Ghosts of America’s Past: Part 3

We traveled into Boston last weekend and visited the homes of John Adams.

While Jefferson wrote the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence, a declaration without believers would quickly have been forgotten. As eloquent a writer as he was, Jefferson was a poor public speaker. According to Jefferson, it was John Adams “who was the pillar of its [the Declaration's] support on the floor of Congress, its ablest advocate and defender against multifarious assaults it encountered.” Adams, Jefferson wrote, “came out, occasionally, with the power of thought and expression that moved us from our seats.”

The results of Adam’s presidency were mixed—he steered clear of the conflict with England and France, yet he enforced the Alien and Sedition acts. Adams was a dedicated public servant in a way that makes a mockery of the claims of contemporary politicians who claim they are only interested in service. Politics in Adams’s era was not a means to achieve wealth. While in France and separated from his family for many years, John wrote to Abigail:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

The outstanding HBO movie epic John Adams was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by David McCullough. At the end of his presidency, as Adams leaves the White House in a public stagecoach, he asks his fellow passengers to “stop gawking” and tells them he is just “plain John Adams, citizen, same as yourselves.” A great leader made his way home to be an ordinary Massachusetts farmer on a stagecoach; it was the 19^th Century equivalent of flying coach on an airline.

Once the person who held the office of president of the United States was a servant of his country; now he is an imperial lord. Adams lived on his farm, Peacefield, from 1801 until his death in 1826; there was no secret service protection and no entourage. His front door was just feet away from the country lane that passed by.

Peacefield Then

During our visit to Peacefield I was struck by how modest the house was; in places it felt claustrophobic. I have seen New England houses of prominent merchants of Adams’ time that were far grander. When he and Abigail moved into this modest home in 1788, it was a big step up from the family home where they had started their married life. In time, Peacefield became the home of their son John Quincy—the sixth president of the United States.

Peacefield Today

A library built of local stones stands just a few feet from the family house at Peacefield.  This was the first presidential library in the United States; it houses the 14,000 volumes that John and John Quincy Adams owned. These were books that they bought and read, books of ideas that engaged their minds. Today a presidential library means a place in which documents are stored—papers that document actions, many of which have eroded our liberties, and papers that explains why the man should be considered great for those actions nevertheless.

The Stone Library at Peacefield

History has not been kind to the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Yet, like his father, he was a man of principle and intellect who held allegiance to President Washington’s sage advice that America should not enter into entangling foreign alliances. John Quincy Adams’s eloquent advice of 1821 has long been forgotten and with our forgetting, our freedom erodes:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [Americas] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.

It seems to us that the choices that John Adams and John Quincy Adams faced happened long ago, but we face the same fundamental choices today: freedom or despotism; peace or war; love or fear.

Part 1

Part 2

Morgan’s Dream

I watch very little television; but when Amazon previewed an episode, I was instantly hooked on Chuck, NBC’s action/comedy/satire series. One character in the series is Morgan Grimes. Morgan is a slacker, around 30, who works in a Buy More (a parody of Best Buy). In the most recent episode, Anna, Morgan’s girlfriend, asks him if he has any dreams and goals beyond working at the Buy More. After making Anna  promise not to laugh, Morgan reveals his dream: He wants to be a “Benihana chef in Hawaii.” Then he quickly explains why his dream is not practical: “I’m way past my prime. I’m not Asian. And I don’t even know where to get the knives.”

I laughed, but not at Morgan. Morgan was simply articulating the human condition—we all make up absurd excuses for not following our dream. Vincent Van Gogh provided the antidote to this state of being when he said: “If you hear a voice within you saying, ‘You are not a painter,’ then by all means paint… and that voice will be silenced.”

Van Gogh is teaching us that we must not wait until the negative voice goes away before we follow our dream. Waiting is not a strategy for success. The voice will never go away, but it can fade away.

