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Rick Telander on American Football (and its Dark Side)

Image by Rajiv Patel (Rajiv’s View) on Flickr

It’s America’s favourite sport – at its best, a wonderful, thrilling spectacle; at its worst, legitimised violence exacting a terrible price on players. The Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter takes us inside the game’s dark heart

Last year’s Super Bowl netted nearly 163 million viewers. Has football taken the place of baseball as America’s favourite pastime?

There’s no question. The interest is greater and the sport fits the personality of the United States better than the lazy pastoral aspect of baseball. TV has embraced the brutal elegance of football. The replay and slow motion effects make the game mesmerising to watch. So I’d say, “Absolutely!” It’s replaced every other sport as America’s favourite pastime – soccer never came close; boxing used to be a big deal, and basketball remains important, but it’s nothing like football.

You played college football and you’ve written about the sport for nearly 40 years. How, specifically, does the sport suit the personality of the United States?

Football entails being aggressive, being independent and taking what you want within the rules. The United States was formed by intrepid individuals who came to stake a claim. They didn’t wait for a land grant. And, like football, there’s a lot of violence in the United States. We have more guns than anywhere in the world and a huge part of the reason why is that we don’t want to be controllable, certainly not by government. Americans like to live right up to the edge of our laws. It’s the same with football – a lot of violence is within every person on the field, playing up to the edge of the rules.

In football, beauty, violence and sex are mixed. The game is beautiful to watch in replay – there is violence in almost every play and then they cut to half-naked dancing girls shaking pom-poms. It’s a uniquely American television spectacle.

Some of our readers won’t be initiated in the pleasures of football – can you just brief us on them? What is the essence of the game, what makes it so interesting to so many people?

It’s all about aggression – that’s the essence of football. If there were no rules these guys would just kill each other. Two teams face each other on the line of scrimmage and try to move into their opponents’ territory. It’s like a battlefront – trench warfare without weapons. All the rules – offside, penalties, motion rules and passing rules – make it complex but the essence of it is very simple: We’re going to go as far as we can toward a goal and you’re trying to stop us. It’s about taking the ball or territory however it has to be done and making it yours as you move up and down the field. In soccer and hockey the line of scrimmage is less precise. In football you can score at any time, through an interception or fumble. I don’t think there’s another sport like it.

American football has been compared to chess on a playing field. Please clarify the comparison.

Chess is a board game, but it’s clearly one of aggression like football. Dumb aggression doesn’t work in chess and it doesn’t work in football. In chess many moves invite mistakes from opponents and in football many plays are based on anticipating an overly aggressive response from the other team. In both the game and the sport, you plot 10 plays ahead and wait for one false move to open up a king for checkmate or the field for a deep long pass. In both games you’re always looking to take someone out, whether it’s your opponent’s knight or your opposing team’s running back. They are extremely analogous, except in football the violence is real and in chess it’s make-believe.

I’m looking forward to learning more as we discuss your five book selections. A college coach’s story seems like a good place to start. Introduce us to Bootlegger’s Boy, a memoir by Barry Switzer.

I covered college football during the 1970s, 80s and into the 90s, so I knew Barry Switzer, the legendary coach of the Oklahoma Sooners, quite well. He was a unique one and Bootlegger’s Boy is the unbelievable true story of his upbringing and triumphs on the field. It’s great reading.

As the title says, Switzer was the son of a bootlegger. His dad would occasionally fire a pistol through the ceiling, Barry’s mom shot him and he died in a car crash. Barry had as awful an upbringing as anyone could have and yet he ended up running the number one college football team in the country.

He always believed if he got the best players he could win and propriety be damned. He found kids who wouldn’t get a chance at another school and led them to play to the limit of their potential. He had a quarterback named Charles Thompson, back in the eighties when they were number one, a little guy, whom Switzer had first seen breakdancing on a piece of cardboard at a car dealership in Lawton, Oklahoma. This kid becomes his starting quarterback as a freshman and led the Sooners to a great record but ended up being arrested, indicted and found guilty of distributing cocaine. Switzer found a lot of kids like Charles Thompson who wouldn’t get a chance at some other college. As he said, “the magic was in the players”.

College football is big business in the US. The games are televised nationally, the athletes become celebrities and the merchandise is marketed as professionally as in the NFL. You played for the Northwestern Wildcats in college, a Big Ten team. Switzer’s Sooners were also Big Ten. What exactly is the Big Ten and how important are university football programmes to the sport overall?

It’s a peculiar part of the American system that big money athletics are part of universities. Spectator sports are tied into university life in a way they aren’t in Asia, Europe or South America. They see the Big Ten as bizarre and they’re right. University should be about higher education, yet sports can produce a lot of revenue for an American college. It’s part of our tradition here – it probably shouldn’t be, but it is.

The Big Ten is a 115-year-old, 12-school intercollegiate conference that embraces big land-grant state schools in the Midwest – including Indiana, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – and has a big academic aspect to it, but it’s synonymous with Division 1 sports.

Let’s turn to the memoir of a college player turned pro-linebacker for the Saint Louis Cardinals. It was called “the first critical look at the dehumanising aspects” of the sport. Tell us about David Meggyesy and Out of Their League.

When I was a kid I remembered Dave Meggyesy playing. In the United States – when I was growing up and to this day – kids are sold on the notion that sports stars are heroes, coaches are father figures and on the sports field the best man wins, good overcomes bad. There’s this Disney-like idea that if somebody wins, they must be a good person. In his book, which was published in 1971, Dave Meggyesy shatters those myths. He writes about the brutality of the game and the cruelty of coaches. He makes clear that winning comes at a steep price.

Specifically, he talked about the demeaning of players. Sexuality was something that he brought up – the point that in sports, and particularly in football, if you don’t do something you’re called weak, you’re called a coward or, worst of all, you’re called a female. That was constant. He shows how violence was legitimised and how players would do anything to please coaches. He writes, “I developed a style the coaches loved. We moved in Oedipal lockstep: The more approval they gave me, the more fanatically I played. From an early age, I learned to endure violence and brutality as simply a part of my life. But in football, the brutality became legitimate, a way of being accepted on the football field and off it.”

Reading that made me realise that although I loved to play in grade school it was going to get nasty. And it did but I couldn’t say I wasn’t forewarned because I read Meggyesy. He is still alive. He became a left-wing activist and union organiser.

Meggyesy seems to focus on the dark side of the game. What do readers of Out of Their League learn about the essence of football?

It’s a cautionary tale. It reminds you not to let your humanity get usurped by people who can get what they want by being cruel. If you’re a coach for a brief time, you see you can make people do inhuman things. As we’ve seen in wars, you can make people torture and exterminate others. So on the football field you have to be careful not to lose your humanity. I think he was the first guy to really make that clear. It was tremendously influential to me, and I think to a lot of people, to have a guy like Dave Meggyesy writing this stuff because nobody else was.

Did you feel dehumanised as a college player?

Yeah, very much so. Football and boxing, by their very nature, get right to the edge of what human beings should be allowed to do to each other. A lot of people say they should not be allowed. In football you don’t get points for hurting someone but there come times when injuring or blindsiding an opposing player can help your team win. Whether it’s a concussion or a blown-out knee, you can end up injuring someone for life. The sport is dangerous. Our heads are in the middle of our shoulders – there’s no way to tackle somebody without your head being involved. You have to be clear about when you’re acting more like a battering ram than a human being.

Let’s turn to two books that became successful films in the seventies, starting with Semi-Tough by Dan Jenkins.

Semi-Tough is the funniest satire of the sport I’ve read. All the fiction before was Disney stuff, about the sports hero winning one for the crippled kid – not about the sports star drinking 40 shots while trying to get laid. There’s a lot of locker-room and bathroom humour in this book. Some of it is X-rated, but it’s also more serious. Dan Jenkins satirises the ugly aspect of football that Dave Meggyesy brought out through non-fiction.

It makes you laugh at things that were politically incorrect while making you realise that they’re wrong. It was a revelatory type of writing that had not been done before by anybody. It’s a really smart-ass dirty playboy aspect of the sport and he brought that out.

The protagonist of this novel, Billy Clyde Puckett, is a Texas-born halfback for the New York Giants. The next novel you named is about the Dallas Cowboys. What is it about the Lone Star state that makes it such an incubator for football?

Their slogan – Don’t Mess with Texas – might say it all. It’s an oversized aggressive state, the biggest state other than Alaska. Everything is huge. The Cowboys came to embody the state. Their original coach, Tom Landry, was a God-fearing Christian and the team was filled with rebellious sex and drug-crazed athletes who were almost sanctified. They were called America’s team.

Once you get out in the plains of Texas, whole towns get wrapped up in the game, as they showed in Friday Night Lights. Teams became symbols of success for whole towns. I’ve been a lot to Lubbock and Midland and it’s really something to behold.

Dan Jenkins comes from Texas, Fort Worth. Then you get a guy like Pete Gent, who was from the Midwest but joined the Dallas Cowboys. He was a very literate person, one of the first athletes I can think of to write a book. He wrote about what he saw from the inside in North Dallas Forty.

Which was the next book I wanted to ask about. First published in 1973, it seems like a more serious novel about the seamy side of football. Please introduce us to the book and its author, a former wide receiver, Peter Gent.

