Blinding Insights

Dissidents in a Box: On Becoming a Sociologist

2011-11-07T14:27:00.004-05:00

Dissidents in a Box: Clip from the Carl Taube Award Lecture

The Taube Award event wasn't recorded for posterity, but here's a remake of a short section on mainframe computers and reading Talcott Parsons at age 19.

Obama Goes to Texas

2011-08-29T20:28:00.005-04:00

Click here:

Click to watch "Obama Goes to Texas on YouTube

Professor Nader-Fonda kicks off the show with a short presentation called "Great Unlikely Moments In Cultural Diplomacy." Commentary follows from Jimmy Jay Viras, Bill Clinton Hernandez, and Sgt. Sigurd Bjornstad. Highlights include a paparazzi shot of President Obama on a private vacation with Governor Rick Perry on South Padre Island, and recently-discovered archival footage of Richard Nixon accompanying Chinese Elvises on "You Ain't Nothing But a Hound Dog."

Caddy Tax

2011-07-29T16:56:00.007-04:00

Watch on YouTube: Caddy Tax: Blinding Insights Hosts Harvard Health Economist Tom McGuire

Harvard Professor Tom McGuire appears on BI to discuss the cost of health care in America and the merits of the "Cadillac Tax" on health insurance premiums under health care reform. Bill Clinton Hernandez confuses Tom with another MacGwire. Nader-Fonda borrows one of Tom's PowerPoint slides to trap unwanted data. Jimmy Jay Viras accuses Tom of being a socialist, and argues the fine points of free-market health care. Sgt. Sigurd Bjornstad may be having a heart attack, and gives an impassioned plea for health care as the basic right of every knucklehead. Finally, Lola Victor-Pujebet returns for a BI encore to comment on the French health care system and say which economist is more charming--Tom or Wilfred. An outtake after the credits raises the distinct possibility that Tom actually plays for the Boston Red Sox.

YouTube: Caddy Tax: Blinding Insights Hosts Harvard Health Economist Tom McGuire

Musically Impaired

2011-06-29T19:18:00.003-04:00

Click to Watch on YouTube:

Blinding Insights - "Musically Impaired"

Blinding Insights tackles the subject of disabilities and what it means to have a physical handicap. Two special guests--Lola Victor-Pujebet from France and Angela Swanson from North Carolina--discuss their personal experience and friendship. Jimmy Jay Viras settles a lawsuit from a wrongfully-terminated bass player. Nader-Fonda speaks out for persons with persistent affected accent disorder with Anglofilia. We learn why Sgt. Bjornstad always wears sun glasses on the show. And BC Hernandez reflects on parents who embarrass their children.

Liberals to Uranus

2011-05-30T14:21:00.005-04:00

Click below to watch on YouTube:

Click here to watch Liberals to Uranus on YouTube.

The state of the US economy is the topic of this interview with
Wilfred Nader-Fonda, Jimmy Jay Viras, and Sgt. Sigurd Bjornstad. Wilfred has a moment of emotional vulnerability before proceeding to dispel the myth of a fiscal crisis and enumerating the many ills of social inequality. Jimmy Jay Viras reaches out to the professor and cuts through it. The sergeant provides a reality check from the everyday life of an underpaid police officer--doing real work but making less money than Jimmy Jay's hair stylist, of whom Sigurd has a low opinion.

Bobcat Mother

2011-03-07T00:22:00.006-05:00

YouTube Link:

Click here to watch Bobcat Mother on Blinding Insights - YouTube Chanel

Searching for common ground to solve the "massive problems" of the world, Professor Nader-Fonda introduces his neuroeconomic theory of the bicameral brain. Special guest Jay Anderson from Minnesota appears on the show to introduce the Tiger Mom's Advisory Board (TMAB) -- A Voice for Solutions: "What we don't need in this country is one more hysterical opinion. What we do need are solutions....and somewhere in the middle, you're gonna find truth." Jimmy Jay Viras recalls his own mother and how he overcame "adversity" to become a famous Nashville singer. He opines upon the Chinese. A commercial sponsor for Blinding Insights is introduced. Sgt. Bjornstad objects. Jeff covers a classic JJV ballad...

For a full introduction to Jay, see To the End of Limbo on this site from September 29, 2008.

Arizona Picnic

2011-02-13T20:19:00.009-05:00

Click here for Arizona Picnic video

Something different: Blinding Insights launches "Diversity Among Real Americans" series. BI shoots a documentary in the Arizona desert. Commentary follows from the regular panel, Prof. Wilfred Nader-Fonda, Jimmy Jay Viras, Bill Clinton Hernandez, and Sgt. Sigurd Bjornstad.

[Note: This video features the family of my brother, Tod Swanson. If you'd like to know more, read "Brothers in the Dark," posted June 29, 2009. Brothers in the Dark.]

Pull Over and Shoot Safely

2011-01-29T06:52:00.007-05:00

Click here to watch:

Season 2, Episode 1: "Pull Over and Shoot Safely"

They're back for Season 2. Jimmy Jay Viras, Professor Wilfred Nader-Fonda, Sgt. Sigurd Bjornstad, and Bill Clinton Hernandez discuss cell phones and distracted driving.

Should there be a law against it?

Stay tuned at the end of the program for a special invitation and to learn how YOU can be a guest on Blinding Insights.

You can also watch Season 1 Highlights, a special edition made up of key quips from "How Sarah Palin Wins," "Cannabis," "iGun," "Supreme Court," "Immigration," Wayfaring American: the Musical," "Rehab Cartel," "e-Mum," "Professor Nader-Fonda and the Ants," and "Christmas Special."

Click below:

Season 1 Highlights

Professor Nader-Fonda and the Ants

2010-12-06T20:31:00.003-05:00

Blinding Insights Productions presents Professor Wilfred Nader-Fonda's illustrated "exciting adventure in applied theory, research methodology, and data analysis." Discussant Jimmy Jay Viras provides critical commentary: "He can't shoot straight!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8bnT8uk9BE

Godspeed, Greyhound

2010-07-18T22:01:00.040-04:00

An e-mail arrives with the news Bob Wennberg has pancreatic cancer. He could be gone by the fall, they say.

I turn to the window, to the tree, to the sky, to 1977 on a golden Santa Barbara morning. Bob is standing at a lectern, peering down through his bifocals at a bevy of diffident nineteen-year-olds. He cocks back his head and sets forth the key analytical critiques of disembodied existence. It’s hard stuff.

Somebody asks Bob a question you wouldn’t remember, and gets an answer you couldn’t forget. Bob says, “Some days, I think I’d like to be a Greyhound bus driver. I wouldn’t give lectures anymore. I’d just look out ahead at the highway and drive—right into the night. I’d take people where they needed to go. They’d be there by the next morning. It would be honorable work, something useful.” He chuckles, but you wonder if the man is half serious.

Now there’s a website for his former students to write to him in the past tense and say … what? Dear Doctor Wennberg, You were the greatest. I don’t remember much philosophy, but you had such a big impact on my life. Thank you so, so much.

Is that enough?

* * *

Last week my friend John called on a whim, asked if I’d go with him to the Blue Bayou in Hillsborough. The musical act was billed as an Indian jazz flute player. So I went with John, and my daughter Alex came along, and we’re sitting there listening to this music—it’s both familiar and peculiar at the same time—having a draft or two. And John says, “What if you had more than one life? What would yours be?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I think about it for a minute. “I guess I’d like to have my same mind and experience—I’d like to be me—in my son’s body. I would know everything I know now, right? But I’d be in his body. Six-two and athletic and buff. And nineteen.”

“You’d be formidable,” John says. “But wouldn’t it be just a different sort of torture? Think about it, really ….”

“OK, what would you be?”

“I’d be a passionate musician. I’d be consumed by some instrument."

There had been this brief and magical moment when John had everything—his own mortgage company and a faux-farmhouse mansion with a pool on seven acres, a Porsche convertible, and a beach house in Beaufort with a boat. To say nothing of a lovely and inscrutable Argentine wife and four equally stunning children. Then she left him and it all unraveled. He lost it all, except for the kids—them, and the grand piano. Nobody knows how he got the thing into the rented bungalow in Carrboro when it ended.

