to appease the social conservatives, who will reward him with what I'll call, tongue firmly in cheek, the Mel Gibson Vote.)

The second key feeling is the widespread belief that Bush has failed to respond correctly to September 11th. We all know the details, of course. People felt threatened after 9/11, felt unsafe. Emotionally, a lot of people respond to various things Bush has and hasn't done (overthrowing Saddam, failing to fund increased civil defense and border security) by projecting their feelings onto him. They feel (wrongly) that it's his fault for not protecting us on 9/11 and (rightly) that he isn't doing enough to try and protect us from future attacks.

So these two separate fears both project themselves onto the President. And a lot of people (myself included) share a concern about both issues, but regard neither as an all-consuming problem. But put them together, and you have a hatred that is hard to keep restrained by the iron jaws of logic. (For myself, I do my best, but can't help enjoying The Onion.)

2:03 PM 0 Comments

Friday, August 20, 2004

Where Am I?

Good question. As I finish up clinicals, I've been trying to figure out just what's going to happen to be between the end of the CNA program in mid-September and the start of the LPN program in January. So far, five different answers from four different people; not bad for a government buerocracy.

I'll be in Kentucky next week on an adventure I will thoroughly document on this blog. In the meantime, posting will remain light. If your starved for InappropriateContent, check out my recent posting at The Bar in the Politics forum. Some good stuff on the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy is avaliable. Such as, is it legal for them to call themselves Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth"?

10:49 PM 2 Comments

Saturday, August 14, 2004

And Now for Something Completely Different...

...politics, which is something I used to talk about a lot more.

There is a fund attempting to install a Victims of Communism Memorial in Washington, D.C. It seems a rather popular cause: Freespace gave 'em five hundred bucks, Volokh linked to that, and Alan Kors is being quoted:

No cause in the history of mankind has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than communism. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead. No one honors those dead. No one does penance for them. No one pays for them. No one is hunted down to account for them. It is exactly what Solzhenitsyn foresaw in The Gulag: “No, no one would have to answer.” Communism was not a “god that failed.” Rather, it was an intellectually organized slaughter and slavery that succeeded, but that could not sustain itself against the productivity and resistance of free men and women.

This is RO: Recieved Opinion, or something that is taken as truth simply because it is often repeated. Let us think about what he is saying. Communism, in and of itself, produces cold-blooded tyrants of the Stalin variety; communism churns out dead; communism is "intellectually organized slaughter and slavery."

It's what now? Communism is not a system of governance. Communism—communal property, everyone putting in and taking as they can and need—is an economic system like capitalism, feudalism or barter. It explains who owns what and why. Governments are not economic systems. They are systems of authority that enforce, among other things, economic systems.

Example: the government of the United States enforces capitalsim. Our police prevent theft (unless bribed), ensuring the capitalist idea of private property; our courts enforce contracts, a function of capitalism. And so forth. Now republican government like ours (republican as in representative government, not political party) can enforce a capitalist system. But there is still a distinction. It can also enforce a communist system, for example the utopian communities of the 1890's or the Kibbutzim of 1970's Israel.

Those, of course, are small-scale systems. Communism, like democracy, cannot function in a secioty larger than a small town. (That is why we have republicanism, which maintains as many of democracies positive attributes as possible and socialism, which does the same with communism.) The thing is, communism is such a good idea—better than democracy—that a number of governments have decided to try their luck and use communism on a large scale.

That was the mistake: for while republicanism can support capitalism or socialism (or, in Canada, both at once) it cannot support communism. In order to get a large number of people to combine their property, the government must be totalitarian. Hence, Stalin, Mao, Castro. But the fault does not lie with communism. While it's a bad economic system, the dead are killed by the dictators, by totalitarianism; not by the communism itself.

This is where the snappy wrap-up conclusion is supposed to go. I can't seem to think of one, so here's a picture of some rotting vegtables a homeless bum in downtown Charleston fished out of the trash and tried to sell for a dollar each. It gave people something to throw at anyone they didn't like, and it relates to communism v. capitalism, if you think about it.

4:02 PM 2 Comments

Friday, August 13, 2004

I cannot explain that sign, which is in downtown Charleston (across from the Transit Mall, near Taylor Books). I will be back to posting after clinicals end next week, and may do another Medical Ethics post this week. Stay tuned.

4:42 PM 0 Comments

Friday, August 06, 2004

Medical Ethics, Part II

Someone called in today, leaving the nursing home short staffed. Even with nurses neglecting their charting duties to help the CNA's, and housekeeping staff doing some CNA work, and six students with an extra RN to supervise them, the patient/CNA ratio was even higher than it's abysmal norm of 12:1.

I once had someone argue against universal health care by pointing out that this sort of generally inadequate care is the norm in Canada. I reply by explaining that it's the norm here, too, except America has two distinct minorities who get different treatment: the rich, who hire home health aides; and the poor, who die in homeless shelters.

The cut on my finger has been bleeding for seventy-two hours now. Not badly, but a small drip that won't stop. I may have to get it looked at.

You always check the care chart inside a resident's dresser before doing anything. It will let you know if they have a weak side, require a mechanical lift, and provide other general information. Sometimes you have to check their big 'ol chart in the nurses station before doing something. There's a surprising amount of paperwork on each resident. But to really learn about someone in the home, you ignore all the paperwork and head straight for the bulletin board above their bed. This is where the family pictures are. This is where you really figure someone out.