Even though the team in the book is called by another name, it’s obviously about the Cowboys. North Dallas is where the Cowboys were located and Forty refers to the 40-man team roster. It’s barely fiction. The book gets a little confused at the end but the first half of it is absolutely brilliant.

It’s about a main character who is a wide receiver – it’s clearly Pete Gent but he’s called Seth Maxwell. Everybody has a pseudonym, but you can tell who’s who. Seth Maxwell becomes more and more disillusioned with all the drug taking and all of the incredible immorality of the players – the guns, the lying, the cheating, the abuse and rape of women. And he finds it harder to manage the incredible amount of pain he endures from what he does on the field. Players are being used almost like gladiators, until they’re of no use to anybody any more. The main character finally comes to the realisation that the only way he can get relief is to leave.

One reviewer wrote that this book let’s you know what it feels like to play the game. Does it leave you aching?

Yeah. He describes getting up in the morning as a process that takes maybe an hour – easing into a hot tub, slowly stretching certain joints and then taking a bunch of painkilling drugs. It’s horrible – almost hard to read. I talked to Pete Gent one time and asked him, “Was it like that when you got up in the morning?” And he told me, “Yeah.” I know it’s true for many players.

We’re coming to realise how crippled and tortured and pummelled these players become, that joints and bones pay a price. And now we know, more and more, what happens inside the head. We see suicides, early onset Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, loss of memory. So many players in their late forties and fifties and certainly by their sixties are mentally and physically incapacitated from playing the game in their twenties.

Pete Gent wrote about that before others did and, of course, when you write things like this, when you tell a truth nobody wants to hear, you’re ostracised. And he was. He was considered an outcast. He was considered a whistle-blower. He was attacked personally and ridiculed. Sadly, Pete Gent just died. I wish he was alive to see that people are finally paying attention to the things he gave warnings of.

The medicine chests of Gent’s characters are filled with uppers and painkillers. Was football that drug-dependant and is it still?

Yes. When you tackle somebody with your shoulder it’s as if you rammed your shoulder in a wall, so there’s going to be bruising and inflammation and slight dislocation of things on every play. Every hit in the NFL is the equivalent of what a normal person will go through in a minor car wreck. So you have to do something.

So there are players who admit to taking drugs and there are those who say they don’t, but are lying. You’re masking pain all the time. You have to play in pain. Somehow people think it’s OK for these guys to get the shots, the numbing shots and the anti-inflammatory shots. Tramadol shots, which is the new rage, they get all the time, routinely, every game. And we know that. Whether you’re a Bears fan or a Giants fan, whoever you root for, they’re all getting shots, they’re all taking pills while they’re playing, and when they’re done they’re left with the pain and addictions.

A memoir from a football physician is your next selection. Tell us about the autobiography of Los Angeles Raiders internist Rob Huizenga.

In this book Dr Huizenga divulged the incredibly damaging things that team doctors did to get players back in the game. Not things that were good for the player’s health; things that were good for the team and the owners. In his view, the coaches, the owners and the doctors themselves were in cahoots. They did not care about the players’ wellbeing, they did not care about their mental health, they did not care about their physical health because they had to win. The job description of the team doctor was not to make the players better; they’re there to help the team win. So if somebody is crippled in the process of making a touchdown, they’ve won that game for you and if you have to cut them that’s fine. Huizenga was the first person from the medical profession to explain all that.

He talks about a neck specialist from Philadelphia named Dr Torg who cleared a player to play after other doctors urged the athlete to retire or get surgery. He talks about Dean Steinkuhler, a tremendous player for the Raiders, who had 13 knee surgeries and another guy, Mike Munchak, a great player too, who had nine surgeries on his right knee alone. This is while they’re playing, so any doctor could warn, “You guys are crippling yourselves.” Huizenga watched all this and felt guilty about it. The Hippocratic oath says first you do no harm. Well, team doctors were doing harm.

Dr Huizenga resigned in disgust.

You either endorse what you see or you have to leave it. He saw that the medical staff’s mission was to help the owner because that’s why they were hired. He said, “I’m not going to do it.” And so then he wrote this book about it and the thing is nobody cares. It’s like, nice read, but nothing will change.

In a series of recent suits, dozens of former NFL players are seeking damages for brain trauma they suffered on the field. Will the game change because of the new focus on brain injuries?

Well, it’s been forced to change but not because people care. The insurance aspect of it has made the NFL do something and made parents more aware. But the obviousness of this has always been there. You can’t hit anything, including people, with your head without sustaining damage.

Most kids just quit, they play football for a while and they may be tough but they will say there’s something wrong with this sport. Something inside of them will tell them that, “This isn’t right. I don’t mind getting my knee injured or my ankle, my shoulder, my hip, my hand, or my wrist. But my brain? This is my essence, this is who I am and that’s not something to mess with.” We haven’t really identified what a person is but there are people who played football and when they’re done they’re not the same any more. They might be willing to risk it at a young age. But even one concussion can have an impact. Doctors are saying no amount of padding for the head can stop a concussion because a brain is loose jelly inside of the skull. The skull may not break, but the brain still collides with its sides and that concussion causes damage. One time of being knocked out cold – the bleeding, the trauma, the bruising – it can hinder you for life.

So what we get to is: Is this game playable? Concussions happen all the time. Is that something that should be tolerated? Guys will say, “I’m a gladiator.” Well, being a gladiator was outlawed a couple of thousand years ago. Civilised societies do not have gladiators. We’ve outlawed a lot of things. We don’t duel with swords any more. We don’t allow people to go out in the street and shoot each other. We recognised if we allowed these things, we would lose something as a civilisation. That’s the point we’re approaching in football. Nobody wants to acknowledge the obvious because it’s a wonderful game. Ninety-five per cent of it is within civilised bounds, but that 5%? It is a wonderful game but, knowing what we know, maybe we shouldn’t play it any more.

Interview by

Eve Gerber

The Ghost of Bobby Lee

By Ta-Nehisi Coates

Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus

–Ralph Wiley

Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary makes note of the fact that General Lee was opposed to slavery. I basically took that as true, until–in all honesty–some of my commenters informed me that it, in fact, was not. One of the saddest, and yet telling, aspects of the War, for me personally, is that on the two occasions when Confederate troops headed North, they kidnapped free blacks and sold them into slavery. Ditto for black soldiers who were captured and “lucky” enough not to be killed. Anyway, if you have a moment check out this lecture a reader was kind enough to send to me. At about the 55:00 mark, Elizabeth Brown Pryor talks about Lee’s relationship to slavery, and more interestingly, how the myth that he was somehow anti-slavery came to be. 

It was sad to hear frankly. If the war actually weren’t about slavery, I think all our lives would be a lot easier. But as I thought on it, my sadness was stupid. What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn’t. The Lost Cause is necromancy–it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn’t about “honoring” the past–it’s about an inability to cope with the present.

The God of History bounds the Confederacy in its own chains. From the declaration off secession in Texas…

…in this free government *all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights* [emphasis in the original]; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states….

To Virginia…

The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States.

To Mississippi…

….Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin…

To South Carolina…

…A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

To the Vice-President of the Confederacy itself…

The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.” Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth…

This is about a lancing shame, about that gaping wound in the soul that comes when confronted with the appalling deeds of our forebears. Lost Causers worship their ancestors, in the manner of the abandoned child who brags that his dead-beat father is actually an astronaut, away on a mission of cosmic importance.

I know how this goes. For us, it’s coping with the fact that people who looked like you sold you into slavery. It’s understanding that you come from a place that was on the wrong side of the Gatling gun. It’s feeling not simply like one of history’s losers, but that you had no right to win. The work of the mature intellect is to reconcile oneself to the past without a retreat into fantasy–in either direction. Claiming to be the descendant of kings and queens is just as bad as claiming to be thankful for the slave trade.

It’s weak to manipulate the dead in order to reconcile our present, to force men to play our Gods. Robert E. Lee was a man, and a product of a time and place that turned people into, quite literally, the most valuable resource in this country.  I hate to keep taking it back to David Blight but…

By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society–slave population–in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close. But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars–that’s just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today’s dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.

These were the kind of forces at work in his world, and I’m not convinced we have the intrinsic right to expect someone like Lee to oppose them. Likewise, I may think that it was sinister for people who “looked like me” to sell me into slavery, but that presumes an expectation of racial unity which almost certainly didn’t exist at the time. Again, it summons the dead to do the work that I would shy away from.

I think this boils down to the problem of nationalism, and where we find our heroes. It isn’t like Southerners are devoid of people who were courageous in all aspects. There’s the great Virginian patriot Robert Thomas, who goes from slave-master in waiting, to leading black troops in brilliant military campaigns in Tennessee, and in his last days defends the rights of freedman. There’s Elizabeth Van Lew, who emancipated all her slaves before the War, and used them as part of a Union spy network in Richmond, the Confederate capitol. 

There’s “The Boat-Thief” Robert Smalls, a slave who stole Confederate transport steamer, filled with armaments, and sailed it to Union lines. There’s Andre Callioux, a manumitted slave turned Union soldier, martyred at Port Hudson in a kamikaze-like charge on the Confederate works. And a century later, there’s Martin Luther King, arguably the modern founding father of this America. He was a product of The South, and his moral judgement didn’t end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Finally, there’s the question of how we claim ancestors, a question that is more philosophical than biological. Africa, and African-America, means something to me because I claim it as such–but I claim much more. I claim Fitzgerald, whatever he thought of me, because I see myself in Gatsby. I claim Steinbeck because, whether he likes it or not, I am an Okie. I claim Blake because “London” feels like the hood to me. 