“It wouldn’t even matter if people loved me,” John says. “They would, of course—everybody’d love me—I’d be that good. But I wouldn’t care. It would just be about the music.”

* * *

Thirty feet goes by fast when you’re sixteen on your way down from a concrete bridge into a river of clear melted snow on a hot day in the Ecuadorian jungle. Down, down, into the water, hold my breath, feel the current, swim against it, open my eyes, see the green boulders and the tiny fish.

I break the surface and tread water, look back at the bridge. Steve Moss is up there. “Come on, Steve!” I shout. “You can do it. Jump!”

Steve is silent, staring down. He’s never going to do it. Steve is a quiet, nerdy medical student from the farmlands of South Georgia. He’s been working long hours in the mission hospital with my dad. I’ve taken him here to show off. I want Steve to see I’m not afraid to jump from the Alpayacu bridge. I’ll dare him to do it, too, but I know he won’t. He’s not the type.

People are so predictable—they really are. Except when they’re not.

Slowly, cautiously, Steve hoists himself onto the concrete wall. He stands up there, balanced on the narrow slab for almost a full minute. He’s trying to get up his courage, I think. I’ve seen people get this far and back down, ease off the bridge and wonder what they were thinking.

“Just do it, Steve! Don’t be a chicken. It’s OK, it’s only water down here! You’ll be fine.”

Steve bends his knees slightly, almost crouches, and then . . . he releases himself out into thin air like an uncoiling spring. Up, up, out over the water, he’s a bird. Then he coils again, a spinning ball, one flip. Two. Two-and-a-half. He cuts the river like a knife blade and disappears under the Alpayacu, leaving barely a ripple.

We dry off on the warm rocks and Steve says, “I admire your dad a lot. He’s the kind of doctor I want to be.” Then he tells me about his father, Captain Robert “Moose” Moss.

Steve’s dad was a farm boy from Colquitt County, Georgia, but in 1941 he became something else: a highly decorated P-40 fighter pilot and one of the legendary Flying Tigers of World War II. Moose and his fellow Tigers shot down 299 enemy planes in seven months. They were credited with stopping the Japanese invasion of China. When Moose got back to South Georgia, he wanted to build something different at Moose Farms—something to remember the Flying Tigers—for the sheer majesty of people diving through the air but now without the metal and the fire and smoke. And so he built a deep swimming pool and a high diving board and it became a world class aquatic facility where six Olympic teams have trained.

The Moss Farms competitive diving teams—the kids who train there—are called the Diving Tigers. Steve was one of them. (“Just jump!” I’d shouted.)

* * *

Pam and Alex join me for sushi and a drink on a hot Friday night at Brightleaf Square. We sit out in the courtyard, listen to the Bull City Syndicate playing blues for awhile, then head down Main Street for a walk.

Pam and Alex disappear into a little shop with West African objects d’art. I stay outside and watch the passersby. When the girls don’t come out after awhile, I go in and find them engrossed in conversation with the Nigerian shopkeeper. I join in.

“How’s business?” I say.

“Getting better,” says the Nigerian shopkeeper. “I was worried when I opened here. They had the street torn up then, and there wasn’t much foot traffic.”

He talks to Alex. He has a daughter, too. Alex tells the shopkeeper she just graduated from college and doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

“Here is a proverb for you,” the shopkeeper intones. “A wise person said, ‘You only live once. But if you work it right, once is enough.’”

That could be true, I think. Trouble is, so many people screw it up the first time—right out of the box. By the time you know, that’s it. So once is not enough. Twice, maybe. Otherwise, what good is midlife imagination? What’s that for?

We’re about to leave. “Good luck,” I say to the shopkeeper. (I mean it. I’m worried about him.)

“Thanks,” he says. “At least I’ve got my day job.”

“Oh? And what’s that?”

A moment later I’m staring at a business card and I realize I’ve been talking to a doctor—a professor of obstetric anesthesiology at Duke Medical School. The shop is his hobby.

* * *

I leave Pam and Alex at the concrete waterfall by the Tobacco Warehouse and walk back to get the car at Brightleaf. I cut across Pettigrew Street and pass the Durham bus station. I see a Greyhound there, about to leave the depot. It’s an inferno out here—I'm drenched with sweat. I hear the hum of the bus and imagine the cool inside. Then I ponder the Nigerian shopkeeper-anesthesiologist and suddenly I think, I could be somebody else. I could be a touring country singer, or a police officer in a college town. I could be out there—protecting the public from twenty-eight-thousand knuckleheads. Or what if I turned and walked, just over there, and got on that bus? I’d sit right up front where I could see everything. I wouldn’t need to know where we were going. The bus driver would take care of that. He would head us out West. We'd cut across the Piedmont like a silver knife through the steamy night. We’d be into the high country by eleven-thirty, crossing the intercontinental divide. All the passengers would be asleep, but not me. I’d watch the moon rise over the Smokies and I’d talk to the driver. He’d be quiet for awhile, but finally ... he’d tell me the meaning of this life and what may lie beyond.

This was a good one, Bob. Godspeed.

Carry Me

2010-03-30T18:12:00.046-04:00

Part 1.

What I remember most about that morning in 1968 is the cold blanket of fog covering the Ecuadorian páramo, and how my dad disappeared from view just a few feet ahead of me on the trail into Lake San Marcos. I was ten years old.

We had spent the previous night in Cayambe, a mountain town at the base of a massive snow-capped volcano by the same name, and then at dawn headed out on foot from the trailhead--me, my brother Tod, his friend Jim, our dad, Dad’s friend Mr. Allpress, and Victor Chicaiza.

Victor was a stout Quichua man hired to carry our camping gear, including tents and food supplies and our dad’s inflatable rubber boat for trout fishing. Victor planned to leave us at the lake and hike back out alone once he got us down there with all this stuff.

Dad suggested at first that we stay together on the trail, but it didn’t happen. Tod and Jim ran on ahead, eager to slip the surly bonds of adult supervision. Next went plodding Victor Chicaiza, slowed by his massive burden but still outpacing Mr. Allpress, Dad, and finally me.

About a half-hour into the hike, Dad disappeared in the fog. I called for him to wait for me, but he didn’t answer. I started to run with my knapsack, lost my footing in the mud, and fell headlong. I smacked my shinbone with full force on a branch that had fallen over the trail.

Lying there in the mud and the mist, with my leg throbbing in the moments after I’d fallen, I screamed for Dad. I screamed first in pain and then in panic when he didn’t come.

In retrospect, I now imagine Dad had been chatting with Mr. Allpress on the trail and failed to notice that the boy wasn’t following behind him. Eventually, of course, he realized that I wasn’t there and he turned around and came back for me. Mr. Allpress walked on.

By the time I saw Dad emerge from the cloud up ahead, I was crying. But then I felt ashamed of my fear and the tears and I blamed it all on the hurt leg. Dad checked the bruise on my shin, gave due regard to my agony, and set forth a provisional diagnosis: “You might just have a little fracture of your tibia there, Ol’Buddy,” Dad said. “You probably shouldn’t walk on it, in any case. Tell you what, let’s find a spot for you to sit for awhile and I’ll go get Victor to carry you down.”

Dad helped me up out of the mud, then crouched and told me to climb on his back. He carried me until he found a flat place, then sat me down in the páramo grass. “Now just wait here, Ol’ Buddy,” he said. Then Dad gathered up his gear and my knapsack, too, and took off down the trail to Lake San Marcos.

It seemed like hours, sitting out there alone on the mountainside. The fog begat a cold drizzle. I wondered if Dad had forgotten where he’d left me. Then he and Victor Chicaiza showed up, and they were a welcome sight. Dad said Victor would carry me all the way down to the lake. Then he said Victor was going out to Cayambe and he’d bring back some plaster bandages so Dad could set my leg in a cast. (He, Dad, would just heat up some water on the campfire to soften the plaster--no problem.) Finally, he said Victor was going to bring in a horse from Cayambe on the day we would leave, so I could ride out and Victor wouldn’t have to carry both me and the boat.

By that time, my leg was actually feeling quite a bit better, but I wasn’t about to say so. And then . . . the more I thought about that cast coming in from Cayambe and the horse and all, my leg started to feel plenty bad again.