Every human being has two voices within. We are most familiar with the voice of our ego.  The voice of the ego evaluates everything as for us or against us. It is the part of our mind that trys to control everything. In her book Soul-Kissed, Ann Linthorst helps us to understand that our ego defines itself based on separation:

Human identity is a sense of personhood, which is established by separation, location and limitation.  Ask yourself who you are, and the details that come to mind will all be statements of location and limitation: “I am male or female, born there, to that father and mother, living here, in this house, with these people, doing this, having that.” This kind of self-identification, which I call “ego” automatically excludes all other possibilities. Being here we cannot be anywhere else. Having what we have and doing what we do means that we don’t have or do other things. Personal identity is determined precisely by separation, location, and distinction from others. I know that I am… by the differences that distinguish and separate us.

Initially, Morgan is certain of his lack and limitation; he knows why he can’t be a Benihana chef. By the end of the episode, he is trying to get back in touch with the other voice within—his True Self. The True Self in each of us is that part of the mind which is connected to the Love and Intelligence of the Universe.

Has the ego’s voice of doubt left Morgan for good? Of course not. Both voices—ego and True Self—will exist in each of us until we die. However, whatever voice we choose to listen to at this moment, we will strengthen. Steve Chandler wrote recently of that voice that Van Gogh speaks of:

The voice says, “Oh, my gosh, this would be so scary, and I dread this and don’t do this and don’t try that.”  It’s a voice that tries to keep the organism safe, but it’s not really safe to be safe.  It’s the opposite of safe.  People trying to stay safe, aren’t creating the world that they really want; and they’re not learning to be fearless.  They are actually learning to be scared.  Training themselves to accommodate fear. Ongoing fear.

In other words, following the choice of our ego is a sad bargain—like alcohol, it buys us only temporary relief from the human condition at the price of reinforcing our weakness. My elderly aunt checks her blood pressure constantly throughout the day. She gets alarmed with each high reading; but perversely, she seems reassured that her definition of herself is intact.

Her blood pressure reading has become her God. In her own way, she has been teaching me. What dream of lack and limitation am I monitoring—and thus worshiping—all day? The disinfectant is simply to be aware of what our ego is worshiping. This awareness is cleansing—but only when it is done free of judgment.

We are all Morgan. Now, more than ever, our world needs us to pivot towards the dreams of our True Self.

On Soviet Sausages and American Apple Pies

In the former Soviet Union there was one commodity, along with vodka, that was ubiquitous—that  commodity was cheap, low-quality, very fatty sausage. Fresh fruits and fresh vegetables were rarely found in the state run stores; but at the end of a queue, sausages were usually available for purchase. Now mind you, even by sausage standards these were extraordinarily low quality and, in truth, not fit for human consumption. But the Soviet citizen—their bellies full and their minds distracted by alcohol—had little understanding that they did not have to live a life of such degradation.

A little history of socialism can make you appreciate the cornucopia of food that is available in the United States. Perhaps some homemade apple pie? Maybe not.  As the Wall Street Journal reports,

On the first Friday of Lent, an elderly female parishioner of St. Cecilia Catholic Church began unwrapping pies at the church. That’s when the trouble started.

A state inspector, there for an annual checkup on the church’s kitchen, spied the desserts. After it was determined that the pies were home-baked, the inspector decreed they couldn’t be sold.

“Everyone was devastated,” says Josie Reed, a 69-year-old former teacher known for her pumpkin and berry pies.

Sold for $1 a slice, homemade pies have always been part of the Lenten fish-fry dinners at St. Cecilia’s, located in this tiny city near Pittsburgh. Similar dinners are held in church basements and other venues across the country this time of year.

After a state crackdown forbidding the sale of homemade pies, members of St. Cecilia Catholic Church in Rochester, Pa., proceeded with their annual Lenten fish fries anyway. The pie flap helped draw healthy crowds.

The problem is the pies are illegal in Pennsylvania. Under the state’s food-safety code, facilities that provide food at four or more events in a year require at least a temporary eating and drinking license, and food has to be prepared in a state-inspected kitchen.