And I claim them right alongside Lucille Clifton, James Baldwin and Ralph Wiley, who had it so right when he parried Saul Bellow. The dead, and the work they leave—the good and bad–is the work of humanity and thus says something of us all. And in that manner, I must be humble and claim some of Lee, Jackson, and Forrest. What might I have been in another skin, in another country, in another time?

As Medicaid Payments Shrink, Patients Are Abandoned

By KEVIN SACK

FLINT, Mich. — Carol Y. Vliet’s cancer returned with a fury last summer, the tumors metastasizing to her brain, liver, kidneys and throat.

As she began a punishing regimen of chemotherapy and radiation, Mrs. Vliet found a measure of comfort in her monthly appointments with her primary care physician, Dr. Saed J. Sahouri, who had been monitoring her health for nearly two years.

She was devastated, therefore, when Dr. Sahouri informed her a few months later that he could no longer see her because, like a growing number of doctors, he had stopped taking patients with Medicaid.

Dr. Sahouri said that his reimbursements from Medicaid were so low — often no more than $25 per office visit — that he was losing money every time a patient walked in his exam room.

The final insult, he said, came when Michigan cut those payments by 8 percent last year to help close a gaping budget shortfall.

“My office manager was telling me to do this for a long time, and I resisted,” Dr. Sahouri said. “But after a while you realize that we’re really losing money on seeing those patients, not even breaking even. We were starting to lose more and more money, month after month.”

It has not taken long for communities like Flint to feel the downstream effects of a nationwide torrent of state cuts to Medicaid, the government insurance program for the poor and disabled. With states squeezing payments to providers even as the economy fuels explosive growth in enrollment, patients are finding it increasingly difficult to locate doctors and dentists who will accept their coverage. Inevitably, many defer care or wind up in hospital emergency rooms, which are required to take anyone in an urgent condition.

Mrs. Vliet, 53, who lives just outside Flint, has yet to find a replacement for Dr. Sahouri. “When you build a relationship, you want to stay with that doctor,” she said recently, her face gaunt from disease, and her head wrapped in a floral bandanna. “You don’t want to go from doctor to doctor to doctor and have strangers looking at you that don’t have a clue who you are.”

The inadequacy of Medicaid payments is severe enough that it has become a rare point of agreement in the health care debate between President Obama and Congressional Republicans. In a letter to Congress after their February health care meeting, Mr. Obama wrote that rates might need to rise if Democrats achieved their goal of extending Medicaid eligibility to 15 million uninsured Americans.

In 2008, Medicaid reimbursements averaged only 72 percent of the rates paid by Medicare, which are themselves typically well below those of commercial insurers, according to the Urban Institute, a research group. At 63 percent, Michigan had the sixth-lowest rate in the country, even before the recent cuts.

In Flint, Dr. Nita M. Kulkarni, an obstetrician, receives $29.42 from Medicaid for a visit that would bill $69.63 from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. She receives $842.16 from Medicaid for a Caesarean delivery, compared with $1,393.31 from Blue Cross.

If she takes too many Medicaid patients, she said, she cannot afford overhead expenses like staff salaries, the office mortgage and malpractice insurance that will run $42,800 this year. She also said she feared being sued by Medicaid patients because they might be at higher risk for problem pregnancies, because of underlying health problems.

As a result, she takes new Medicaid patients only if they are relatives or friends of existing patients. But her guilt is assuaged somewhat, she said, because her husband, who is also her office mate, Dr. Bobby B. Mukkamala, an ear, nose and throat specialist, is able to take Medicaid. She said he is able to do so because only a modest share of his patients have it.

The states and the federal government share the cost of Medicaid, which saw a record enrollment increase of 3.3 million people last year. The program now benefits 47 million people, primarily children, pregnant women, disabled adults and nursing home residents. It falls to the states to control spending by setting limits on eligibility, benefits and provider payments within broad federal guidelines.

Michigan, like many other states, did just that last year, packaging the 8 percent reimbursement cut with the elimination of dental, vision, podiatry, hearing and chiropractic services for adults.

When Randy C. Smith showed up recently at a Hamilton Community Health Network clinic near Flint, complaining of a throbbing molar, Dr. Miriam L. Parker had to inform him that Medicaid no longer covered the root canal and crown he needed.

A landscaper who has been without work for 15 months, Mr. Smith, 46, said he could not afford the $2,000 cost. “I guess I’ll just take Tylenol or Motrin,” he said before leaving.

This year, Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, has revived a proposal to impose a 3 percent tax on physician revenues. Without the tax, she has warned, the state may have to reduce payments to health care providers by 11 percent.

In Flint, the birthplace of General Motors, the collapse of automobile manufacturing has melded with the recession to drive unemployment to a staggering 27 percent. About one in four non-elderly residents of Genesee County are uninsured, and one in five depends on Medicaid. The county’s Medicaid rolls have grown by 37 percent since 2001, and the program now pays for half of all childbirths.

But surveys show the share of doctors accepting new Medicaid patients is declining. Waits for an appointment at the city’s federally subsidized health clinic, where most patients have Medicaid, have lengthened to four months from six weeks in 2008. Parents like Rebecca and Jeoffrey Curtis, who had brought their 2-year-old son, Brian, to the clinic, say they have struggled to find a pediatrician.

“I called four or five doctors and asked if they accepted our Medicaid plan,” said Ms. Curtis, a 21-year-old waitress. “It would always be, ‘No, I’m sorry.’ It kind of makes us feel like second-class citizens.”

As physicians limit their Medicaid practices, emergency rooms are seeing more patients who do not need acute care.

At Genesys Regional Medical Center, one of three area hospitals, Medicaid volume is up 14 percent over last year. At Hurley Medical Center, the city’s safety net hospital, Dr. Michael Jaggi detects the difference when advising emergency room patients to seek follow-up treatment.

“We get met with the blank stare of ‘Where do I go from here?’ ” said Dr. Jaggi, the chief of emergency medicine.

New doctors, with their mountains of medical school debt, are fleeing the state because of payment cuts and proposed taxes. Dr. Kiet A. Doan, a surgeon in Flint, said that of 72 residents he had trained at local hospitals only two had stayed in the area, and both are natives.

Access to care can be even more challenging in remote parts of the state. The MidMichigan Medical Center in Clare, about 90 miles northwest of Flint, closed its obstetrics unit last year because Medicaid reimbursements covered only 65 percent of actual costs. Two other hospitals in the region might follow suit, potentially leaving 16 contiguous counties without obstetrics.

Medicaid enrollees in Michigan’s midsection have grown accustomed to long journeys for care. This month, Shannon M. Brown of Winn skipped work to drive her 8-year-old son more than two hours for a five-minute consultation with Dr. Mukkamala. Her pediatrician could not find a specialist any closer who would take Medicaid, she said.

Later this month, she will take the predawn drive again so Dr. Mukkamala can remove her son’s tonsils and adenoids. “He’s going to have to sit in the car for three hours after his surgery,” Mrs. Brown said. “I’m not looking forward to that one.”

The Jewish Review of Books

Bob Dylan: Messiah or Escape Artist?

by Ron Rosenbaum

Bob  Dylan:  Prophet,  Mystic,  Poet
by  Seth  Rogovoy
Scribner  Books,  336 pp.,  $26

In 1978, a young graduate student traveling in India named Daniel Matt wrote to Gershom Scholem, the 80-year-old Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The letter discussed his experiences, his ambitious plans to translate the central text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, and, most of all, about Bob Dylan, who he hoped Scholem might appreciate.

      I’m also sending you Bob Dylan Approximately, whose author believes that Dylan draws
      on Kabbalistic sources consciously or unconsciously (whatever that means). The thesis
      does not hold water … Be that as it may, the book is still interesting as a collage, and
      will give you a hippie’s perspective on Robert Zimmerman (Dylan’s real name).

Scholem replied:

      Your detailed account of your travels in the East and your experiences there with several
      friends and gurus I read with great interest … Who was or is Robert Zimmerman, called
      Bob Dylan? … Please let me know if he is a Jew. The Zimmermans divide 50% into Jews
      and goyim … My receptivity to music is, alas, nothing, therefore I forego the pleasure of
      listening to “Blonde on Blonde” or even the more seducing “Desire.” The title “Highway 61”
      arouses no desire in me. Maybe I am too old for it.

“Who was or is Robert Zimmerman, called Bob Dylan?” Is he a Jew? Good questions! Almost from the beginning of his career Bob Dylan né Zimmerman has had an odd, intense, divisive, often mysterious, relationship with Jews and Judaism. For some Jews (and Christians too) he has become a virtually messianic figure. In his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Seth Rogovoy portrays him as a kind of biblical prophet on the order of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

I’m not exaggerating the cult-like devotion of those whom I’ve come to call “the Bobolators” (after Shakespeare’s “Bardolators”). Although there are many brilliant commentators who are able to separate the wheat from the chaff, there are others for whom there is no chaff, those for whom his every word and line in every lyric, no matter how casual or trivial, seems to be a burning bush of signification that speaks with numinous authority in a blaze of encrypted poetry.