The truth is, I ended up having a pretty good time for a kid on a fishing trip with an implausibly broken leg. I hopped gamely down to the lakeshore on my “good leg” and caught my share of rainbow trout. In the evenings, we grilled the fish over the campfire and Dad and Mr. Allpress talked and told stories into the night.

Henry Allpress, Esquire, was a distinguished-looking, avuncular gentleman who worked for USAID in Quito. He was the epitome of what I thought of admiringly as an “American Colony man.” He had two lovely daughters who went to our school--much older than my brother and me--but he didn’t have any boys of his own. Mr. Allpress loved to fish, and to talk about fishing, and it seemed nice that Dad had a friend.

After we’d camped out there at Lake San Marcos for several days, Victor showed up with the horse, just as Dad had asked him to, but the horse had no saddle or bridle--just a blanket and a rope. Victor steadied the horse while Dad and Mr. Allpress lifted me onto his back. The horse tried to throw me off at first, but Dad and Mr. Allpress held on to me and Victor reprimanded the horse. Victor then tossed the inflatable rubber boat and sundry camping gear over his shoulders and led the horse and me straight up the mountain.

By the time I was fully evacuated to Quito, my leg was pretty well healed. As for the guilt, I’ve still got that.

Part 2.

I remember it was a sweltering afternoon in North Carolina that day I pushed Angela’s wheelchair up the wooded trail to the waterfall at Chimney Rock. It must have been the summer of 1993; she was just a little girl.

Chimney Rock is a place of magnificent natural beauty. You gaze across rolling valleys of forest to the horizon, and then to the tiny wildflowers close at hand--the Jack-in-the-pulpit and Solomon’s seal. It’s where they filmed The Last of the Mohicans. But on this day, my eyes were glued to the trail, as I maneuvered Angela’s chair around rocks and roots.

I struggled and sweated for a couple of hours and then Hickory Nut Falls splashed into view--a splendid white veil tumbling four-hundred feet over a sheer cliff. I couldn’t push the chair quite close enough, and so I carried Angela in my arms the last few yards into a cool and thundering mist.

That night I had the dream again. In the first part, I see Angela walking. She’s at the end of a dark hall and I don’t recognize her at first. Then she laughs and says, “Hey Dad, it’s me! It’s Angela.” She’s tall and graceful and walking. And then there’s the second part, where I’m sitting in a wheelchair myself, surrounded by walking people. Somewhere deep in the dream, I know it’s a sham--that I really can walk, after all, but I can't admit that I'm malingering. And then I fall and I’m lying on the ground. Somehow I know, once again, that I am able to get up and climb back into the chair, but I can't will myself to do it. Nobody suspects my secret. Nobody comes to help me, either. So I just lie there on the floor by the chair. Then I wake up in a sweat.

This dream used to visit me often, but it’s been a long time now.

Part 3.

It’s March, 2010, and Matt and I are headed out on a father-son backpacking adventure in the Virginia high country. The trip is Matt’s idea and I’m honored that he wants to spend his Spring Break with me, instead of with his buddies at Arizona State.

We set out on the trail into the wilderness and quickly realize we’re ill prepared for something: deep snow. Matt is wearing sneakers. By the time we camp the first night, his feet are numb. We get a fire going and he warms up.

As the fire burns down, I feel like telling my son a story. “Matt, did I ever tell you about the time I went backpacking with Grandpa and Uncle Tod in the mountains of Ecuador and I hurt my leg?”

I recount for Matt the tale of the trip to San Marcos and Victor Chicaiza and the horse.

In the morning, the fog has mostly cleared and we’re treated to an ethereal orange sunrise glinting off snow-covered conifers and boulders and icy fields in the valley below.

After a second day of hiking through snow, Matt can’t feel his feet again. Late in the afternoon we lose the trail; it seems to disappear at an impassable rock face. We decide to camp where we are, in a wind-swept meadow with no source of moving water but plenty of snow to melt.

Try as we might, we can’t keep a fire going that night. Everything is wet. Matt’s feet are still numb. Temperatures fall into the mid-twenties. The two of us wrap up in every piece of dry clothing we have, and we lie in our sleeping bags--not warm enough--as the wind whips through the tent and our watches seem stuck between two and three in the morning.

When dawn arrives, we decide to head home early. We’re just too cold and we’ve used up most of the propane to melt snow. Retracing our path, we find another route out.

Traversing one more deep snowfield, I step through the icy crust past my knee and twist my right ankle. I don’t say anything at first, but the more I walk on it, the more it hurts. Near the end of the day, I mention it to Matt. I’m moving pretty slowly.

By late afternoon we’re back to the road, just a half-mile from the backpackers' parking lot. “Dad, you stay here and I’ll go down and get the car,” Matt says. “I'll pick you up.”

“No, I can walk it, man,” I say.

“Dad. Just stay here. I don’t want you to walk with a sprained ankle. I’ll be right back up with the car. It’s just over there. . .”

I rest on my pack and wait for my son. I gaze back up the mountain from which we've come. I don't want this to end. Then my mind wanders, and I'm waiting on the páramo. Waiting for Dad and Victor Chicaiza to come and carry me through the mist.

Twenty minutes later Matt shows up with the car and I'm shaken out of my reverie. It's time to go home. He peels off his wet shoes and socks and drives barefoot with the heater blasting through the floor vents. We cross into North Carolina and he says, “You know, Dad, I was actually worried last night that I might lose my toes and never be able to play basketball again.”

“That really happened to a guy who went to my college,” I reply. “Why did you think I was blowing on the fire so hard last night, just trying to get it going?”

By the time we pull into Chapel Hill, my sprained ankle is pretty well healed. As for the guilt . . .

* * *

Postscript

Tod calls on my birthday. I tell him about the adventure with Matt, and then we’re reminiscing about our days growing up in Ecuador. I recount my memory of that trip to Lake San Marcos. He hasn’t thought about it in a long time, and he remembers things a bit differently. “It’s funny how you recall some things and not others,” Tod says. “It’s just your perspective at the time.”

“That’s so true,” I agree. “What I remember most is hurting my leg and Dad leaving me up there in the fog on the páramo, and Victor and the horse.”

“I hardly remember any of that,” Tod says. He remembers shooting some waterfowl off the lakeshore with his shotgun, and then swimming in to retrieve it, and Dad getting mad and looking at him with this certain look of searing disapproval. And then Tod says, “Do you remember Henry Allpress?”

Now it’s Friday afternoon and I’m winding up to leave the office. On a whim, I Google this name I’ve hardly thought of in over forty years: Henry Allpress. His 2008 obituary pops up in a newspaper from Hilton Head, SC. He was ninety-four.

I quickly do the math and figure out that Mr. Allpress was the same age I am now in 1968 when we trekked into San Marcos. The obituary says he was a lawyer with the State Department and served several tours with USAID in Latin America; that he was from Nebraska and a lifelong Methodist; and that he loved fishing and made several long canoe trips into the Canadian wilderness, "despite Cottie's objections."

I learn that Mr. Alpress is survived by, among others, his daughters Margaret and Marilyn and his granddaughter, Maria Paloulias Wood, Esquire, an attorney in Raleigh, NC. I Google Maria Wood's law firm and find her e-mail address and write to her.

Maria writes back and says it’s a wonderful surprise to hear from someone who knew her grandfather in the 1960s. She’s heard many stories of his days in Ecuador. She describes a loving grandfather who “lived to fish” but was “always there” for her--teaching her to drive, taking her to freshman orientation in college, and coming to her first law office to take picture after picture. She says she might like to name her first son Henry.

I hope somebody takes young Henry fishing. And if he can't walk for any reason, don't wonder why, just carry him--that's what I say.

* * *

Short video of the backpacking trip:

"Appalachian Spring (Not Quite)"

No Dumb Questions

2010-02-06T10:41:00.030-05:00

“There is no such thing as a dumb question,” Mr. Stockman told our geometry class. “Ask me anything.” A lot of math teachers say this but they don’t mean it. They never want you to take them literally. I tried it. I asked Mr. Stockman, “How do you spell hypotenuse?” He said that was a really dumb question.