Make no mistake, very little of our food supply is inspected; one can only wonder why this crackdown now. Instead of harassing church kitchens, perhaps the Pennsylvania inspectors might look for contaminated Chinese food ingredients that are alarmingly ubiquitous in our food supply.

Remember Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi? If Seinfeld had a “Pie Nazi” character he would say, “No homemade pies for you! Instead go to the supermarket where you can get a pie with little fruit but with bleached flour, high fructose corn syrup, dough conditioners, emulsifiers, preservatives, artificial colors and artificial flavors.” Homemade pies may have 5 or 6 ingredients; the next time you are in the supermarket, read the label on a pie. You may find close to 20 to 30 ingredients.

In his essay The Rush Towards Socialism – and How To Stop It Thomas DiLorenzo recently wrote:

The administration’s main agenda is an explosion of federal spending and debt so large and outrageous that America will soon exceed Sweden in the proportion of the economy that is controlled by government – if it hasn’t already. That’s just for starters. They also want to sharply increase taxes on the most productive and hardest-working people in society; increase the capital gains tax to deter private investment; expand the welfare state; spend trillions on pure, pork barrel spending in a massive vote-buying spree; set all corporate compensation levels by governmental fiat; tax away the wealth of unpopular business people (only starting with those AIG executives); regulate and control all risk taking by private entrepreneurs; enforce a civilian draft to create a modern-day, American version of the Hitler Youth (See Rahm Emanuel’s creepy, Stalinist-sounding book entitled The Plan); nationalize entire industries, starting with the capital markets (they understand that there can be no capitalism without private capital markets); and double, triple, and quadruple the number of “regulators” who already regulate all aspects of human life in America.

In the United States, as we collectively rush to give up our freedom in exchange for perceived security, we too may experience the degradation and deprivation of relying on government to meet our basic needs.

State run food stores are not yet on our horizon, but neither was much of the government intervention that we have seen a few years ago. We may stand online for sausages yet. And for you socialists living in “sophisticated” urban centers, let me lower your expectations now—the bureaucrats will not be providing you free sushi in state run food stores.

This Yankees Fan Has Had Enough

In his classic book on architecture The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander offered this observation about bad architecture: “When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature.” Alexander offered this advice to those architects who try to take their ego out of a building design: “You are able to do this only when you no longer fear that nothing will happen….”

Although Alexander’s work is to help architects design buildings that have “the quality without a name,” his work has universal applicability. This quality, he pointed out, “cannot be made, but only generated, indirectly, by the ordinary actions of people, just as a flower cannot be made but only generated from the seed.” Continuing his gardening metaphor, Alexander points out, “If you want to make a living flower, you don’t build it physically, with tweezers, cell by cell. You grow it from the seed…No process of construction can ever create this kind of complexity directly.”

Consider The New York Yankees—each year a new team of high priced mercenaries is assembled. If opening day is an indication, this year’s team promises to be another boring collection of players who have no idea of what team play means. On the mound was CC Sabathia; we are told that the Yankees were fortunate to sign him to a $161 million free agent contract. Pitching against the Orioles on Monday, he looked at least 40 pounds overweight; he barely made it past the 4^th inning.

In order to avoid injury and maximize his performance, a team player would take pride in being in top physical condition. In his book Talent is Overrated, Geoff Covlin, although not necessarily writing about sports, observes:

Trust is the most fundamental element of a winning team. If people think their teammates are lying, withholding information, or plotting to knife them, nothing valuable will get done. Similarly, team members may not trust one another’s competence. Such teams don’t create synergy. They created the opposite, dysergy-two plus two equals three, with luck.

So-called dream teams may be in trouble from the start because team members often have particular reasons to be distrustful.