He was the chosen one for the secular Jewish folkies who saw him as able to bring the messianic, if not Marxist, social gospel to the gentiles in his protest songs. While some kvetched about his name change, realistically “Zimmerman” wouldn’t have served the Woody Guthrie persona he crafted. And the Woody Guthrie act worked. It worked so well that this middle-class Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, passed as a kind of Okie hobo. Of course, talent played a part: Dylan’s “Song to Woody,” really the first sign he was capable of conjuring up transcendent beauty, decisively signaled his difference from all of the other Greenwich Village faux Okies.

That is, until he got tired of that act and caught fire with electric rock and roll, leading to cries of betrayal and “Judas!” That famous cry of “Judas!” was heard as Dylan launched into an electric guitar set in his 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert (now available as Live 1966 and arguably the best of the live Dylan albums). And when you think about it, it was an accusation that he was being Judas to his own Jesus.

He was wickedly good at electric rock and roll and there was a period when he was writing unconsciously great songs, with an alchemy of cynicism, nihilism, psychedelicism, and absurdist black humor: The flash and filigree of “Highway 61 Revisited”; the “thin wild mercury” sound (as Dylan once described it) of Blonde on Blonde. I still believe this was his moment of greatest transcendence culminating in the pure masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks. In those first two albums, especially, one could place Dylan in a secular Jewish cultural/historical context: the largely Jewish “black humor” movement whose genesis lay in the absurd horror of the Holocaust, from Lenny Bruce to Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer to Philip Roth.

But, as Matt wrote to Scholem, some Jews have always wanted to claim him for more traditional Jewish piety, and Rogovoy is the latest. It should be said that those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology (and I’m now working on my own take on him) owe Rogovoy a great debt for persuasively tracking so many Dylan words, lines, and allusions to Biblical sources we might not have noticed. But should we therefore expect Dylan to behave himself as a specifically Jewish artist?

Rogovoy tries to make the case that the most important thing about Dylan is his Jewishness. Even when Dylan converted to Christianity, Rogovoy assures us, he—and his songs—were still really Jewish. And for a time—after the explicitly Christian period of the late seventies and early eighties passed—when Dylan was seen on Chabad Lubavitcher telethons and then, more privately at Chabad services all over the map, it seemed like Dylan had finally found his home in the messianic Hasidic sect.

But then, somewhat to Rogovoy’s misfortune, just as this book proclaiming Dylan’s essential Jewishness was about to be published, Dylan’s label made an announcement that even those like myself, no longer easily shocked by Dylan’s choices, found shocking. Rogovoy’s Jewish “prophet, mystic, poet” was going to release a “traditional” Christmas album, entitled “Christmas in the Heart.” Yes, we all know (as Garrison Keillor churlishly reminded us recently) that Jews have written many Christmas songs, but mostly of the secular “White Christmas” sort. In this album Dylan sings real devotional songs, including “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

Could there be a connection between Rogovoy’s book and the Christmas album? Rogovoy is so relentless in nailing every Dylan utterance to some Biblical or Talmudic or kabbalistic source that on some level Dylan might have known he was about to be tied to this procrustean bed of piety for good. This is more metaphorical conjecture than biographical theory. But if you watch the video of “Must be Santa” from the Christmas in the Heart album (by far the best thing on it), you see a Dylanesque guy desperately trying to flee from a Christmas party and hurling himself through the glass of the venue to escape it.

That’s Dylan: more escape artist than preacher. It was Dylan who told us he became his own “enemy / in the instant that I preach.” Nonetheless, Rogovoy’s source-hunting is so relentless, one can only bow to his ingenuity as he pins just about every Dylan line you can think of, like a dead butterfly, to its biblical source box. I was particularly impressed by the wealth of allusions to the Davidic stories he finds. On the other hand, Dylan has been aptly described as a “magpie” who snatches images and allusions from any context, as he happens upon them. And what Rogovoy sees as piety may be mag-piety. A less contestable aspect of Rogovoy’s exemplary research is his deepening of the detailed picture now emerging of Dylan’s Jewish upbringing. Rogovoy shows that the Zimmermans were at “the center of Jewish life in Hibbing,” and that young Robert’s bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel.

Certainly, we know Dylan has remained preoccupied with God. There’s an excerpt in Rogovoy’s book from an interview with Dylan (this was in the late ’70s and the interviewer, as it happens, was me). Dylan was discussing the ills of the modern world and, in his inscrutable deadpan, suddenly mentioned that he had seen a Time magazine cover that asked “Is God dead”?

“Would you think that was a responsible thing to do?” Dylan asked me, with an emphasis on responsible that made it either genuinely indignant or joking—or both. Then he added “What does God think of that? I mean if you were God, how would you like to see that written about yourself?” It was funny, Dylan trying to feel God’s pain, asking the primal Dylan question of God: how does it feel?

Perhaps the biggest stretch of the book is Rogovoy’s rationalization of Dylan’s Jesus period. Talk about taking the Christ out of Christmas. Consider when he comes to what he calls “Dylan’s most direct statement of Christian belief,” on the album Slow Train Coming. “The official published lyric of ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’ has him singing, ‘There’s a Man upon a cross and He’s been crucified / Do You have any idea why or for who He died?’”

“But,” Rogovoy tells us, as if he has discovered a loophole, “on the recording Dylan actually sings, ‘There’s a man on the cross and he’s been crucified for you / Believe in his power that’s all you gotta do.” Either way it’s a pretty straightforward declaration that the crucifixion is the path to salvation. But wait! Rogovoy seeks to obfuscate Dylan’s rare if unappealing didacticism: “The line seems tacked on to the end of the song; nothing that comes before prepares a listener for this statement of faith; there is no case being made that leads up to this as the logical (or illogical) conclusion; it’s practically a non sequitur as it appears in the song.”

You can almost see him sweat. But it’s simply not true that nothing prepares the listener or that it’s a non sequitur. It’s more like a culmination that Rogovoy can’t abide. He denies Dylan the right, misguided or not, to be the person he was then, because it challenges the ironclad rigidity of Rogovoy’s thesis. This transparent sophistry (“tacked on” could be another person’s “triumphant conclusion”) allows Rogovoy to avoid confonting Dylan’s soul-searching.

Still, there’s something there. As Daniel Matt, now the distinguished translator of the Zohar, put it to me in an e-mail:

For many years I worshiped Dylan. I occasionally referred to him as Baba Di-lan, Aramaic for “our gateway,” to truth and wisdom. For some reason, I always wanted him to be very deeply Jewish, whether or not he was. I felt that he saw things in their stark reality, that his prophetic vision penetrated to the core of everything and his poetic genius enabled him to share that with others.

A Better Way to Build a Pro-Israel PAC

 

The Jewish Standard

Steven Eidman • Letters

Published: March 4th, 2010

Thank you for your profile of the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs (JACPAC), and its newly elected president, Clifton resident Gail  Yamner. 

(see http://www.jstandard.com/content/item/pac_head_urges_greater_political_involvement/ )

There are many one-issue pro-Israel PACs that do excellent work in helping to elect candidates who are strong supporters of a close U.S.-Israel relationship.

However, many of these candidates hold views on domestic issues, such as civil and reproductive rights, gun control, and church-state issues, that are at odds with the views of the overwhelming majority of Jewish voters. JACPAC supports a bipartisan slate of candidates who are both strongly pro-Israel and whose stance on domestic issues is more moderate and tolerant.

While a contribution to a single-issue PAC might have previously ended up helping to elect a Jesse Helms or a Tom Delay, and today may go to a Jim Demint, and tomorrow may wind up in the war chest of Sarah Palin, a contribution to JACPAC will go to candidates whose election will be good for Jewish interests in Israel and here at home.

Steven Eidman

Englewood

Where Should You Buy Your Food: Whole Foods or Walmart?

The Great Grocery Smackdown

By Corby Kummer

Buy my food at Walmart? No thanks. Until recently, I had been to exactly one Walmart in my life, at the insistence of a friend I was visiting in Natchez, Mississippi, about 10 years ago. It was one of the sights, she said. Up and down the aisles we went, properly impressed by the endless rows and endless abundance. Not the produce section. I saw rows of prepackaged, plastic-trapped fruits and vegetables. I would never think of shopping there.

Not even if I could get environmentally correct food. Walmart’s move into organics was then getting under way, but it just seemed cynical—a way to grab market share while driving small stores and farmers out of business. Then, last year, the market for organic milk started to go down along with the economy, and dairy farmers in Vermont and other states, who had made big investments in organic certification, began losing contracts and selling their farms. A guaranteed large buyer of organic milk began to look more attractive. And friends started telling me I needed to look seriously at Walmart’s efforts to sell sustainably raised food.

Really? Wasn’t this greenwashing? I called Charles Fishman, the author of The Wal-Mart Effect, which entertainingly documents the market-changing (and company-destroying) effects of Walmart’s decisions. He reiterated that whatever Walmart decides to do has large repercussions—and told me that what it had decided to do since my Natchez foray was to compete with high-end supermarkets. “You won’t recognize the grocery section of a supercenter,” he said. He ordered me to get in my car and find one.