When I was a college student, I got a volunteer internship with the Santa Barbara County Probation Department. I was assigned to drive around in a county car and try to find these probationers who had “temporarily disappeared.” One day I went looking for this guy who was a heroin addict. He was supposed to be on a methadone maintenance program and going to drug abuse counseling sessions, and he wasn’t going to those. So I found him in this rundown apartment in a sketchy neighborhood. He looked terrible. I introduced myself and said I was a student intern with the Probation Department. I asked him how he was doing and he said, “Man, I am really depressed.” So I looked at this poor man—he was unemployed, strung out, really sick, all alone, and about to be taken back to jail—and I blurted out the following brilliant interrogatory: “Why are you depressed?” He looked straight back at me—I appeared to be about fourteen years old—and said, “What are you majoring in?”

A couple of years ago I was explaining to a young research assistant what it was like to run statistics on a computer back in the late 1970s. In those days, you went to the Yale Computer Center, which was housed in an elegant neoclassical building with a rotunda entrance on Whitney Avenue. Inside the YCC you waited to use a big machine that punched little rectangular holes in paper cards. You always screwed up a few cards, so you had to re-punch and replace those in the deck in exactly the right order. Then you would stack up your cards and carry them over to another big machine called the Card Reader, which performed the same basic function as a Hungarian fortune teller. The Card Reader rifled through your cards and “read” the inner meaning in the pattern of holes while you stood there and watched. The Card Reader’s interpretation was then transmitted into the bowels of something called the Mainframe. The Mainframe was massive. You had no idea how it worked. For all you knew, there was a small team of dissident Soviet mathematicians inside there working with slide rules—it was that big. Anyway, you gave the Mainframe a couple of hours and then walked over and inquired at a service desk on the other side of the building, where a guy in a white shirt and tie and pocket-protector handed you a printout the size of the Sunday New York Times. Almost all of it was Error Messages. The next step was to go over and stand in line to speak to another fellow named Dave who was schooled in the arts of Error Message Divination. Usually Dave pointed out that you had forgotten to punch a semicolon on one of your cards. Dave knew very well which card it was, but he wasn’t about to tell you. That was something you had to figure out for yourself. When Dave said this, you would drop your whole deck of cards on the floor of the YCC where they would scatter in a wide radius and mix with the dropped cards of other graduate students. That’s when the real research started. Those were the days.

My research assistant stared at me, wide-eyed. I was suddenly reminded that she was born during the latter years of the Reagan administration. “Could I ask you something?” she said.

“Of course,” I replied. “Ask me anything.”

“Why didn’t you just use Excel?”

* * *

So I had this cool dream the other night where I was wearing a tuxedo up on a big stage, and I was hosting the global awards for Best Health Care in the World.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is my distinct honor and privilege tonight to announce the winners in several categories for Best Health Care in the World.

· In the category of Lowest Rate of Preventable Deaths, the winner is France! . . . and the consolation prize for 14^th place goes to USA!

· In the category of Longest Life Expectancy, at 77 years for women and 72 for men, the winner is Japan! . . . and the consolation prize for 24^th place goes to USA!

· In the category of Fairness . . . Responsiveness . . . and Overall Health Care System Performance, the winner again is France, closely edging out Italy! . . . and the consolation prize for 72^nd place goes to USA!

· Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve saved the most important award for last. In the category of Most Expensive Health Care in the World, measured by the highest percentage of gross domestic product spent on health care on the planet . . . topping out at 17.3% of GDP, a whopping 2.5 trillion dollars spent on health care in 2009 and growing at 5.7% . . . the winner is . . . USA!! USA!! We’re Number 1!! No other country comes close! Come on up here, USA, and receive your award . . .”

“Thank you very much, Jeff, and thank you ladies and gentlemen. First, I'd like to point out that we do have the greatest cutting-edge medical care in the world . . . Just ask any Saudi billionaire with a rare form of cancer! Ha ha! But anyway, I’d like to accept this award on behalf of our nation’s insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, our wonderful political system, the lobbyists, and most importantly, Jeff, those 46 million uninsured Americans who really made this possible. If those folks weren’t willing to go without basic health care and then show up and wait for hours in our hospital emergency rooms, I wouldn’t be standing here today. It’s a great accomplishment. And we’re not stopping there! As we speak, we’re seeing to it that 14,000 Americans lose their health insurance every day! Just in the last three years, our nation’s great insurance companies have held the line against 12 million Americans with preexisting conditions and made sure they didn’t get coverage! Looking to the future, there’s a report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that says by 2019 we’ll have 66 million uninsured people in America. People will be spending 40% to 60% more on health care than they are now, and businesses will see their health care costs double—from $429.8 billion in 2009 to $885.1 billion in 2019. Employer spending on health insurance premiums will increase 72 percent. Spending on government insurance programs could double and the amount of uncompensated care in the health system will go through the roof. These are amazing numbers, Jeff. No other country comes close to us on this. We’re Number 1!! USA!!"

“Thanks, USA, and congratulations! Before you sit down, could I ask you one question?”

“Sure, ask me anything.”

“Do you think Congress is going to pass health care reform legislation this year?”

* * *

A girl I knew in high school forwarded an e-mail urging everyone to send an avalanche of messages to Congress to defeat the Democrats’ scheme for a government takeover of the American health care system. The e-mail was from Ralph Reed, the conservative political activist and former head of the Christian Coalition. Reed warned that passage of President Obama’s far-reaching “socialist agenda” would be “the end of America as the ‘Land of the Free’.”

Ralph Reed is a smart fellow with a PhD in American history from Emory, so let me ask you something: Does he really believe this?

I replied to my former classmate and said I supported health care reform. She sent back a three-screener with a lot of material explaining the basics of the Free Market System and some commentary by Republican Congressman Tom Price of Georgia, who is an expert on health care, being an orthopedic surgeon by training.

Doctor Congressman Price was sounding the alarm about the evils of the Democrats’ proposed health care legislation. He cited specific examples, like: “This bill, on Page 733, empowers the Washington bureaucracy to deny lifesaving patient care if it costs too much.” Whoa. That sounded pretty bad. So I downloaded the thing and looked up page 733 and it said the bill would authorize a Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research. The purpose was “to identify the manner in which diseases, disorders, and other health conditions can most effectively and appropriately be prevented, diagnosed, treated, and managed clinically.” I read it again, looking for the part about denying lifesaving care to patients. I just couldn't find it, and so I gave up on that and went back to the other stuff from Doctor Congressman Price, like: “This bill – on page 301 – will force Americans to purchase the health coverage that Washington picks, not that you select for yourselves.” Whoa again. So I looked up page 301 in the bill and it says people get to pick their own coverage. It says you can keep your current employment-based insurance plan, other grandfathered health insurance coverage, a qualified health benefits plan, Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare for people the Armed Forces, etc.

What am I missing?

Yesterday I read an article about the national Tea Party convention in Nashville. These people are really mad at Obama. For a fee of $100,000 The Sarah is coming to speak and inspire and channel their rage to take back the country from the Socialist in Chief. But even The Sarah may have a hard time topping the opening screed by Tom Tancredo. The former Congressman said President Obama was a “committed Socialist ideologue” who was elected only because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote.”

Come to think of it, when I went to vote last year at the New Hope Fire Station, nobody made me pass a civics and literacy test at all! Maybe that’s a good thing . . . I think I could have passed the reading test. I’m pretty sure I could have answered the question about the 15^th Amendment to the Constitution of 1870 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But what if they’d asked me to explain the Senate rules that allow one Republican Senator to place a “blanket hold” on 70 Presidential nominees awaiting Senate confirmation so that he can get federal money to build a Counterterrorism center in Alabama?

Now that’s a really hard question. I have no idea what the answer is. I'm just a professor. Remember the professor on Gilligan's Island? He figured out how to make a radio from a coconut, but he had no clue how to fix a hole in a boat. Somebody has to crack this. I wonder if any of those dissident Soviet mathematicians with the slide rules are still around.

* * *

Why We Live in the South

2010-01-30T22:38:00.024-05:00

It has come to my attention that certain members of my immediate family think these video reports are wearing a little thin. But life is short. Time is passing. Someday, I hope they'll visit me in the Assisted Living Facility, and they'll remember the way I was . . .

