quote | Auden

When asked what my favorite quote was, this is what I came up with:

For given Man, by birth, by education,
Imago Dei who forgot his station,
The self-made creature who himself unmakes,
The only creature ever made who fakes,
With no more nature in his loving smile
Than in his theories of a natural style,
What but tall tales,the luck of verbal playing,
Can trick his lying nature into saying
That love, or truth in any serious sense,
Like orthodoxy, is a reticence?

--W.H. Auden, From "The Truest Poetry is the Most Feigning"

link | Reforming Our Health System

When it comes to our broken health care system, I blame you, well, I blame us. In short, only a nationalized health care system will work. Until we demand it, our system will remain broken. Shame on Republicans for scaring people! Rhetorically, this happens in two ways. First, there's the specter of Canada/UK, etc. I've used both health systems. They're not bad. If there are drawbacks, it is a function of the amount money put into their systems not the system itself. You could change those systems by, for example, doubling, say, the UK's per capita expenditure and still have significantly less than our current expenditure on health care. Second, there's the specter of government. The line generally goes, "you don't want the government making medical choices for you, do you?" No one asks the question, "do you want for-profit companies, who make more money by denying care than providing it, making your medical choices for you?" Still, neither presidential candidate's health care plan goes far enough -- really, it was Clinton who had the best plan. Obama's plan is only slightly better than McCain's.

"The McCain plan is a recipe for shrinking coverage. The individual insurance market is notoriously treacherous and the amount of the tax credits is nowhere near enough to purchase even a high deductible policy. Furthermore, the tax-exempt health savings accounts would not be of much help to poor or even middle-class people since they aren't much motivated by tax breaks and don't have discretionary money to put aside in the health savings accounts anyway."

From: Reforming Our Health System: Why Neither Candidate Has the Answer, a lecture given at Princeton University by Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. In her lecture, Angell explores why -- despite higher and spiraling per-capita costs -- the American system provides fewer basic health services than many other advanced nations. She proposes fundamental changes that would make universal health care at sustainable cost a real possibility. It's worth a listen.

[AYT][Theology][Politics][McCain][Health]

film | Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising

I watched Michael Moore's latest film Slacker Uprising two nights ago. I don't always like Moore's films; actually it'd be more accurate to say that I rarely love Moore's films. He's been good for documentary films in terms of exposure (though perhaps less so in terms of form), but I always leave feeling clubbed over the head with a message that tends to lack nuance (even if I tend to agree). Of course, he often sees himself presenting the other side of a story, leaning into an entrenched message, so I can understand why his films feel that way. I can see some taking Slacker Uprising as an homage to Moore himself, but I found it easier to connect to this film than some of his other films. The film follows Moore on his 2004 cross-country tour to get Kerry elected president. The result of Moore's message and presence in front of the camera is a greater sense of sincerity and transparency in the film. There's a delightful scene where a Catholic group starts chanting the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary during one of Moore's rallies. Moore finishes saying it with them and then reminds them how frequently Scripture talks about the poor.

[By the way, I hate abortion, both as a practice and an issue. To be clear, no one is pro-abortion as such. I hate that it has become a litmus test among conservative Catholics and Protestants about whether a candidate is in line with their so-called "values". Republicans would rather support a war-centered hawk, who doesn't seem to see military spending and deployment as oppression of the poor in our country and the creation of poverty abroad, and an incompetent running mate, than sacrifice perceived pro-life purity. I don't say the following to say that thinking about abortion is of little value, yet while there were well under a million abortions in the US in 2006 (a number that continues to fall), there were at the same time (according to the USDA) 35.5 million people living in US households considered to be food insecure. Further, the reason given for a quarter of abortions is poverty. Whether or not one supports a "culture of life" cannot be determined by a single issue. One would also want to attend to positions on war (those dead related to our dishonest experiment in regime change in Iraq is well over a half a million people), heath care (the US currently has the most expensive health care of any OECD country and also has the highest percentage of costs paid privately, yet has some of the worst health statistics among so-called developed countries), income disparity, poverty assistance and reduction, budget allocation, capital punishment, economics, job creation, etc. It is to the credit of Republican strategists over the last 25 years that they've co-opted the Christian imagination of so many to make them focus on one issue. Forgive the rant, but come on people...anyway, back to the film...]

Another enjoyable moment was Joan Baez singing "Finlandia" [Tune: Jean Sibelius; Lyrics: Lloyd Stone]:

This is my song, O God of all the nations,
a song of peace for lands afar and mine;
this is my home, the country where my heart is;
here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine:
but other hearts in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country's skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine;
but other lands have sunlight too, and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine:
O hear my song, thou God of all the nations,
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

It's probably not the best film you or I will see this year but I did enjoy and would recommend it. Also, it is one of the cheaper films you'll see. You can stream/download it for free. See their website, iTunes, or YouTube.

[AYT][Theology][Politics][Film][Moore]

update | Stay Tuned

...I've been busy writing my dissertation, but I'll post a couple of posts that never made it past the draft phase from last year. Stay tuned.