He was right. In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods. The bunched beets were from Muranaka Farm, whose beets I often buy at other markets—but these looked much fresher. The service people I could find (it wasn’t hard) were unfailingly enthusiastic, though I did wonder whether they got let out at night.

During a few days of tasting, the results were mixed. Those beets handily beat (sorry) ones I’d just bought at Whole Foods, and compared nicely with beets I’d recently bought at the farmers’ market. But packaged carrots and celery, both organic, were flavorless. Organic bananas and “tree ripened” California peaches, already out of season, were better than the ones in most supermarkets, and most of the Walmart food was cheaper—though when I went to my usual Whole Foods to compare prices for local produce, they were surprisingly similar (dry goods and dairy products were considerably less expensive at Walmart).

Walmart holding its own against Whole Foods? This called for a blind tasting.

I conspired with my contrarian friend James McWilliams, an agricultural historian at Texas State University at San Marcos and the author of the new Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly. He enlisted his friends at Fino, a restaurant in Austin that pays special attention to where the food it serves comes from, as co-conspirators. I would buy two complete sets of ingredients, one at Walmart and the other at Whole Foods. The chef would prepare them as simply as possible, and serve two versions of each course, side by side on the same plate, to a group of local food experts invited to judge.

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

The program, which Walmart calls Heritage Agriculture, will encourage farms within a day’s drive of one of its warehouses to grow crops that now take days to arrive in trucks from states like Florida and California. In many cases the crops once flourished in the places where Walmart is encouraging their revival, but vanished because of Big Agriculture competition.

Ron McCormick, the senior director of local and sustainable sourcing for Walmart, told me that about three years ago he came upon pictures from the 1920s of thriving apple orchards in Rogers, Arkansas, eight miles from the company’s headquarters. Apples were once shipped from northwest Arkansas by railroad to St. Louis and Chicago. After Washington state and California took over the apple market, hardly any orchards remained. Cabbage, greens, and melons were also once staples of the local farming economy. But for decades, Arkansas’s cash crops have been tomatoes and grapes. A new initiative could diversify crops and give consumers fresher produce.

As with most Walmart programs, the clear impetus is to claim a share of consumer spending: first for organics, now for locally grown food. But buying local food is often harder than buying organic. The obstacles for both small farm and big store are many: how much a relatively small farmer can grow and how reliably, given short growing seasons; how to charge a competitive price when the farmer’s expenses are so much higher than those of industrial farms; and how to get produce from farm to warehouse.

Walmart knows all this, and knows that various nonprofit agricultural and university networks are trying to solve the same problems. In considering how to build on existing programs (and investments), Walmart talked with the local branch of the Environmental Defense Fund, which opened near the company’s Arkansas headquarters when Walmart started to look serious about green efforts, and with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas. The center (of which the Walmart Foundation is a chief funder) is part of a national partnership called Agile Agriculture, which includes universities such as Drake and the University of New Hampshire and nonprofits like the American Farmland Trust.* To get more locally grown produce into grocery stores and restaurants, the partnership is centralizing and streamlining distribution for farms with limited growing seasons, limited production, and limited transportation resources.

Walmart says it wants to revive local economies and communities that lost out when agriculture became centralized in large states. (The heirloom varieties beloved by foodies lost out at the same time, but so far they’re not a focus of Walmart’s program.) This would be something like bringing the once-flourishing silk and wool trades back to my hometown of Rockville, Connecticut. It’s not something you expect from Walmart, which is better known for destroying local economies than for rebuilding them.

As everyone who sells to or buys from (or, notoriously, works for) Walmart knows, price is where every consideration begins and ends. Even if the price Walmart pays for local produce is slightly higher than what it would pay large growers, savings in transport and the ability to order smaller quantities at a time can make up the difference. Contracting directly with farmers, which Walmart intends to do in the future as much as possible, can help eliminate middlemen, who sometimes misrepresent prices. Heritage produce currently accounts for only 4 to 6 percent of Walmart’s produce sales, McCormick told me (already more than a chain might spend on produce in a year, as Fishman would point out), adding that he hopes the figure will get closer to 20 percent, so the program will “go from experimental to being really viable.”

Michelle Harvey, who is in charge of working with Walmart on agriculture programs at the local Environmental Defense Fund office, summarized a long conversation with me on the sustainability efforts she thinks the company is serious about: “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

“We support local farmers,” read a sign at an Austin Walmart. I didn’t see any farm names listed in the produce section, but I did find plastic tubs of organic baby spinach and “spring mix” greens with modern labeling that looked like it could be at Whole Foods. My list was simple to the point of stark, for a fair fight. Some ingredients seemed identical to what I’d find at Whole Foods. Organic, free-range brown eggs. Promised Land all-natural, hormone-free milk. A bottle of Watkins Madagascar vanilla for panna cotta. I couldn’t find much in the way of the seasonal fruit the restaurant had told me the chef would serve with dessert. But I did find, to my surprise, a huge bin of pomegranates, so I bought those, and some Bosc pears. The sticking points were fresh goat cheese, which flummoxed the nice sales people (we found some Alouette brand, hidden), and chicken breasts. I could find organic meat, but no breasts without “up to 12 percent natural chicken broth” added—an attempt to inject flavor and add weight. I wasn’t happy with the suppliers, either: Tyson predominated. I bought Pilgrims Pride, but was suspicious. The bill was $126.02.

At the flagship Whole Foods, in downtown Austin, the produce was much more varied, though the spinach and spring mix looked less vibrant. The chicken was properly dry, a fresh ivory color—and more than twice as expensive as Walmart’s. My total bill was $175.04; $20 of the extra $50 was for the meat.

Brian Stubbs, the tall, genial young manager of Fino, and Jason Donoho, the chef, were intrigued as they helped me carry bag after bag into the restaurant’s kitchen. They carefully segregated the bags on two shelves of a walk-in refrigerator. The younger cooks looked surprised by the Whole Foods kraft-paper bags, and slightly horrified by the flimsy white plastic ones from Walmart.

The next night 16 critics, bloggers, and general food lovers gathered around a long, high table at the restaurant. Stubbs passed out scoring sheets with bullets for grades of one (worst) to five (best) for each of the four courses, and lines for comments.

The first course, bowls of almonds and pieces of fried goat cheese with red-onion jam and honey, was a clear win for Walmart. The Walmart almonds were described as “aromatic,” “mellow,” “pure,” and “yummy,” the Whole Foods almonds as “raw,” though also more “natural”; they were in fact fresher, though duller in flavor. (Like the best of the food I saw at the Austin Walmart, the packaging for the almonds had a homegrown Mexican look.) The second course, mixed spring greens in a sherry vinaigrette, was another Walmart win: only a few tasters preferred the Whole Foods greens, calling them fresher and heartier-flavored. And only one noticed the little brown age spots on a few Walmart leaves, but she was a ringer—Carol Ann Sayle, a local farmer famous for her greens.

So far Walmart was ahead. But then came the chicken, served with a poached egg on a bed of spinach and golden raisins. A woman whose taste I already thought uncanny—she works as an aromatherapist—compared the broth-infused meat to something out of a hospital cafeteria: “It’s like they injected it with something to make it taste like fast food.” I thought it was salty, damp, and dismal. The spinach, though, was another story: even the most ardent brothy-breast haters thought the Walmart spinach was fresher.

Dessert was the most puzzling. I had thought that Walmart’s locally sourced milk and exotic-looking vanilla would be the gold standard, but the Whole Foods house brands slaughtered them (“Kicks A’s ass,” one taster wrote). People couldn’t find enough words to diss the Walmart panna cotta (“artificial, thin”) and praise the Whole Foods one (“like a good Christmas”). I wished I’d bought the identical Promised Land milk at Whole Foods, to see if there is in fact a difference in the branded food products that suppliers give Walmart, as there is in the case of other branded products. The pomegranate seeds, sadly, were wan, with barely any flavor, particularly compared with the garnet gems from Whole Foods. But Walmart got points from the chef, and from me, for carrying pomegranates at all.

As I had been in my own kitchen, the tasters were surprised when the results were unblinded at the end of the meal and they learned that in a number of instances they had adamantly preferred Walmart produce. And they weren’t entirely happy.

In an ideal world, people would buy their food directly from the people who grew or caught it, or grow and catch it themselves. But most people can’t do that. If there were a Walmart closer to where I live, I would probably shop there.

Most important, the vast majority of Walmarts carry a large range of affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. And Walmarts serve many “food deserts,” in large cities and rural areas—ironically including farm areas. I’m not sure I’m convinced that the world’s largest retailer is set on rebuilding local economies it had a hand in destroying, if not literally, then in effect. But I’m convinced that if it wants to, a ruthlessly well-run mechanism can bring fruits and vegetables back to land where they once flourished, and deliver them to the people who need them most.

Correction: The article originally stated, incorrectly, that the Agile Agriculture partnership included the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.

The Death of Film Criticism

By Thomas Doherty

“It sucks,” decrees an Internet movie critic, sharing the most common aesthetic reaction in contemporary film criticism. In the viral salon of bloggers and chat-roomers, the finely tuned turns of phrase crafted by an earlier generation of sharp-eyed cinema scribes have been winnowed to a curt kiss-off. In cyberspace everyone can hear you scream. Just log on, vent, and hit send.