The more dextrous residents often have little crafts up there, often papier-meche crosses. The total assists have certificates of appreciation from the nursing home that more able residents are able to tear up with impunity. Family pictures can help you guess age. Residents in their sixties and seventies have baby portraits of grandchildren. As they approach their eighties, baby portraits are replaced with high-school yearbook photos. (These are the most fun: does resident A know her grandchild is flamingly gay? does resident B see the way the photographer hid his grand-nephews multiple eyebrow piercings?) Once residents hit their ninetieth or even hundreth birthday, baby pictures of great-grandchildren appear.

A unique picture is one resident's picture of her parents. It's from the late nineteenth century and is an authentic daguerreotype. I once saw several in the archives of the Utah Historical Secioty, doing some community service (for mandatory, not altruistic, reasons). It's really an impressive thing.

Letters from family aren't common, although one 103 year-old resident has some e-mails from her obviously with-it son in his seventies, which the staff have printed out and tacked up. And they say old people can't manage computers. While letters are rare, many residents have cards—happy birthday cards, christmas cards, thinking-of-you cars. There is a sort of rule here: the more cards a resident gets, the less their family visits.

11:17 PM 1 Comments

Thursday, August 05, 2004

Medical Ethics, Part I

On Monday, I started clincials. To become a Certified Nurses' Aide, you're required to spend seventy hours working in a nursing home, so Job Corps students spend three weeks pulling six hour shifts daily. Clinicals. This is when most students who wash out quit.

So I've been working at a West Virginia nursing home for several days now. And there is no element of the job I can't handle. Yeah, it's a shitty job——literally. But I can handle changing a couple of pairs of appends a day. Most of the work is far more boring. A lot of residents require assistance eating, and that's a very time-consuming duty. But I can handle it. Then there's charting intake and output. Trying to figure out how many CCs of coffee a given resident drank during breakfast. That part's easy.

The most difficult part is not the charting, or the heavy lifting, or even the diaper-changing. Simply trying to communicate with someone who can no longer function on their own is incredibly emotionally taxing. Call it Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, senility, whatever. The residents are no longer in sync with reality. Several of them bear striking resemblance to my parents, aunts, teachers; a similarity that seems to grow the more I realize how far gone they are.

But I can handle that, too.

Individually, each element of the job is something I can handle, most of them with relative ease. The problem comes as the stresses accumulate. I work a short six hour shift, and we generally spend only four and a half of that working. There's five of us working two or three patients a day. It's an incredibly light workload, especially considering that at this low-end facility the resident/CNA ratio is often 12 to one or higher. Yet I still return to the center exhausted and worn. I have no idea how I'll be able to survive twelve hour shifts with four or five times the number of residents I have now and little support.

My most charming resident is an 87-year-old woman still in near-perfect cognitive condition. She's up when I arrive and ready to talk my socks off. She loves to tell me tales of her twenty-odd years as a medical aide. She spent much of her time in a maternity ward of a now-closed Charleston hospital, and probably delivered some of my classmates. She still cares about other people the way everyone in the medical field should. She helps keep an eye on her roommate, an extremely deteriorated woman with a tube feed who requires a mechanical lift to move her from bed to wheelchair.

Physically, the former medical aide isn't as unscarred as she is mentally. She's had multiple back surgeries, a direct result of chronic deterioration caused by her work. (Apparently medicine is horrible for your back. My father has back problems for the same reasons.)

This job takes so much out of my I find it hard to string together coherent thoughts, now. I jump back and forth from one thing to another, and can't really see an overall point as I reread what I've been working on. Was Kerouac a medical aide?

I cut my finger pretty badly the day before yesterday. A small cut, not even an inch across, but an avulsion, which means I tore some of the tissue, partially detatching it. The cut took over thirty-six hours to heal, and because of the nature of CNA work, I had to wear a bulky dressing and gloves for even routine tasks.

Things outside the nursing home seem less important now. I got signed up to volunteer at a multicultural festival this weekend. (For Utahns, think the Living Traditions festival, only not as good.) Normally I'd be excited as hell about it. But it's not really grabbing me.

I had a significant quantity of cash stolen out of my dresser yesterday. It's a huge problem, financially. I mean, huge——I'm screwed. Normally I wouldn't let money problems ruin my life, but I can barely muster the concern to try and get things fixed.

My greatest fear is that I'll let this take over my artistic ambitions. The whole point of being here was to earn enough money to put myself through film school. I'm still working on two screenplays, but as I've mentioned, my writing is suffering because of this. I just got several rolls of film printed (and will eventually be getting more from relatives in Boston who are operating on Riley time) but can't muster up the enthusiasm to get prints made of the better shots. Of course, with my cash gone, I can't afford it either, but still...

I try to call a few of the people I rely on for emotionally support (you know who you are) but can't get through to anyone this week (hint, hint, you bastards). That's why I'm trying to work through this stuff here, online. I do normally despise angst-y blogging, but in this case it's probably justified.

All things in moderation, though, and this entry is too long by half. I will bid you adeiu...

9:14 PM 1 Comments