If video doesn't load, click here to watch it on YouTube: "Why We Live in the South"

Why Poor People Look So Happy

2009-11-22T07:44:00.045-05:00

I write to offer a sincere, if belated apology to my fellow taxpaying Americans for my part in a small scandal.

In the mid-1990s, the Library of Congress wasted some of your hard-earned money on a book containing the following words:

"From a Marxian perspective, this might appear to be a classic example of how ideology serves class interest through systematic distortion of the views of the oppressed, so that they are unable to see the reality of their own condition and thus remain dependent and powerless. First the ideology of power creates its own version of reality; then this new reality consolidates power by hiding its ideological scaffolding where it can least be suspected as such—in the minds and voices of the weak and poor." [1]

That’s nothing but pinko Socialist nonsense. I should know, because I wrote it.

What does it mean, though, you ask? In plain English, I was just trying to say that poor people aren’t really as happy as they look. And rich people aren’t all that miserable, either. They just complain a lot. They do this to fake the poor people into leaving them alone. Actually they’re loving it. Being rich is great.

That’s what I was getting at. But as I say, it was pure nonsense. I realize now that rich people truly are miserable. Of course they are, because they’re exhausted. They’re the ones who have to keep the Free Market System running. By night, they have to lie awake thinking up new kinds of convertible arbitrage to securitize their hedge funds [2], and by day they have to beat back the Federal Government, which is trying to tax them to death (and beyond.)

Meanwhile poor people have it made. All they have to do is go to Walmart and life is good. They’re thrilled.

Sometimes I feel bad for rich people, but when you think about it, somebody has to bear the burden of being in charge—why not them?

You might wonder where I got all that baloney about “ideological scaffolding hiding in the voices of the poor” in the first place. I heard it in 1979 from a Chilean dude who couldn’t find a job, so he was teaching social theory at Yale, which at the time was operating as a sheltered workshop/rehab program for political refugees escaping Right Wing Latin American dictatorships. Them, and few leftover Vietnam-era nutcases who didn’t qualify for Veterans mental health and addiction treatment, because they hadn’t actually fought in the Vietnam War, having spent the entire decade writing PhD dissertations and smoking weed, biding their time until it was over. But by then the country was in such a mess that it was incredibly stressful for them to deal with, and the only thing they were put together enough to do was teach sociology at an Ivy League university. A decent community college would never have put up with these people.

Notwithstanding my professors, getting a doctorate in sociology taught me a lot about the Free Market System. Here’s how it goes: I spent three years writing my dissertation, and another year revising it into a book manuscript. The royalties I earned came to approximately $980; that works out to 12 cents an hour for my labor. What this taught me is the Law of Supply and Demand and its relation to Price.

Just as a point of comparison, the surgeon who took out my spleen when I had a car crash got about $15,000--this for a few hours of work snipping an organ and putting in a few stitches. That doesn't sound too hard to me. But it’s how Supply and Demand works. So if you want to make some bucks, Jackson, stop writing books about Socialism and start taking out spleens. It’s as simple as that.

What about Quality, you ask. Doesn't that count for something? Isn’t it true that ‘you get what you pay for’? It turns out that Quality is a slippery Socialist concept. The important thing to remember about Quality is, ‘Quality According to Whom.’ My book was reviewed in several elite academic journals and the reviewers all said it was pretty good. These journals are each read by about six people. The problem is, they are the same six people who wrote the reviews, and they didn’t have to buy a copy of the book for themselves, because the publisher had sent them one for free in exchange for writing the review. That's how Socialism works.

When nobody bought my book, Oxford UP thought maybe it was because people didn’t understand the Quality of it, and so they did what any twit Socialist publisher would do: they doubled the price, from $55 to $110. “Let’s see if that does the trick, Nigel," they said to each other.

But then, as if by magic, the Free Market stepped in. Amazon.com started selling used copies of my book online for $12. These used copies from Amazon were not actually used at all. They were always in mint condition. I know this, because I’m the one who bought them. They were absolutely perfect, without a single blemish on the dust jacket. Nobody had cracked the cover.

I autographed these books with ponderous and witty inscriptions and gave them to my children and parents and friends, most of whom were kind enough to pretend that I hadn’t already given them a copy last year.

One year I ordered another round of copies of my book from Amazon—now they were selling for about $6 apiece!—and when one of the copies arrived, I opened it and noticed it was ink-stamped on the copyright page: “Property of the Library of Congress." This was a low blow. You know the Federal government is in trouble when the Library of Congress starts pawning their copy of a book nobody wants to buy. And then Amazon sells it back to the poor shmuck who wrote it—for six bucks.

I felt kind of bad, since it was really the taxpayer who had gotten the shaft on this deal, so I tried to give the book back to the Library of Congress as a charitable donation. It turns out they’re running out of room as well as money. I tried offering it to a number of different government officials, but the minute they found out the book was about Socialism, they hung up on me. I finally succeeded in giving it to the only elected public official I know personally, my buddy Guy McCook who is a County Commissioner down in Scotland County, NC. Guy was just corruptible enough to take the darn thing. (Now he owes me a favor, but again, that’s how the Free Market System works.) [3]

I'm not saying books are losers in general. It’s just books about certain things, by certain people. Consider the differences between my book and that new memoir by The Sarah, Going Rogue. She’s selling copies by the millions. And she had ghostwriters. Her book costs $14.50. That’s the Free Market System for you.

What’s The Sarah got that I don’t? Well, for one thing, The Sarah’s book is about Free Market Philosophy and my book is about Socialism. Another difference is that my book has no picture on the cover. Her book has a wonderful sexy picture of, well, The Sarah. And then, as I’ve already mentioned, my book was reviewed by a few colossal nerds. The Sarah’s book was reviewed by the Brain Trust of the Republican Party on national cable television. Rush Limbaugh pronounced it “truly one of the most substantive policy books I’ve read.”

Do you see the differences? But here’s the point I wanted to get to. If the Free Market System could do this for The Sarah, just think what it could do for health care in the United States of America.

Follow me here. When I had my car crash, I did not get to pick the surgeon I wanted. They didn't even show me a catalog. I'd never seen this guy before in my life. I'm still mad. It was my spleen, after all. I should have gotten to pick who took the darn thing out. This is the sort of thing I really hate about Socialism.

And take medical licensing, for example. Why should the Government decide if a doctor is qualified to perform a splenectomy? What do they know? If a doctor can’t do the job, how long would he stay in business? Let the Free Market take care of that.

In my situation with the car wreck, if we had had Free Market Health Care I could have shopped for a great deal on a decent splenectomy. I probably could have just gone out and bought a Home Splenectomy Kit and removed my own spleen, for heaven’s sake.

But you say there is no such thing as a Home Splenectomy Kit. Yeah, not yet. But in a Free Market, you would get innovation. And that’s good for everybody.

What if people can’t afford any splenectomy, you say. That, too, is a Free Market issue. If we got rid of all the Socialist regulations and Government red tape in the present system, you’d see prices drop fast. And at that point, if some people still could not afford to have a splenectomy, you’d have to wonder about their priorities. Some people can’t afford to drive a Porsche, either.

Just one more point. We really need to eliminate two sinkholes of Socialized Medicine in this country. One is Medicare and the other is the VA hospital system. Is this any way to honor our grandparents and our wounded soldiers? The least they deserve is Free Market Health Care, not some Socialist program run by the Government. Medicare and the VA need to go. Stick a fork in them.

Again, I’m sorry about that book.

* * *

[1] Swanson, J. (1995). Echoes of the Call. Oxford University Press, p. 146.

[2] If you don't know what this means, don't worry. Neither does anyone else on the planet, including Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. Which is another part of the reason rich people are so miserable.

[3] After writing this, I checked online and discovered that the Library of Congress does have a copy of my book in its collection after all. My guess is that Guy must have found a way to return it to the Library--he's pretty well connected. Anyway, if you're ever in DC, you might want to check the book out. If you find a big flourish of an inscription on the title page that says, "Remember the Bandana Club--A.A. '75--Cuidado el Pilsener Grande!", that's the one.