The transfer of film criticism from its print-based platforms (newspapers, magazines, and academic journals) to ectoplasmic Web-page billboards has rocked the lit-crit screen trade. Whether from the world of journalism (where the pink slips are landing with hurricane force) or academe (which itself is experiencing the worst job market since the Middle Ages), serious writers on film feel under siege, underappreciated, and underemployed.

The ballast of traditional credentials—whereby film critics earned their bones through university degrees or years at metropolitan dailies—has been thrown overboard by the judgment calls of anonymous upstarts without portfolio but very much with a DSL hotline to Hollywood’s prime moviegoing demographic. In film criticism, the blogosphere is the true sphere of influence.

A sure sign of the bleak diagnosis for the ink-and-paper crowd is the arrival of the sympathy cards. While tanking as a viable livelihood, American film criticism is up to its eyeballs in affectionate, retrospective tributes. In 2006, the Library of America bestowed its seal of approval with American Movie Critics: An Anthology From the Silents Until Now, edited by Phillip Lopate, a professor of creative writing and literature. Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of the U.S. Study of Film (University of California Press, 2007), by the film professor Dana B. Polan, and Inventing Film Studies (Duke University Press, 2008), a collection of metacritical articles edited by the film scholars Lee Grievesen and Haidee Wasson, focus primarily on the academic institutionalization of the discipline of film studies, but both also track the deep backstory of a practice as old as the nickelodeon. Forthcoming (April) from Santa Monica Press, the film critic Jerry Roberts’s The Complete History of American Film Criticism lives up to its title with a quick march through every top-billed byline from the Kinetoscope to Blu-ray. Finally, just out in DVD, For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)—a documentary mash note directed and written by the critic-scholar and now filmmaker Gerald Peary, a professor of communications and journalism and longtime film critic at The Boston Phoenix—sounds last call at the wake.

The history lessons are revelatory, both for uncovering the long tradition of discerning film criticism in America (it didn’t start in the 1960s) and for the surprising number of brand-name writers who have slummed as movie reviewers: Carl Sandburg, on the silent screen in The Chicago Daily News in the 1920s (on Garbo: “slim, pale, like willows turning yellow in autumn”); John Updike, who took to the pages of The Boston Globe to defend the Goldie Hawn-Kurt Russell rom-com Overboard (1987) (on Goldie: “a semicomic valentine surrounded by tumble-dried blond hair”).

Turn-of-the-(last)-century critics fixed on film early on as a canvas to mull over and carp about. Watching the Life and Passion of Christ (1903), Joseph Medill Patterson wondered, “Is it irreverent to portray the Passion, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension in a vaudeville theatre over a darkened stage where half an hour before a couple of painted, short-skirted girls were doing a ‘sister act’?” More than one of the pioneers used his perch as a steppingstone to the other side of the screen. D.W. Griffith’s racist hallucination, The Birth of a Nation (1915), was co-written by the film critic Frank E. Woods, though the guild might want to keep quiet about that one. The future playwright and screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood—The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)—first caught Hollywood’s eye for his prescient film commentary. Writing under the heading “The Silent Drama,” he knew the curtain was coming down on pantomime after one listen to The Jazz Singer (1927). “I, for one, suddenly realized that I shall have to find a new name for this department,” he proclaimed.

  

 

 

 

Walter McBride, Retna

Yet throughout the formative years of 20th-century cinema, most workaday film criticism was dominated by newspaper hacks recruited from the sports beat or trade reviewers with tunnel vision on the ticket window (Variety on Sergey Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925): “utterly devoid of entertainment and box office value”). Not until the late 1930s did film critics begin “to break free from the limitations of the traditional film review and explore film criticism as a type of expansive and deeply personally artistic practice,” Haden Guest, director of the Harvard Film Archive, writes in Inventing Film Studies. Among the first standard bearers were Otis Ferguson at The New Republic (“the first working film critic who put everything together,” avers Lopate); Manny Farber (whose paeans to underground films and “termite art” elevated B movies to A-list status); and the poet, journalist, screenwriter, and critic James Agee (to writers on film what Edward R. Murrow is to broadcast journalists).

Appropriately, a congenial place to sample American film criticism is at the movies. Peary’s For the Love of Movies grants film critics star billing. Begun as an homage, however, it plays more as a requiem for the heavyweights of a dying vocation, a film-geek version of The Way We Were. Like Lopate’s anthology and Roberts’s survey, the documentary rewinds the forgotten prehistory of film criticism, but its narrative spine is the legendary grudge match between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, the Tracy and Hepburn—or maybe Trotsky and Stalin—of American film criticism. Kael threw the first punch in her scathing 1963 attack on the cult of the director as auteur, “Circles and Squares,” an essay that launched two birds with one screed—her own as a hit woman not to be crossed, and her target’s, who suddenly found the obscure pieces he published in the low-circulation Film Comment the manifesto of a new credo.

Each corner had a claque of fierce camp followers (dubbed “Paulettes” and “Sarrisites”) who shadowboxed for their mentors. “We made each other, we helped each other,” Sarris admits. “We established a dialectic.” Yet the fact that Sarris speaks for himself in For the Love of Movies and Kael appears only in archival footage creates an unfortunate disequilibrium; the pair were nothing if not evenly matched. Peary started shooting in 2001, by which time Kael was too infirm to participate. (She died of complications from Parkinson’s disease later that year.) Denied the romantic-comedy ending—Andy and Pauline falling into each other’s arms—the viewer is also denied the sight of the lions clawing at each other in winter.

By the 1970s, with the blistering auteur wars ending in a TKO for the Sarrisites, the veterans regrouped just in time to man the barricades for the Second Golden Age of Hollywood. Kael was firing on all cylinders at The New Yorker, defending the kiss-kiss bang-bangers Brian De Palma and Sam Peckinpah, Sarris was obligatory reading in The Village Voice, championing cinephilic New Yorkers like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, and across the nation, dozens of newspapers and magazines lent copious space and splashy cover stories to long-form think pieces analyzing filmmakers happy to be hailed as great artists.

Lopate’s collection gives a fair sampling of the gems—Richard Corliss and Richard Schickel at Time, Molly Haskell at The Village Voice, Vincent Canby at The New York Times, and Susan Sontag anywhere. Of course the gauzy flashbacks to a time when voracious moviegoers devoured erudite essays by equally passionate critics is as romantic a conceit as any released by MGM. But the box-office returns accrued by offbeat hits suggest a symbiotic relationship. Cheek-to-cheek, film and film criticism thrived.

Even when Hollywood turned to high-budget but lowbrow blockbusters in the 1980s, film criticism maintained its sharp edge and upward arc. Reviewing the decade, Peary, Lopate, and Roberts all give due regard to the salutary impact of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, the Chicago-based tag team whose television point-counterpoint, which made its debut nationally on PBS in 1978, brought a new level of film smarts to a video forum long dominated by dolts in turtleneck sweaters. “At their best, Siskel and Ebert’s lively talks were marked by the immediacy, drama, comedy, intelligence, and surprise of live theatre,” argues Roberts.

Then a different kind of termite art burrowed into the house that film criticism built. In the mid-1990s, the wide-open frontier of the blogosphere allowed young punks who still got carded at the multiplex to leapfrog over their print and video elders on user-friendly sites with hip domain names. If the traditional film critic was a professorial lecturer who lorded his superior knowledge and literary chops over the common rung of moviegoer, the Web slinger was a man-boy of the people, visceral and emotional, a stream-of-consciousness spurter with no internal censor or mute button. Listen to the war cry of the Internet Movie Critic ensconced at http://home.earthlink.net/~usondermann: “What sets me apart from the Siskel & Eberts of this world is a simple truth: I don’t read books!”

The poster boy for the fanboy-as-critic is the bearded, gnomish taste master Harry Knowles. In 1996, Knowles executed an Internet end run around print film critics by setting up his own aisle seat at Ain’t It Cool News (http://aintitcool.com). Soon his site was as coveted an imprimatur as the opposable thumbs of Siskel and Ebert. Knowles boasts two and a half million readers a day—though maybe “hits” is a better measurement—which explains why Hollywood ads are now more likely to quote from Web sites than from print critics.

Predictably, the old guard sees the newbies as semiliterate troglodytes who prowl the viral veld grunting out expletives. “The Internet has made the proliferation of these people possible in a way that it never was before,” rasps Rex Reed in Peary’s film. Schickel concurs: “What I see of Internet reviewing is people of just surpassing ignorance about the medium expressing themselves on the medium.” Many film critics would agree with the condemnation of “the spectacle of 22- and 23-year-old boys taking 40- or 50-year-old artists to task without being able to show a sign of technical knowledge.” (Actually, the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels said that last bit after banning uppity critics from Reich newspapers in 1936.)

Defenders of the bloggers, texters, and tweeters laud the democratization of opinion and the instant access to inside dope. (Many Web-based critics have few qualms about pirated scripts and studio screeners.) Untethered to the industry and not co-opted by plush press junkets, the argument goes, the unpaid fan-bloggers are more independent, more honest, and more in sync with the mass audience than the jaded sexagenarians. Moreover, purely as a media forum for cinematic analysis, the widescreen Net blows away the printed page, offering unlimited space for analysis, links to like-minded sites, and photo “captures” and streaming clips for illustration. The bloggers get the info out first and fast, the readership bookmarks its own comfort zones, and critic and reader begin a two-way conversation that collapses the distinction between interlocutors. The print-bound critics are lumbering dinosaurs grousing about their own extinction. Survival of the fittest, gramps.

