Osler's Razor

As the nation continues its recovery from a deep recession caused by reckless real estate investments (by home buyers, lenders, and derivatives traders), it is increasingly clear that the wealthy are recovering while the poor and middle class are not.  Stock prices are high, but wages are not.

In the midst of this, Congress has cut food stamps, and is poised to cut more.

I'm baffled by this.  Given our continued support of agri-businesses through enormous subsidies, why is it we treat poor people different than those corporations, even within the context of a single farm bill?  If the principle food-stamp-cutters stand on is "self sufficiency," then why doesn't that principle  apply to large corporations?  Shouldn't we make them do without the hand-outs of taxpayer money?

To apply a harsh principle to the poor but not to the rich and to corporations makes sense only if my dad is right-- that our politics are now badly skewed by the money spent on political campaigns by corporations.  Increasingly, I am convinced that he is right.

Clay is my favorite Auburn fan, and it was a great weekend to be an Auburn fan.  If you missed it, here is what happened in the Iron Bowl, the annual state rivalry game between Alabama and Auburn:



It totally messed up the BCS in the most wonderful way.  This is why I love college football.

One word:  Brining!  It made this year's turkey the best ever.  Really.

And did you see the ending of the Auburn-Alabama game?  I didn't (I was out getting food for dinner), but my parents reported it was pretty amazing.

And that haiku!  Check it all out here.  Sally's was too profane to reprint (she gets like that), but it was awesome.  As was this Italian reverie from Antonia Promessa:

Every moment is
Thanksgiving in Italy.
Pasta,Wine,Song.

I sit on the pink
piazza and drink vino
The sun is glow-warm

All Things move turtle.
We are kissing when our tall
Waiter comes with the bread.

He does not avoid
Our eyes but tries to drink from
Love's common bottle.

Man, I never did find the good stuff in Italy!

With Thanksgiving past, we enter a season of two definitions, presenting a challenge for Christians.

First, it is the Christmas season in our culture-- a time of revelry, spending, and tumult.

Second, it is the Christian season of Advent, which calls us to a time of quiet and waiting.

The two conflict in every possible way.  If we devote our time and energy to Advent, we don't get our shopping done, and we miss the parties.  The other way doesn't work either.

I wish that I could say that I do both, but I don't.  I bow much more to the culture than to my religious imperative, in part because I can't resist the impulse to indulge all of our culture's bounty this time of year.  Do others struggle with this balance?

When I was the fifth-grader pictured here, I was a student at John R. Barnes Elementary School in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.  It was a good school, with many decent teachers and some great ones, too, along with a committed and caring principal, Mr. McMahon.

The school had a choir composed of fifth and sixth graders.  The music teacher had tryouts in the fall, well ahead of the holiday concert the choir would present.  We each trooped into her music room individually and sang for her.  When it was my turn, I came in, sang what she asked, and turned around.  She said nothing.

A few days later, the names of those who had made the choir went up-- every name but mine and one other kid in the class.  The other kid, Vince, was developmentally disabled.  He spent only some of his day with our class, and even then had special assignments.  My classroom teacher told the whole class that when everyone else went to choir, Vince and I would stay behind and work on a project in our classroom.

I suppose that this is where the story usually veers off into a bitter remembrance of being teased and bullied by the other kids, but that isn't what happened.  Sure, I was hurt and confused about why I was the only student besides Vince not to make the choir-- was I that much worse of a singer than Wally and Dave and Mike?-- but I don't remember anyone in the class saying a cruel word.

So I was left to do my project with Vince as everyone else marched off to the music room.  The teacher  struggled to come up with something Vince and I could work on, and finally told us to design and build a cereal box.

I didn't really know Vince; I was a shy kid, and he had his own challenges.  Now that we were thrown together, though, I had to get to know him.  And I did.

It was the first time in my life I had the chance to work with a handicapped person, to accommodate their needs and acknowledge their strengths, and I found it fascinating.  Vince loved the project.  His mom sent him in with boxes for us to look at, and for the first time I really examined what they put on the box, the marketing and busyness of it.  We went slowly, since we had weeks to finish.  I learned to settle down, to adjust to his pace, and be quiet sometimes with him.  He was often a good listener, it turned out, something that is rare in fifth grade.

After the concert (I didn't go) the choir was done with its task, and so were Vince and I.  Probably I learned much more than the choir kids.  That lesson, in my best moments at least, still informs my actions when I am with someone like Vince.  

That's what I am thankful for today.  I have had failures and humiliations in my life, grave disappointments, and each one has led to something good.  I realize how rare that is, how fortunate I am.  The grace I have received was unearned-- like those afternoons with Vince, I did nothing to bring them on except to fail in some way.  What can be more remarkable than that?

The gentle hand of such grace is a precious thing, and I am a very fortunate man.

Here in Minneapolis there is a place that is a little hard to describe.  The Bryant Lake Bowl is part bar, part hipster restaurant, part bowling alley, and part live theater.

The theater is directly adjacent to the bowling alley, and the soundproofing is... well, I think hipsters installed it.  Which means that when you see a play there, you also hear all the sounds that go with people bowling.  And, inevitably, that means you are sitting there in the theater wondering if it might not be a better evening to be bowling than to be watching this particular play.

I like bowling.  I'm not good at it, but I enjoy it.  That said, last night when I went to see Tom Ward's 31 Plays at the Bryant Lake Bowl, I never once thought I would be better off bowling.