Dad Reports Live from Alaska--The Midlife Adventure Continues

2009-10-23T15:39:00.014-04:00

"All in all, it was shaping up to be . . . " (a tribute to Bill Withers.)

Click on the arrow below to watch the video.

To the End of Limbo

2009-09-29T20:50:00.025-04:00

My dad wasn’t a trained surgeon but he did the best he could. There were times at the jungle hospital in Ecuador when he operated mainly by following diagrams in a tome that might have been called The Joy of Surgery. Critically injured patients’ lives would be hanging by a thread, and Wally would stand there with an open textbook at the operating table, humming There is a Balm in Gilead.

Dad borrowed our Tinkertoy wheels and strung up elaborate pulley systems to hold patients’ broken legs in traction. When his patients needed a blood transfusion, Dad would implore the families in the waiting room to donate a pint or two. If that wasn’t enough, he would stride across the compound to our house and hit up my mother--sometimes in the middle of the night with the patient still on the operating table.

Mom was a universal blood donor and became accustomed to these nocturnal sanguineous visitations. It got to the point where she would just roll over in bed, extend her left arm, and barely wake up. Dad would suck out a bright purple pint with a big syringe and trot back to work.

I shared this story with a young Red Cross phlebotomist at the New Hope Fire Station blood drive last Saturday. She looked at me with an expression of bemused horror--the sort of look a phlebotomist might give a wise guy who cracks, “Confidentially, I should tell you my parents were vampires. Do you find me attractive?”

In the early 1970s a special visitor descended on our house and my parents treated him like he was the Archangel Michael. Our guest was a blond mustachioed young surgeon from Washington, D.C. My parents were determined to recruit him to come down there and help Dad. The surgeon’s name was John Doerfer.

One afternoon during Dr. Doerfer’s sojourn with us, a teenaged accident victim was brought into the hospital, splayed out in the back of a pickup taxi. He’d been hit by a bus and had quite a number of broken bones. Dad and Dr. Doerfer sprung into action. I happened to be hanging around and chose this moment to tell Dad that I’d been thinking of becoming a doctor myself someday. In a flash of well-meaning but misplaced pedagogical enthusiasm, Dad invited me into the operating room to watch him and Dr. Doerfer perform surgery on this multiple trauma victim. “Maybe you’ll learn something!” he said.

Dad was the picture of jovial serenity as he assisted Dr. Doerfer in the operation--humming gospel choruses, making small talk with his friends Beth the anesthetist and Eleanor the instrument-handing nurse, and complimenting young John’s surgical chops.

For his part, Dr. Doerfer appeared to be slightly freaked out. As the hours passed, he became more and more anxious. “Wally, we’re never going to finish this in time. We’ve got to wake him up--he’s been down too long. There are a lot of things we need...”

Dad acted like he and John might have been assembling a slightly complicated model airplane on a Sunday afternoon. “It’s looking great, John! Let’s keep going! You want something to eat? We’ve got bananas. Could somebody get John a banana?”

Dad loved surgery almost as much as trout fishing. He was a little better at surgery.

Night fell and eventually I de-gowned and left the hospital and walked back to the house. On the far horizon to the west, I saw what looked like a red ember glowing on the cone of Mt. Sangay--a rare sight from fifty miles away.

The next morning dawned clear and Sangay remained visible along with its jagged-topped neighbor, El Altar. At the breakfast table, Mom explained to Dr. Doerfer that he had been granted a rare vision: seeing Sangay erupt at night and then the snowcaps rising out of the mist in the morning. Mom opined that this was a sure sign the Lord was calling John Doerfer to move to the jungle for good. “What do you think, John? Huh?”

Dr. Doerfer wasn’t saying. He looked like a man who had spent the night in one of those secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan: wrung out and in no mood for further questions. He departed shortly thereafter, offering little clue as to his future plans and leaving my parents in limbo.

* * *

During our family’s first decade in Ecuador, we never owned a car--even when we moved to Quito. My mother would carry a big basket on the bus down to the Santa Clara open market, hire a sturdy-looking urchin to trail around behind her while she picked out our fresh groceries for the week, then hail a taxi to drive her and the basket home.

In 1973, we came back to Minnesota on furlough and finally got a car of our own. It was a jimdandy--a twelve-passenger Chevrolet van with a long and distinguished history of service as a National Car Rental shuttle vehicle at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. My dad’s brother-in-law Sheldon was a vice president at National and worked out some kind of a deal on the van. It was practically free; all we had to do was drive it to South America.

The day we got the van from Uncle Sheldon, Dad motored over to Grandpa Arvid’s house to display his splendid new chariot. Grandpa was bothered by the National Car Rental logos painted on the sides. (He had the same impulse that I’d had upon receiving Melvin Christiansen’s used baseball glove for Christmas with Melvin’s name block-lettered on it: Let’s paint over that.)

Arvid found some white enamel paint in his basement and proceeded to brush over the National logos forthwith. The effect was not quite what Dad was hoping for. The repainted ovals were flat-finished and off shade from the rest of the car. It now gave the impression that we’d stolen a utility van from a plumber.

A couple of days later, our family packed into the van and left Minnesota. We planned to cross over into Mexico at El Paso, Texas, but took a circuitous route through the western states. When we got into Wyoming, I convinced Dad to let me drive. I was sixteen and didn’t even have a learner’s permit, but I’d heard an urban legend that Wyoming--being the Wild West and all that--let kids drive without a license. I also told him I’d had a lot of practice driving friends’ cars in Quito when I went away to high school. Dad seemed to think this could be true, and before I knew it, I was bombing along through the Tetons at seventy-five miles per hour with my elbow crooked out the window and my family unaware of their peril.

Eventually we reached El Paso, crossed over into Ciudad Juarez, and headed down the Panamerican Highway into Central America. We sped through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Costa Rica on our way to Panama City where we planned to put the van on a boat to Guayaquil. I remember the scenery in all these countries as a magnificent green blur, because Dad had a goal of doing one country per day. He made an exception for Mexico, which extends about two thousand miles.

We all slept in the van by the side of the road, oblivious to wild animals, bandidos, right-wing death squads, and narcotraficantes. We ate freeze dried camping food. Sometimes we made a fire. I was reading The Grapes of Wrath and it felt like we were the Joads. Actually there wasn’t enough sleeping room for everybody inside the van, so most nights, weather permitting, I stretched out on the roof. I would lie up there gazing at the stars and ponder deep philosophical questions, the top three being: (1) If a person could travel to the edge of the universe, what would he find on the other side (and if the answer is “nothing,” then what was the difference between nothing and a separate empty universe?) (2) If God was willing to kill Bathsheba’s baby who hadn’t done anything wrong, then why didn’t he just kill Hitler? (3) Would I ever have a girlfriend?

When we arrived in Costa Rica, we stayed with a family who would soon join us in Ecuador: It was the Doerfers. John and Mary had signed up for the mission after all, and were now studying Spanish at a language school in San Jose. That night I got to sleep in a real bed that rightfully belonged to the Doerfers’ small son, Johnny, who was evicted from his room as an act of hospitality.

In Panama City we boarded a plane for Quito. I had wanted us to drive all the way through, but Dad said the Panamerican ended in northern Colombia. Where exactly? This was never clear. Apparently, the road petered out somewhere in a misty limbo between the National Car Rental garage and a jungle hospital where a man's broken leg was suspended by Tinkertoys.

* * *

At the end of my junior year at the Alliance Academy, my cousin Jay Anderson came to Ecuador. He was an art major at the University of Minnesota and a singer-songwriter with shoulder-length blond hair. I thought he was the coolest person in the world. Jay’s mother, my Aunt Corinne, had written a letter to Dad asking him to put Jay to some useful missionary work. Jay’s idea was to climb the Andes, explore the Amazon, and be a traveling troubadour.

Somewhere in the Ecuadorian Oriente, Jay acquired an eight-foot boa constrictor. He was determined to take this rather large serpent back to Minnesota as a personal effect. In Quito, he found out there was an orphan being adopted by a couple in Minneapolis, and this gave him a brilliant idea. Jay offered to transport the baby to Minnesota, but his bold and secret plan was to smuggle the boa constrictor into the United States of America in the bottom of diaper bag.

