David Brooks invites us to turn off the TV (or turn off the iPhone, the Wii, the iPod, YouTube, &c.) in order to read a long-form published essay, in his annual Sidney Awards.

Among the topics healthcare leads the list, but also American (in)justice, local DC politics (in the person of Marion Barry) and Afghanistan.

Here is the health-care reform agenda of Republican politicians and the right-wingnuts (pundits and conspiracy theorist deadenders) who constitute the aptly-named Republican “base”:

Defeat Obama.

That’s it. It’s just that simple.

No innovative health policy. No creative health proposal. Just a political calculation: Defeat Obama on this big one, and he becomes a lame duck. Then try to make political hay in the 2010 midterm elections.

The Republicans and their right-wingnuts are not interested in your health. The Republicans and their right-wingnuts are not interested in you if you are one of the 45 million Americans who are uninsured. The Republicans and their right-wingnuts are not interested in you if you are a physician or advanced practice nurse struggling to provide care to patients. The Republicans and their right-wingnuts are not interested in you if you are a business, corporation or industry struggling with health insurance benefit costs.

Republinuts just want to defeat Obama . . . by any means necessary.

Too Fast, Too Soon!

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority Leader of the Senate and master of anal retention, intones that there is no need for haste. Foot dragging Republicans have been hard at work on this issue for sixty years, since President Harry S. Truman called on the Democratic Party to lead the cause for public health care. I was present in the Senate chamber on the night in 1960 when Republican vice president Richard M. Nixon, president of the Senate, cast the tie breaking vote to send an early Medicare bill to defeat. (After the vote I nearly got knocked over by Lyndon Baines Johnson, Democratic Senate majority leader, as he charged down a Senate hallway, livid that he was unable to secure the votes for passage.) The time is now.

I Don’t Want to Lose What I Have!

Right-wingnuts operate in a zero-sum world. Extending rights to others somehow, in their strange political economy, entails taking away rights from themselves. Thus, for example, acknowledging the equality of gay people and relationships somehow undermines straights’ rights. And now health care reform: If we provide healthcare for the uninsured, then we’ll lose what we have. Let me explain this simply: By doing nothing you will lose what you have. In fact, unless you are the rare employee with outstanding health insurance, like a member of Congress, today you have already lost what you had ten or twenty years ago.

Government Rationing!

Republinuts’ fear mongering also includes the threat that health care reform will entail “rationing of health resources.” Let me explain this simply: Health care is already rationed. Your access to health care is rationed by your insurance company, if you’re insured. Your access to health care is rationed by your ability to pay out of pocket. Your access to health care is rationed if you are a member of the armed services or access health care through the VA, Medicare, or Medicaid. Unless you are a wealthy or are a member of Congress, your health care is already rationed.

Socialist Medicine!

When Republinuts start huffing and puffing about “socialized medicine” in those socialist countries like France, England, Holland, or Canada, you know that the debate is about politics, not about health care. Employing the tyranny of the anecdote, Republinuts will relate some horror story about a sick Canadian who died because of unconscionable delays in treatment. Ironically, the future of American global capitalism depends on national health care reform as American corporations are less able to compete with global companies in the industrialized world where most countries ensure that employers are not saddled with providing health benefits. Let’s look at the numbers. Last year the Gallop organization surveyed citizens in several countries asking if they had confidence in their health care or medical systems.

73% of Canadians answered in the affirmative.

73% of Brits answered in the affirmative.

Despite the fact that Americans spend much more per person on health care than the Brits or Canadians, only 56% of Americans answered in the affirmative.

A friend of mine, who has recently accepted the presidency of a college, writes me asking, What do faculty want in a president?

What faculty want in a president is . . .

–Someone who sees, acknowledges, embraces, and celebrates the best within the culture and history of the college, and who is willing to nurture that.
–Someone who remembers that presidents come and go (with astonishing frequency and rapidity), but faculty remain (or endure). It is more their college than yours, so don’t think you can remake it in your image and likeness.
–Someone who is presidential (i.e. presents the public face of the college in a way that they can be proud of) but who still has the common touch (i.e. who is not imperious). A president of my acquaintance, for example, insists on being addressed as “Dr. ____” even by his vice presidents in cabinet meetings.
–Someone who knows their names and knows what they do.
–Someone who manages by wandering around (rather than wandering by managing around), who regularly walks the campus, who walks down hallways and pokes his nose in offices.
–Someone who makes modest promises and delivers extravagant results (not the other way around).
–Someone who doesn’t have to have all the answers, who can admit when he or she has made a mistake.
–Someone who demonstrates a tireless commitment to the faculty and to the college (rather than a tiresome commitment to his or her own career). I admire ambition, but personal ambition is secondary. A president should be a steward rather than an opportunist.
–Someone who sweats the small stuff, extends the common courtesies, attends to the thoughtful personal communication. A president of my acquaintance, for example, never extends the courtesy of acknowledging receipt of invitations to campus events, much less of responding to them whether or not he can attend. Never say, “I’ll try to be there”; either you will be there or you will not be there, and if you can’t be there, explain why you can’t.
–Someone who is more like a pastor than like a manager, and who is, following the biblical injunction, “strong, loving, and wise” (2 Timothy 1).
–Someone who understands that being a president is an opportunity to give back to academia all that you have received from it.
–Someone who has the courage to ask faculty for a frank assessment of how he or she is doing, and then has the heroism to listen and to modify behavior accordingly.
–Someone who hasn’t forgotten the lessons of kindergarten: Tell the truth, share, play well with others.”