The play, featuring Tom and his wife Sherry, hit pretty close to home.  It centered around Jesus problems, Baylor, Minneapolis culture, and drinking, in about that order of importance.  Needless to say, these are all things I have had on my mind lately.  This is stuff I know.  I have been working on a book about the Trial of Jesus and the fascinating cast of characters associated with that, and there was a certain continuity to my day.

Though a lot of the play would be construed by some as "anti-religious," I would never describe it that way.  It was an honest, painfully honest, revelation by someone about their own faith, a revelation that showed ambivalence, doubt, and (sometimes) rejection.  What truly honest discussion of faith wouldn't include those things?  In truth, the play served the same function as the very best church services-- the ones that tell a story, the kind of story that troubles you deeply, hits close to home, and demands honesty, ambivalence, doubt, and rejection.

That probably isn't a mistake.  Ward grew up with storytelling in church the way that Aretha Franklin grew up with singing in church-- it formed and shaped the tools, which could then be used for other things.

So many great haiku last week!  Go back and read them all-- such excellent entries.

I may not forgive Sara Sommervold for this:

Always the same song,
My Baby Takes The Morning...
We waltz, teens in gym.

Because now I can't get that stupid song out of my head! Here, Sara, I think it is important that you listen to this a few times:

Well, if you really are into Baylor football...

ESPN's College Gameday is in Stillwater, Oklahoma for the big Baylor/Oklahoma State game.  It's a game that really matters, too-- Baylor is undefeated and ranked #4, and OSU has one lost and is ranked #10.  Baylor has a bad history in Stillwater, but this might be the year...

It will be an uphill fight, though.  Oklahoma State has a good squad... and such interesting names!:


 

At any rate, even if you don't like football, there are some good options today.  For example, the new Hunger Games movie is out.  It is about a dystopian society where children from different districts have the "honor" of opposing one another in brutal combat, which is televised to millions of people as a way of distracting them from economic inequalities in their society.  I'm glad I don't live there!

Maybe you don't have a song stuck in your head right now (like I do), but you know it has happened at some time or another.  An advertising jingle, "Muskrat Love," that song about gum that IPLawGuy wrote in 1984, whatever.

Here is mine:

Vampire Weekend;
That Bari sax as a drone...
It's stuck in my head!

Now it is your turn.  Just make it 5 syllables/7 syllables/5 syllables and vent!

Robert Shiller, a Nobel laureate in economics, has called income disparity in the United States "the most important problem that we are facing."  There can be no doubt that income disparity has grown in my lifetime:  from 1979-2007, the top 1% of households saw their income increase by 275%, while the bottom one-fifth saw only an 18% increase.  That's a remarkable difference.

Should it matter that the middle class is shrinking?  Smarter people than me think it does, and even my economics-challenged brain tells me that this is something contrary to the way we Americans see ourselves-- as a hard-working, middle-class country.  In reality, though, we are moving towards a society with a large underclass and a smaller upper class, with fewer people in between.

If you accept that this is a problem (and not everyone does), then the question is what to do about it.

There are several possible approaches, but the two that are most discussed are a more progressive tax structure and a higher minimum wage.  The latter has been in the news lately, as activists have coalesced around a specific target:  the $15 per hour minimum wage.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25, which has been true since 2009.  A full time worker making $7.25 an hour will earn about $15,080 a year.  As President Obama noted, a family with two kids making minimum wage is living far below the poverty line.

Some economists argue that raising the minimum wage would be ineffective or counter-productive at reducing poverty, in part because many poor people don't work and because many minimum-wage earners don't live in poverty.  Common sense tells us, too, that the economic disruption caused by a swift hike in the minimum wage is a bad idea during a fragile economic recovery.  Moreover, price hikes caused by such a change would disproportionately affect the poor-- because they more often than others shop at low-wage employers like Wal-Mart and eat at low-wage employers like McDonalds.

As a long-term strategy, though, I have sympathy to the idea.  It makes sense to me that hard work should be rewarded with something more than poverty, if it is that low-wage work which sustains you. Our society too often imposes policies that disfavors work.  For example, profits from investments are taxed at a much lower rate than most wages.

If I am working for $7.25 an hour, a two-dollar raise is a big deal.  It matters.  It has been a long time since I made $15,000 a year (and things were cheaper then), but I remember acutely how careful I had to be, and how little I could afford.

I know that if the minimum wage is improved significantly the price for some things would go up, but I am willing to pay that difference.  I suspect that I'm not alone...

Rebecca Black is back with a new song:



And if you are into movies, there is that new Hunger Games film coming out this weekend:

This week, Brett Favre said that if he had a son, he probably wouldn't let him play football.

Football may be fading as an American sport.  Not because people don't want to watch it, but because people don't want to play it-- or at least don't want their kids to play.

What might this mean?

I fear that something terrible has happened.

For the first time ever, Mustang's Former Sally has written a haiku, and Geoffrey has not responded.  Here was her poem:

Geoff wanted to be a
Doctor in his youth.Auditioned
Gals for experiments.

Invited Trixie,
For Boudoir experiments,I
Had to put foot down.

On his sorry ass. (Syllables suck!) 

Despite being called out, Geoffrey never showed up.  I'm pretty sure that means that he has died, probably in some kind of defective-toy-related accident.  Sigh. WHY him?  Why?

UPDATE:  It turns out he is ok.  He penned this late entry:

Curious lad,loved
To go to the doctor.When
The nurse looked at him

With soft doe-ish browns,
Felt his heart melt,when her warm
Hand took pulse...med school!!!