To watch their backs and retain their 401(k)’s, most print critics have been forced into sleeping with the enemy. As a form of ancillary outreach, blogs, podcasts, and chat-room discussions have become a required part of the job description for print reviewers. Or maybe the print part of the gig is now the ancillary outreach.

Feeling the same heat, academic critics have also plunged into the brash new world. The film-studies panjandrum David Bordwell—think Knowles with chops in postmodern theory—runs one of the most closely watched blogs at David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (http://davidbordwell.net/blog). The impact of the academic bloggers on Hollywood’s box-office gross is negligible (sorry, David), but the online work of the digital hordes is already making a substantial contribution to film scholarship—in the spirited parry and thrust of the dialogues, in the instant retrieval of past research, and in the factoid jackpots provided by the film databases.

The problem, however, especially for graduate students and younger scholars, is that the powers that be in academe still have not sussed out how to calibrate the value of online work in decisions about hiring, tenure, and promotion, how to weigh the contributions on Web sites like Sense of Cinema (http://sensesofcinema.com) and FlowTV (http://flowtv.org) against peer-reviewed brands like Cinema Journal and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. Is heavy Web-site traffic the modern version of frequent citation from respected colleagues? Is a year in harness as a conscientious Webmaster equal to the publication of a scholarly article? Not yet, but the hoary admonition to “publish or perish” may soon morph into “post or perish.”

For the print-minded film critic who refuses to evolve, the writing is on the digital wall. The jacket cover for Lopate’s anthology shows a pair of analog antiques: a creaky 35 millimeter projector and a clunky manual typewriter. The freeze frame closing out Peary’s film shows Sarris, clutching a cane, and Molly Haskell under a theater marquee, as if about to enter their last picture show.

Not good omens for a craft rooted in the literary grace and humanist sensibility of the revered Agee. “The Italian made Shoeshine is about as beautiful, moving, and heartening a film as you are ever likely to see,” he confided to his readers in 1947, in full swoon over Italian neo-Realism. “I will review it when I am capable of getting more than that into coherent language and feasible space.”

Coherent language within feasible space—words to write by, even when the prose is no longer bound by linear rhetoric and finite column inches. The demise of that tradition of film criticism would really suck.  

One Strange Fish Tale

By Peter Schmidt

 

 

Benjamin Rasmussen

Behold the regal rainbow trout, dappled denizen of deep lake and rushing river, fierce hunter of fish and fly—and prize of pork-barrel politics, invigorator of men, eradicator of native species, payload of numerous bombing missions.

An angler can catch a lot of rainbow trout and yet have no clue what a remarkable force of nature—and mankind—the creatures truly are. Anders Halverson, a research associate at the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West, hoists them up for close inspection in a book just released by Yale University Press: An Entirely Synthetic Fish: How Rainbow Trout Beguiled America and Overran the World. 

 

Few one-that-got-away stories sound nearly as improbable as his account of how our species, Homo sapiens, spread the fish species, Oncorhynchus mykiss, beyond its native range.

Consider that as of the 1870s, the rainbow trout and its sea-run variant, the steelhead, lived only along the Pacific Rim, from California to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. Since then, Halverson says, the fish “have been introduced to every state in the United States and to at least 80 different countries on every continent except Antarctica,” an expansion of range that took humans, corn, sheep, and dogs thousands of years to achieve.

Halverson offers statistics that illustrate how much humans are still involved in the spread of rainbow trout: For each of the roughly four million people born in the United States each year, he says, state and federal hatcheries stock about 20 of the fish in public waters. Most of them being mature, they weigh a total of about 25 million pounds.

Enlarge Photo

Why make such an investment in spreading this one species of fish? It grows rapidly in hatcheries and withstands warmer waters and more-difficult conditions than other trout. Perhaps more important, Halverson says, the stocking of rainbow trout—which fight hard and leap acrobatically when hooked—has “satisfied a powerful human need”: the primal urge to seek out and battle prey.

Halverson’s book is a microhistory, an examination of America’s involvement with a favored fish that sheds light on broader truths regarding our recent relationship with the natural world.

He says he fished for stocked rainbow trout while growing up in Colorado but eventually got bored with the pursuit and thought little of the fish until he became a graduate student in aquatic ecology at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in 2005. At Yale “I came to realize there is a real paradox to the way so many fisheries are managed these days,” he says. “Like most fishermen, I see fishing as a way to escape civilization and industrialization, and a way to sort of make peace with the natural world.” Yet most rainbow trout, being either the products of hatcheries or the descendants of hatchery fish, “are in many ways a product of that industrialization.”

He decided to write a book examining the artificial spread of the rainbow trout and obtained a National Science Foundation grant to help finance the undertaking. He initially expected the project to be mainly an exercise in muckraking (he had worked as a newspaper reporter before going to graduate school). But “the more people I met and the more people I interviewed,” he says, “the more I realized what a complex topic this is.” Although he came across case after case in which efforts to spread the trout led to environmental disasters, his book generally does not paint those involved as fools or villains.

When it comes to government policy regarding trout, he says, “there are a lot of issues for which there are no clear answers.” He points to the dilemma posed by rainbow trout’s ability to mate with the increasingly rare—and unhealthily inbred—cutthroat trout of the American West. Such interbreeding is causing cutthroats to become even rarer as a distinct species, but the purebred cutthroat population is having so much trouble surviving on its own that hybridization might represent the single best hope of passing the fish’s genes along to future generations. It is unclear whether the long-term survival of cutthroats requires keeping rainbows at a distance or bringing the two species together.

The oddest specimens in An Entirely Synthetic Fish are the people. They include Livingston Stone, a New Hampshire pastor who abandoned the pulpit to raise brook trout on a fish farm, then ventured to California in the 1870s, initially to set up a federal salmon hatchery in the Sacramento River Valley. He encountered the rainbow trout and ended up propagating that species in a hatchery on the McCloud River, where he lived under threat of attack by outlaws and members of the Wintu tribe. In one report on his activities, he remarked, “With tarantulas, scorpions, rattlesnakes, Indians, panthers and threats of murder our course here is not wholly over a path of roses.”

Among others described in Halverson’s book is Al Reese, a crop duster and barnstormer who in the late 1940s helped persuade California’s Department of Fish and Game to drop rainbow trout into mountain lakes from the air. (He tested the fishes’ ability to survive the trip partly by holding live specimens out a car window at 70 miles per hour.) The state agency recruited World War II pilots and purchased surplus military airplanes to dump the fish, generally from about 200 feet. Many of the trout died on impact with the water or ended up stuck in trees, but enough survived to inspire the agency to similarly drop turkeys, partridges, and even beaver (in burlap sacks attached to parachutes). About 50 years later, the agency learned that it had gone overboard with its fish-bombing runs, inadvertently ridding lakes of rare frogs, which the fish had devoured, and filling some lakes with so many trout that their growth was stunted from too much competition for food.

California fish-and-game officials are hardly the only ones who eventually altered trout-stocking policies in response to evidence of money wasted or doing more harm than good.

The book devotes a chapter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision in 1962 to deliberately poison the Green River in Utah and Wyoming to wipe out the native fish and make room for rainbows. At the time, few in the agency questioned the idea of pouring huge amounts of the piscicide rotenone into a body of water. Since 1952 federal and state fisheries managers had used the chemical, which kills anything with gills, to clear the way for rainbow trout and other game fish in a long list of rivers and lakes around the nation, even within national parks.

A few scholars at Colorado State University and the University of Utah spoke out against the Green River plan and subsequently complained of efforts by state and federal agencies to shut them up by threatening to cut off grants to their institutions. Many of those involved in the river poisoning lived to regret it, for it ended up being a disaster for both the environment and public relations.

The project’s planners assumed they would be able to keep the keep the river from carrying the rotenone into Dinosaur National Monument park by having workers neutralize the poison upstream from the park with potassium permanganate, but they were wrong. When dead fish turned up in the park, the Fish and Wildlife Service found itself in the cross hairs of the National Park Service. Perhaps even more important, about three weeks after the incident, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, helping spawn an environmental movement that barraged officials in Washington with angry letters about the Green River kill.

The secretary of interior at the time, Stewart Udall, responded by curbing the use of rotenone by federal agencies and calling for the welfare of unique species to be a “dominant consideration” in such projects from then on. All four of the chief so-called trash fish that the Green River poisoning sought to kill—the humpback chub, the bonytail, the razorback sucker, and the Colorado pikeminnow—now have a place on the federal endangered-species list. The federal government has spent more than $100-million trying to save them.

An Entirely Synthetic Fish recounts many other governmental attempts at improving nature that went awry. In the 1960s, for example, researchers discovered that stocking a river with hatchery trout can decimate the wild trout population and actually leave it with fewer trout over all; the hatchery fish aggressively compete with the locals for food, and many end up being eaten themselves because they seem to associate the shadows of predators with those of hatchery workers tossing kibble. Beginning in the late 1980s, the Colorado Division of Wildlife inadvertently unleashed trout epidemics by stocking rivers with rainbows infected with parasite-born whirling disease, which leaves its victims disfigured and prone to swimming in tight circles.