There may not be “out” gays in the military, but there appear to be Queer Eyes among Air Force officers.

An article by R. Jeffrey Smith in The Washington Postreveals that top brass among Fly Boys have lobbied Congress to spend counter-terrorism funds for “comfort capsules” (and we’re not talking about Qualudes, girl friend), modular suites that can be installed inside the fuselages of AF aircraft that include comfortable reclining chairs, beds, couches, stereo, full-length mirror (I guess to practice voguing or throwing shade) and flat-panel media devices.

According to Smith, “at least four top generals [were] involved in design details such as the color of the capsules’ carpet and leather chairs.”

Smith reports: “One request was that the color of the leather for the seats and seat belts in the mobile pallets be changed from brown to Air Force blue and that seat pockets be added; another was that the color of the table’s wood be darkened.” The seat color change is reported to have cost nearly $70,000. As everyone knows, you can’t have brown leather with a blue uniform. Or as St. Oscar might have said, Either that leather goes or I go.

Over all, the Air Force has tried to divert over $16 million for this upgrade to first class.

And you can sleep more soundly at night knowing that the top brass are tanned, rested and ready for action. This is, of course, the same Air Force that can’t keep track of its nuclear weapons.

Please thank the folks at the not-for-profit Project on Government Oversight for digging and dishing.

The week that Eliot Spitzer came clean (pun intended) about his creative financing of sessions with a high-end sex worker, my students in the second semester of a survey of world literature course were looking at Freud’s account of his patient “Dora.”

I’ve configured the world lit course as an exploration (I just typed and corrected “sexploration”) of modernity, so we discuss Freud as an instance of what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” a critical analysis that takes nothing at face value (see also Marx, Nietzche). And I situate Freud in a long Western tradition of critical suspicion going back to Plato. For me Freud is a kind of ne0-Platonist who proposes that, instead of your being saved by a philosopher who shows you that the shadows on the wall of the cave are not real, you are saved from the psychic unreal by the psychoanalyst (who guides you out of the cave of your neuroses).

I used Spitzer as an exemplar of the conflicting desires and the competing parts of the Self posited by Freud. Spitzer’s Super-Ego losing control over his Id. But Spitzer is also exemplary of that Freudian concept of “reaction formation”: Methinks the laddy doth protest too much. We most vigorously and publicly condemn those messy recesses of our own secret selves. So it doesn’t surprise me to see in today’s New York Times, a headline reading “A Leader Recalled as Focused but Unable to Bend.” What did we expect from a crusader on behalf of financial and sexual rectitude?

Sometimes there’s little difference between being rigid and being turgid.

The trick is not to let the hermeneutics of suspicion descend into cynicism.

This week we learned that the well respected and beloved (though controversial) president of the College of William and Mary, Gene Nichol, would not have his contract renewed by the Board of Visitors (headed by the college’s rector, the refried Bush administrator Michael K. Powell [son of the Good Soldier and former Bush Secretary of State who helped get us into the Iraqi cesspit, Colin Powell]). The controversy around Nichol’s presidency had been brewing for some time. Last October I wrote to Michael Powell in support of Nichol. Here is the text of that letter.

Mr. Powell:

As a citizen in the regional community and as a member of the community of higher education professionals in Virginia, I am taking advantage of what the (Norfolk) Virginian-Pilot has characterized as your and the board’s desire for comment on the presidency of Gene Nichol. 

The mob has gathered to depose Mr. Nichol, a mob comprised of the “usual suspects” of religio-political ideologues and moneyed interests who are engaged in the kind of bullying that often works in church congregations to keep a pastor in line. Mr. Nichol appears guilty of two things: 1) Having reminded us that, regardless of its historical origins, the College of William & Mary is not a subsidiary of the Church of England or of the Country Club at Prayer, and the Wren Building (with its chapel) is not a museum property managed by English Heritage, but is a public space of a public (and therefore secular) higher education institution; and 2) Having unilaterally decided to remove a brass cross that had been placed in the chapel a few decades ago.

Permit me to point out regarding the second issue that this imbroglio should remind faculty, administrators, and board members of the importance of the principles of shared governance as articulated by the American Association of University Professors, principles that protect the participation of all parties in a college community. Mr. Nichol initially acted unilaterally but not in bad faith.

I have watched Mr. Nichol with admiration and gratitude. His passion for the College of William & Mary is evident, and he is an articulate representative for all that it values. In the higher education world where presidents usually view themselves as CEOs who stay for a few years before moving on to the Next Big Career Thing, Mr. Nichol gives every sign that he loves the College of William & Mary and would complete his distinguished career there. Finally, those of us among your poor relations in the community colleges have been grateful for his advocacy of transfer agreements allowing the best and brightest among our students to be admitted. I have sent a dozen or so students to William & Mary in recent years.

I hope that the board will see through the crass and cynical political bullying that seeks to remove Mr. Nichol and will renew itself to the principles of shared governance.