Incredibly, this mad scheme worked. Jay breezed through customs in Miami. The authorities focused all their attention on the baby and the adoption paperwork and never thought to check under a stack of diapers for an eight-foot slithering rat swallower.

Back in Minnesota, Jay moved in with my Grandpa Arvid’s two elderly spinster sisters, Olga and Agnes, whom everybody called “the Aunties”. They had a little two-story house in south Minneapolis, and Jay lived with them while he went to college. The Aunties adored my cousin, whom they called “Yay,” and he was equally fond of them. But something happened that year that would put a strain in their relationship for a season: The snake disappeared inside the Aunties’ house without a trace.

The boa stayed at large all winter--that’s about nine months in Minnesota--leaving the Aunties in limbo. They had to wonder every time they went in the basement if they might trip over a snake the size of a short fire hose. Then one day in the spring, Jay came home and found the Aunties in a triumphant mood. They had recaptured Balboa in the basement after all, safely incarcerating the beast in a small fortress they had built out of stacked apple crates.

* * *

It was 1994 and I was trying again to reach Stan George, my editor at Oxford University Press. I’d sent him the final edits to my manuscript but I hadn’t heard from him in two months. Now he wasn’t returning my phone calls. I dialed one more time and got his voicemail: “This is Stan George. I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now. Leave me a message and I will call you back at my earliest opportunity.”

That was the last straw. I’d had enough. I would go over Stan’s head and call his boss. I looked up the number of someone at the press with a higher-sounding title than Stan’s and phoned in a huff.

“Mr. George is ignoring me!” I fairly shouted. “I’ve left numerous messages but he won’t return my calls. This is unprofessional. What’s happening with my book? I’ve been left in limbo for two months.”

What followed next was a long and awkward pause, then this: “Professor Swanson, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Stan is dead. He passed away some time ago. I guess we should have changed his voicemail message.”

Changed his message, I thought? Changed it to what? How about: “Hello, you’ve reached the desk of Stan George. I REALLY can’t come to the phone right now... because I’m dead. But thanks for calling, and have a lovely day.”

When the book finally came out, Oxford printed up promotional flyers and sent me a stack of them. I sent one to my department chairman, Allen Frances. Shortly thereafter, I met with Dr. Frances for my annual faculty evaluation.

“Thanks for sending me that book announcement,” Allen said. “What’s it about again? Missionaries in Ecuador? Anyway, I’m glad you’re done with it. You probably had your own reasons for writing it, and it shows you’re a civilized person. But I don’t want you to think it’s going to help you get tenure in the medical school here. In fact, I really don’t believe you’re ever going to get tenure. It’s just a fact. You’re a sociologist in a clinical department. That’s a tough sell. But you know, write some grants and a few more papers, and maybe you’ll be able to move somewhere. Duke will look good on your CV wherever you end up.”

Suddenly I felt anxious and cold--like the Aunties in the middle of an endless winter and possibly in bed with a snake.

* * *

It’s November 2007 and I’m at an elegant wine-and-cheese reception at the University Club, surrounded by my colleagues, close friends, and family. The special occasion is to celebrate my promotion to the rank of Professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences with tenure at Duke Medical School.

The co-sponsor and host of this affair is my personal investment advisor and portfolio manager, who is also an old and dear friend. His name is John Doerfer, Jr. John now lives in Chapel Hill, is a divorced father of four, and just returned from a journey to Ecuador where he stayed with my brother Tod in the jungle. He revisited the mission hospital where our fathers worked together; the house where both our families lived at the different times in the 1960 and 1970s; and the bedroom that was first mine and then his.

Jay and Wendy Anderson walk in, fresh from the airport and just having stepped off a plane from Minnesota. Jay says this feels like a Hollywood movie.

Johnny Doerfer approaches the mic and reads a kind letter from my Yale mentor, Kai Erikson. Then my Duke colleague Marvin Swartz reads a funny fake letter from Allen Francis, our former chairman. (Allen left Duke long ago, and contrary to his dire predictions I’m still here.) Marvin presents me with a few charming gifts, effluvia of liberal academic culture: a nationwide map of NPR stations, a Chia pet that will grow a tangled mat of green hair on the head of Professor Einstein, and a beer top opener that spouts memorable Bushisms like, “You’re working hard to put food on your family.”

Jay Anderson stands to speak. The blond hippie tresses are long gone; the story of the baby and the boa and its heroic recapture by the Aunties has joined the canon of Swanson family legend. Jay has become a pillar of the community and a true craftsman like our Grandpa Arvid--a builder and a guitar maker and father of three grown children of his own. He looks over the gathered assembly, which includes a distinguished professoriate with Ivy League degrees, and says “I don’t care what you do. . . ” He pauses and looks down for split second, as if from a high diving board. “I care who you are.” Then Jay rises into an eloquent and generous tribute--a spontaneous meditation on the meaning of friendship, family, personal character, and the passage of time.

I listen to Jay and I wish my mom were alive to hear this. I wish Dad were here, too. Despite my intention that day, long ago, when Dad let me watch him and John’s dad perform surgery on a guy who got hit by a bus, I never followed through and became a doctor. Ironically, though--and improbably--I had come to this: I was now a full professor in a medical school. My mother would have loved it.

Finally, I deliver a few prepared remarks:

. . . I turned fifty earlier this year, and so I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mortality. I just wanted to tell you that if I should die anytime in the next ten years or so, none of you should feel the slightest obligation to attend the funeral. You’ve done your duty tonight. If you want this in writing, let me know.

I did want to make just a couple of remarks. I’ll try to be brief--I realize that there are certain people in this gathering who already feel obligated to spend too much of their precious time listening to me pontificate on a regular basis. (I’m thinking of my son Matt and some current and former postdoctoral fellows who are here tonight.)

Apropos of pontificating, I wanted to share with you something that I learned recently that was announced by the Vatican. We have some religious studies scholars here tonight--these guys are theologians and so they know this, but I was not aware of it. It turns out that Pope Benedict has formally abolished the Catholic notion of Limbo. This is absolutely true.

Now, Limbo is the place where the unbaptized souls go to just sort of look busy and wait and see what’s going to happen to them. So I was really sorry to see this abolished, because it always seemed to me such a perfect metaphor for the academic career without tenure.

I was concerned about what had happened to Limbo, and so I contacted a professor friend of mine who has impeccable Catholic scholarly credentials. He was trained by the Jesuits. And I asked him about Limbo. He said it was no big deal, because the Pope had not overturned an actual “doctrine.” Limbo was never a doctrine per se, but just a theological hypothesis. And this was a huge relief, I’m sure, to all the people who have actually been in Limbo--like, for hundreds of years--to find this out now.

My friend also reassured me that a related doctrine, Purgatory, remains intact, and may continue to serve as an inspiration for the academic life--especially one funded entirely on soft-money grants. Actually what most concerned my friend the Catholic scholar was not the loss of Limbo but the planet Pluto; losing Pluto was a tough blow. . .

I end my shtick and pause for a moment. My mind wanders to the time I took my Matt and his friend whitewater rafting in the mountains, and the guides turned out to be two girls younger than my son. I was the only person in the raft with the slightest appreciation of the fact that we will all surely die--perhaps today. Suspended between the raging rapids and a giant rock, I said a prayer and tried to recall how much life insurance Pam was going to collect. Then I heard the kids laughing at me and we were in the still waters.

At the University Club I proceed to thank people in earnest--one by one--for what they’ve all done and who they are. I say it’s going to be brief but this is a happy lie. I end with these words:

Finally, at a time like this, and coming from my background, really the only appropriate thing to do is to quote Scripture. So I’d like to repeat those old words, “Love bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, endures all things.”

With a little of that, I could survive the end of limbo. I might even be immortalized for quite some time.

The Farewell

2009-08-24T11:49:00.050-04:00

Arvid, Wally, Jeff, and Matt Swanson (1991)

My grandfather is standing by a lake on a cloudy day. His face is turned to the camera, but his arm is reaching out ahead and he’s pointing toward the shore in the distance. “Look,” he seems to be saying. “There it is. Just over there.”