The book also compellingly traces how the nation’s attitudes toward fishing have varied over time. In the 17th century, the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony regarded fishing with a hook and line as an exercise in idleness deserving punishment. During and just after the American Revolution, fishing suffered a similar image problem, thanks to its association with the English aristocracy. Beginning in the mid-1800s, however, interest in sport fishing boomed as it gained status as a diversion for the wealthy and came to be viewed as a pursuit that helped keep men virile and in touch with nature. Politicians eager to take credit for bringing hatchery jobs and better fishing to their states happily supported federal efforts to stock waters with game species.

Throughout much of America, one can still encounter the absurd sight of fishermen gathered on riverbanks next to hatchery trucks, hoping to catch naïve rainbow trout minutes after they are stocked. While not exactly shooting fish in a barrel, perhaps no other experience comes as close.

For his part, Halverson is attempting to restore the populations of rarer species of trout by, counterintuitively, encouraging people to fish for them. Taking a cue from the culture of birdwatchers, many of whom will travel long distances to add to their “life list” of species they have seen, he has set up a Web site that encourages anglers to catch and release as many species as they can. His logic is that if enough people roll into small towns and say they are out to hook rare fish species X or Y, the local chambers of commerce will get word, and new constituencies will be created to lobby for the fish’s restoration.

Writing An Entirely Synthetic Fish has renewed his own interest in angling, both for rainbows and for other trout, Halverson says. “I actually love fishing again. You pick one of these rainbows up, and it is just a book that says so much about us.”

Warning: Your Reality is Out of Date.

Introducing the Mesofact

By Samuel Arbesman  

When people think of knowledge, they generally think of two sorts of facts: facts that don’t change, like the height of Mount Everest or the capital of the United States, and facts that fluctuate constantly, like the temperature or the stock market close.

But in between there is a third kind: facts that change slowly. These are facts which we tend to view as fixed, but which shift over the course of a lifetime. For example: What is Earth’s population? I remember learning 6 billion, and some of you might even have learned 5 billion. Well, it turns out it’s about 6.8 billion.

Or, imagine you are considering relocating to another city. Not recognizing the slow change in the economic fortunes of various metropolitan areas, you immediately dismiss certain cities. For example, Pittsburgh, a city in the core of the historic Rust Belt of the United States, was for a long time considered to be something of a city to avoid. But recently, its economic fortunes have changed, swapping steel mills for technology, with its job growth ranked sixth in the entire United States.

These slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information. We recognize rapid change, whether it’s as simple as a fast-moving object or living with the knowledge that humans have walked on the moon. But anything short of large-scale rapid change is often ignored. This is the reason we continue to write the wrong year during the first days of January.

Our schools are biased against mesofacts. The arc of our educational system is to be treated as little generalists when children, absorbing bits of knowledge about everything from biology to social studies to geology. But then, as we grow older, we are encouraged to specialize. This might have been useful in decades past, but in our increasingly fast-paced and interdisciplinary world, lacking an even approximate knowledge of our surroundings is unwise.

Updating your mesofacts can change how you think about the world. Do you know the percentage of people in the world who use mobile phones? In 1997, the answer was 4 percent. By 2007, it was nearly 50 percent. The fraction of people who are mobile phone users is the kind of fact you might read in a magazine and quote at a cocktail party. But years later the number you would be quoting would not just be inaccurate, it would be seriously wrong. The difference between a tiny fraction of the world and half the globe is startling, and completely changes our view on global interconnectivity.

Mesofacts can also be fun. Let’s focus for a moment on some mesofacts that can be of vital importance if you’re a child, or parent of a child: those about dinosaurs. Just a few decades ago, dinosaurs were thought to be cold-blooded, slow-witted lizards that walked with their legs splayed out beside them. Now, scientists think that many dinosaurs were warm-blooded and fast-moving creatures. And they even had feathers! Just a few weeks ago we learned about the color patterns of dinosaurs (stripes! with orange tufts!). These facts might not affect how you live your life, but then again, you’re probably not 6 years old. There is another mesofact that is unlikely to affect your daily routine, but might win you a bar bet: the number of planets known outside the solar system. After the first extrasolar planet around an ordinary star made headlines back in 1995, most people stopped paying attention. Well, the number of extrasolar planets is currently over 400. Know this, and the next round won’t be on you.

The fact that the world changes rapidly is exciting, but everyone knows about that. There is much change that is neither fast nor momentous, but no less breathtaking.

 

  An In-Depth Look At the Federal Budget

by Hale “Bonddad” Stewart

This week, the president announced the creation of a panel to look at the federal budget. As such, it seems appropriate to look at the federal budget in detail to get a sense of what’s there. All of the information contained in the graphs that follow is available from the CBO. Please click on all images to see a larger image. Also, all data starts in 1970 and goes through fiscal 2009.
The US has run a surplus 4 years since 1970, or about 10% of the time. Over those 39 years we’ve had Republican and Democratic control of both the White House and Congress. This leads to a very simple conclusion: no party can make a legitimate claim to being fiscally responsible.
Above is a chart of the total deficit for each year going back to 1970. First, note (again) only four years show a surplus. This means that for 35 years (and in fact for a longer period) the US has issued debt on a continuing basis to pay for its revenue shortfall. This means the US — like most US corporations — has to manage its Treasury operations. All this means is the US Treasury has to decide what maturity of Treasury bond to issue, how much of a particular Treasury bond to issue and when to issue it. Again, this is standard procedure from a corporate finance perspective.$12.4 trillion and total US GDP is approximately $14.4 trillion. That makes the debt/GDP ratio 86%. While that is not good, it is not fatal.
Above is a chart of total federal outlays as a percent of GDP. Notice the number has been remarkably constant since 1970, fluctuating right around 20% for most of that time.
Personal income taxes (the top blue line) comprise the largest percentage of federal tax receipts. In addition, these have continually comprised about 45%-50% of total federal receipts. The biggest change since 1970 has occurred in social insurance taxes (the yellow line), which have increased from a little over 20% to about 35%-40% over the last 10 years. Corporate taxes (the light purple line) have also been consistently responsible for about 10% of total tax receipts. Finally, note that estate and gift taxes (the light blue line at the bottom of the graph) overall contribution is more or less negligible on a percentage basis.
The above chart looks at federal receipts from a percent of GDP basis. Fist, note the percentages have been fairly consistent since 1970. Personal income taxes total between 8%-10% of GDP, corporate taxes total about 2% of GDP and estate and gift taxes account for less than 1% of GDP. The only big change has been an increase in social insurance taxes, which have increased to about 6% of GDP.
The above chart breaks federal spending down into mandatory, discretionary and interest payments. Mandatory spending has increased from a little under 40% of the federal budget in 1970 to right around 60% over the last few years. Discretionary spending has decreased from right around 60% in 1970 to a little under 40% over the last few years. The progression of mandatory spending is at the center of much of the budgetary concern in Washington and the public.
Above is a chart of the 10-year CMT (constantly maturing treasury). Interest rates have been dropping for about 20 years. While there is considerable debate regarding the possibility of this continuing, we’ll have to wait and see how that plays out.
Above is a chart of mandatory and discretionary spending as a percent of GDP. Interestingly enough, despite the increase in the dollar amount of discretionary spending, it has remained more or less constant on a percent of GDP basis. The recent spike may be the result of the extraordinary budgetary circumstances the country is currently in. Additionally, discretionary spending actually dropped until the beginning of the decade when it started to rise again. Finally, interest payments are under control for now.

Let’s start with a chart of government revenues and expenditures, starting in 1970:

Currently, total US debt is approximately

Let’s take a look at the components of federal revenue.

Finally, note that interest payments are in fact pretty much under control. The primary reason for this is the near 20 year downward trajectory in interest rates:

Finally, the chart above shows the percentages of SS, Medicaid and Medicare of mandatory spending. The big issue here is clear: note the increase of medicare as a percentage of mandatory spending. It’s been increasing for some time.

So, what does all of this tell us about the US budget?

1.) The total federal debt/GDP ratio and interest rate payments (both on a percent to total expenditures and percent of GDP) are manageable at current levels. All of this has been aided by a two decade long decrease in interest rates. It’s doubtful that will continue given the current pace of expenditures. Most importantly, given the current rate of spending and debt growth, changes will have to be made once we are out of the recession for sure. And that’s where the real political problem lies.

2.) While mandatory spending has remained constant as a percent of GDP, it’s increase to about 60% of the current federal budget is perhaps the biggest problem the US faces going forward. And as the percentage increase in medicare payments indicates, medical payments are a primary reason for the problems the country faces at the federal fiscal level.

3.) The argument that the US is taxed to death is wrong. On a percent of GDP basis the US is taxed at moderate rates.

4.) I’m surprised how unimportant estate and gift taxes are to the overall scheme of things. Even before the generous estate tax credit of the last few years (essentially exempting estates worth less than $3.5 million), estate and gift taxes are remarkably unimportant from a total revenues perspective. It’s obvious they serve another purpose such as the theoretical prevention of dynastic wealth transfer.