Be as it may a sign of obsolescence, I spend the first wakening hour of nearly every day reading books. Since no editor or schoolmarm intrudes I go at my own pace, but do read challenging books along with those those that give bursting morning a boost of pleasure.
Last year, I reread “Richard III”, “The Odyssey” and “Oedipus Rex.” The last two were my duty to a Ninth Grade girl being subjected to the cruel and usual torture of dealing with such things before her time. I enjoy Shakespeare’s early plays, for instance “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” more than critics advise. But Richard III pales in its portrayal of evil with the mature Shakespeare’s “Macbeth.” “The Odyssey,” which I adored in novelized form as a Seventh Grader, is too much of an odyssey for one a bit closer to death than he was in 1956. The 1909 Harvard Classics translation, written in 300-year-old English, isn’t the King James Bible and might be sprightlier in modern English.
I had last read “Oedipus Rex” in college. We were instructed in the Freudian view that the Oedipus complex answers everything. A fresh reading of the play reveals Oedipus to be highly moral, one who insists on the truth — that is why he blinds himself when he sees it — and who accepts his living punishment. A better man I’m sure than many of our leaders, lobbyists, lawyers and lenders. Four new books stand out as worth recommending to readers interested in public affairs:
1) “Who Killed Health Care?,” by Regina Herzlinger, the first female tenured professor at Harvard Business School. Here we have a dreary business treated by an author with a sense of humor. Professor Herzlinger’s “killers” are 1) managed-care insurers who neuter (my term) doctors and patients; 2) general hospitals, especially non-profits, that engage in blatantly monopolistic practices; 3) employers, who have no skill in purchasing individuals’ health insurance; and 4) Congress, which has utterly politicized dialysis treatment — the only procedure for which it has so far made the taxpayer the “single payer.”
This revolutionary work advocates putting doctors and consumers back in charge of the buying and selling of health-care — citing as a model the supermarkets that provide hundreds of thousands of products to millions of middle-class customers. The author seems to be pointing to a modified return to fee-for-service medicine.
2) “The Mascot,” by Mark Kurzem. This book is Judaica, but unlike anything previously written in the genre. It is the story of the author’s father, Alex Kurzem, born Ilya Galperin in Koidanov, Belorussia. When the Nazis arrive and murder the Jews of Koidanov, the little boy escapes and becomes feral until until he is discovered by a Latvian S.S. unit, which, unaware he is Jewish, adopts him.
“Alex” survives and emigrates to Australia, where he raises a family — never speaking to his wife or children about his memories as a very little boy. But they eventually extrude. In 1998, Alex returns
to his birthplace, where he finds a half-brother sired by his father after his mother and full siblings had been murdered. Ilya Galperin was about six when he was ripped from all he knew. This fragment of Judaica is really a universal story of the life of the mind, from early childhood unto old age.
3) “Cape Wind,” by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb. The latter was my editor at The Providence Journal, and is, I suspect, responsible for sophomoric class prejudice about Cape Cod’s wealthy summer people, with their white ducks and beloved races in ca. 1913 wooden sailboats called Wianno Seniors. (The authors never figure out that the Oyster Harbors Club and the Wianno Club are two clubs, not one.) This is nonetheless an important book. It exposes the hypocrisy of environmentalists, notably Sen. Eward Kennedy, and industrialists who got rich on fossil fuels, who oppose the very idea of entrepreneur Jim Gordon’s proposed wind farm in what they regard as their private sailing roads in Nantucket Sound.
This is nonetheless an important book. It exposes the hypocrisy of environmentalists, notably Sen. Eward Kennedy, and industrialists who got rich on fossil fuels, who oppose the very idea of entrepreneur Jim Gordon’s proposed wind farm in what they regard as their private sailing roads in Nantucket Sound.
“Cape Wind” is really about democracy. It exposes the servile ways of the “liberal” Massachusetts congressional delegation when a Kennedy wants a personal favor. More importantly, it gives a rare
picture of democracy’s most hidden chamber, the House-Senate conference committee.
A conference committee is a select group of members entrusted to reconcile minor differences in bills already passed by both Houses. In 2006, Senator Kennedy reached across the aisle to Rep. Dan Young (R-Alaska) to insert new wording, intended to cripple Cape Wind, in a Coast Guard authorization bill. This irregular use of the conference was meant to be done quietly, but word got out. Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) pledged to oppose the inserted language, but did not keep her word. The hero was Rep. Charles Bass (R-NH), who would lose his seat to a Democrat in the fall. Mr. Bass exposed his colleagues’ chicanery, which could not survive the light of day. The conference committee’s report was not accepted — a rarity — and Cape Wind lived to face new political death threats.
4) “Nationalism, Five Roads To Modernity,” by Liah Greenfield. This 491-page work by the Israeli-born Harvard sociologist cannot be read, it must be studied. It is the skilled iconoclast’s answer to the simple saw that “nationalism” is bad; therefore “internationalism” is good — even if it has terror states as arbiters of human rights at the United Nations.
The author investigates how nationalism produced liberty in England and the United States; totalitarianism in Russia and Germany; and a schizophrenic political history in France. One important insight: Whereas Protestants in England and America prospered, their equivalent in Germany, the Pietists, were educated but impoverished in a static society. In Britain and the United States, social mobility led to liberty’s growth and extension. In Germany, the lack of mobility led to xenophobia and the and political doctrine of “antisemitism,” first named and advocated by Wilhelm Marr in 1879.
Of the United States, the author notes that the notion of equality was added to the English notion of liberty, and that explains both our instability and our stability: Inequality (the greatest was slavery) is always bitterly challenged — leading to hard compromise and deeper stability. The rise of Barack Obama, is, I think, consistent with this insight.
My thanks to Ricky Greenfield, publisher of the Connecticut and Western Massachusetts Jewish Ledgers, for introducing me to #2; and to Jim Stergios, Director of the Pioneer Institute in Boston, for introducing me to #4 and to the author of #1.