What is he pointing at? There are spruce pines and birch trees edging the water. The place could be anywhere in northern Minnesota. But it’s not. Arvid is standing on the shore of Stora Le, near Nössemark, in the province of Dalsland,

Sweden

“Where my parents were born and lived,” he writes in a postcard, “the lake my father always talked about.”

His hair is white. He is seventy-three years old. He has come to a land he calls the old country, but he’s never seen it before. He speaks Swedish with archaic turns of phrase from a century past. His grandparents are buried here. His own parents died in America long ago. This is the place they left.

On his sojourn to Sweden in 1969, my grandfather met a first cousin he had never known. The cousin’s name was Sven and he was ninety years old. Sven told Arvid that he remembered the day my great-grandparents, Johannes and Maria Svensson, left Nössemark. It was 1891. Sven was just a boy.

Sven said there was a farewell at the lakeshore--a gathering of family and friends. Johannes gave a speech, in which he said that he had seen many young people get “America fever” and leave their parents behind. Johannes feared that someday his own children would leave him, too. He didn’t want to stay and become a sad old man in Sweden. He decided that he would take his young family and go to America. There he would start a new life, replant the family tree.

Johannes and Maria said goodbye to their loved ones. They boarded a steamer to begin their long journey. The steamer headed out across the water. And they never looked back.

There is a hopefulness but a cruel logic in the speech by Johannes: In a choice between the old and the young, we choose the young; for our children’s sake, we leave our parents behind.

Four years later, in 1895, Maria’s mother died in Sweden. That same year, my grandfather was born in a white clapboard farmhouse in Minnesota. Johannes planted an oak sapling in the yard.

Now I stare at the picture of Arvid pointing at the lake in Sweden and I wonder what he was thinking. Maybe that was the very day Sven told him the story of the farewell. He must have thought of Johannes; his father had been gone twenty-one years by then. He must have remembered his lovely mother, Maria, who died when Arvid was sixteen.

This is where they were born. Where they fell in love. Where they left their own parents and sailed away, just like Sven said.

But maybe Arvid recalled a different day, another gray morning in 1917, when he hugged Johannes and his stepmother, boarded a train bound for an army depot in Des Moines, Iowa, and left to fight in the Great War. Johannes was a graying man in midlife by then; he was going deaf. I imagine him waving, straining to hear his son's last goodbye, then watching Arvid’s boyish face disappear in the window as the train pulls away. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers would die.

And maybe Arvid remembered a time much later, in 1961, when his own son, Wally, left Minneapolis to follow his call as a missionary doctor in the jungle of Ecuador. Standing there in Sweden in the land of his father, Arvid hadn’t seen my father in years.

* * *

On the day Arvid died, I was vacationing on the North Carolina coast, walking along the beach alone in the afternoon. As I headed back to the cottage, I noticed Pam hurrying towards me in the far distance. When she got close enough, I saw her face and knew she was coming to tell me bad news.

“It’s your grandpa,” she said. “He died today.”

I flew out to Minneapolis the next afternoon. At the funeral, I saw my dad, my brother Tod, and sister Lisa. Dad and Tod both gave eulogies. Dad spoke of his family’s Christian heritage. Tod recalled the years he had lived with Grandpa and Grandma while he was a student at the University of Minnesota. He spoke of the comfort of Arvid’s silent companionship, when the two of them would do something together and there was a shared understanding and affection and neither felt any need to speak. He remembered the quirky objects that Arvid collected, and his sense of humor.

“One day Grandpa showed me an antique opium pipe that he had found in a pawn shop,” Tod told the assembled crowd at First Covenant Church. “It was a thing of beauty. Then Grandpa’s eyes twinkled and he said, ‘Too bad my wife won’t let me smoke.’”

The funeral was on a Saturday. On Sunday, Dad and Tod and Lisa and I rented a car and drove north in search of Arvid’s boyhood home--the white farmhouse where Dad, too, had spent many summers as a child visiting his grandparents.

We couldn’t find the place at first. After driving around in the cornfields for awhile, we happened upon on small white church by a lake. The Sunday morning worship service had just ended and people were milling about. We parked and Dad got out and approached an ancient man who was inching along with a cane.

“Excuse me,” Dad said to the cadaverous-looking elder. “Would you happen to know where the old Swensons’ farm is? Could you tell us how to get there?”

“Swenson . . .” The man pondered the name for a moment. “Wasn’t he the fellow who was hard of hearing?” Johannes had been dead for more than forty years.

“That was him,” Dad said. “He was my grandfather. He used to carry around a megaphone when he got older, so people could shout into his good ear.”

“Ya, sure,” the man said. “Let me draw you a map.” He rested his church bulletin on the back of his Bible and sketched in the margin--two farm roads, an intersection, and an ‘X’. “That’s it right there. Swenson's.”

We found the house and it was just as Dad remembered it. But now there were children’s toys scattered in the front yard. We knocked on the door and a young woman appeared. Dad introduced himself and explained why we had come. “This was my grandparents’ house,” he said. “My dad was born here.”

The young woman invited us in. She showed us around. We climbed the stairs and Dad pointed out the place where he had slept when he came to stay in the summers.

We walked outside and stood in the shade of a massive oak tree. “I can’t believe how big that tree is now,” Dad marveled. I tried to reach my arms around the trunk. Dad reached around the other side and our hands almost met in the middle.

* * *

The phone rang and it was my son Matt calling from Ecuador. It seemed like a long time since we’d heard from him. “Where are you now?” I asked.

“I’m at Grandpa Wally's house,” he said. “Today Grandpa showed me around the hospital where he worked all those years. And now I’m looking at his old photo albums. I saw some pictures of you when you were my age.”

A few days later Matt came home. Then he packed up his stuff to leave again, to start college at Arizona State. I drove him and Pam to the airport early last Wednesday morning. On the way in the car, Matt joked, “Well, you’re finally doing it. You’re finally getting rid of me and sending me off to the other side of the country.”

At the airport, I hugged my son and told him I loved him. “I love you too, Dad,” he said. Then he and Pam disappeared through the security gate. I stood there for a minute and recalled the summer I left my parents in Ecuador to start my own college adventure in California, a sort of modern reprise of my great-grandfather’s coming to America.

In five generations of fathers and sons, our family’s odyssey had spanned parts of three centuries, three continents, two world wars, the story of the immigrants who came to America and the missionaries who left. And now it was my son’s time to leave, to turn his face and stride off into whatever world may come.

As I write this, I’m alone in our big house and looking forward to Pam’s return from Arizona tonight. I glance at my watch. By now she’ll be leaving campus and heading to the airport. I’m interrupted by the message tone on my Blackberry. There’s a text from Matt: “Just said goodbye and we’re sad.”

Johannes Svensson (ca. 1900) and great-grandson Jeff Swanson (2004)

* * *

Arvid Swanson (ca. 1909) and great-grandson Matt Swanson (2009)

* * *

Matt and Jeff Swanson (2009)

* * *

Acknowledgement and postscript: For family historical material, including Sven's account of "the farewell" in Nossemark, and the photographs of the Svensson house circa 1894 and of Arvid as a young man, I am indebted to the Swanson Family Book (2005), edited by Linda Gronvall, Mary Gardeen, et al. DNA works in wonderful ways; when I look at the pictures of my grandfather and my son at about the same age, or the one of my great-grandfather Johannes whom I am said to resemble, what comes to mind is: "YOU again!"

White House Inter-Scandinavian-American Beer Summit

2009-07-31T13:35:00.013-04:00

Jeff Swanson shares the story of his egregious arrest in Chapel Hill, NC, by a Norwegian-American police officer, Sgt. Sigurd Bjornstad. He calls upon President Obama to hold a Scandinavian-American beer summit at the White House. "If this happened to me right here in my home town, while I was breaking into my own minivan, it could happen to any other Swedish-American academic in the United States," Swanson says.

Click here to watch it on YouTube

UPDATE! Sgt. Bjornstad has posted his own video disputing Swanson's version of the arrest and suggesting a Lutefisk Summit to address inter-Scandinavian hostilities.

Click here to watch Bjornstad's rebuttal