Great coaches and managers know that, as important as talent is, a collection of big egos will perform to a level less than the sum of the parts. Consider the 1980 Olympic U.S. hockey team, the “Miracle on Ice” team, which won the gold medal at Lake Placid, NY. The U.S. team, composed of amateurs, was up against the team from the Soviet Union, considered to be the best team in the world. When Craig Patrick, the assistant coach of the U.S. team, said to head coach Herb Brooks, “You’re missing the best players,” Herb is reported to have responded, “I’m not looking for the best players, Craig. I’m lookin’ for the right ones.”

John Wooden was the coach of the legendary UCLA basketball teams that won seven consecutive national championships. Many consider Wooden the greatest coach of any sport in history. High praise indeed! But if you examine his record, his coaching philosophy, and how he conducted himself, it would be hard to argue with that assessment.

Among Wooden’s talented players was Sidney Wicks. When Wicks first came to UCLA, he was not a good team player; he was impatient. In his book, Be Quick-But Don’t Hurry, co-written with Coach Wooden, Andrew Hill relates the story of when Wooden banned Wicks from the starting lineup in favor of Lynn Shackleford. Wicks asked Coach Wooden, “Aren’t I better player than Lynn Shackleford?” Wooden responded, “Why yes, you are, Sydney, and when you learn to play with the team, you will start, but not before then.” It took Wicks a full season to get the point, but he went on to become a great team player. In college, he became national player of the year; and in the MBA, he was rookie of the year.

If you are a sports fan, reflect for a moment on the most memorable games in any sports that you have seen. On your list of games is probably one played by a team that grew organically and overcame adversity. Although as a fan you weren’t on the team, your life was enhanced not because your team won, but because you learned and were inspired by watching their journey. If you allowed that lesson to sink in, you too were inspired to become more of what you could be.

I’m a life-long New York Yankees fan. But who—outside of a Wall Street banker buying his expensive tickets from a taxpayer paid bonus—would care if this current gang of mercenaries wins? Are they fun to watch? My answer is no. As Alexander would point out, they are lifeless. More than that, they they promote values that, if applied, subtract from our lives. They teach Americans that there is nothing that a little more money cannot cure. They teach Americans that the outcome, rather than the process, is all that matters.

Zombie Patients

This past week, my eighty-five-year-old aunt had a heart catheterization and she received a pacemaker. Since she has no children, I was down in Florida for the surgery. Although her surgery was prompted by heart irregularities, the surgery was elective. The surgeon was a decent and competent man; yet I cannot help but reflect on the economics of her surgery.

My aunt is about 100 pounds overweight; she eats terribly and has done very little exercise, even walking, for at least 30 years. After her hospital stay, she was transferred to a rehabilitation center. Not pleasant for her or the taxpayer.

According to Shannon Brownlee’s excellent book Overtreated, there are more than 2 million heart catheterization procedures performed in the United States each year. Of those 2 million, 1.2 million are elective—meaning, like my aunt, the patient has symptoms but is not in immediate danger of dying. Of the 1.2 million elective procedures, 160,000 are inappropriate, “according to cardiologists’ own rules.” Most importantly, Brownlee writes, “The latest research…suggests that the vast majority of elective cardiac procedures are no more effective at preventing heart attacks and death than medical management, which involves giving patients drugs and counseling.”

I don’t know if Brownlee includes dietary and exercise advice as “counseling.” By my own observations of the number of overweight health care professionals and the horrific food served in hospitals to sick patients, I’d conclude that the medical industry is singularly unqualified to provide such counseling.

Dean Ornish is perhaps the most well-known physician promoting dietary and lifestyle changes as alternatives to drug and surgery for heart patients. He observes that, “More than $30 billion were spent last year on angioplasties, yet randomized trials clearly show that they don’t prolong life or even prevent heart attacks for most people. In contrast, studies show that most heart disease is completely preventable today, simply by changing lifestyle.”

To be sure, the dietary portion of the Ornish program is rigorous—whole grains, beans, fresh fruits, and vegetables are stressed—while animal food, fats (less than 10%) and processed foods are minimized. Ornish is not the only one who has come to these dietary recommendations. No, I am not naïve enough to believe in magic bullets; but the evidence is overwhelming that health care expenditures would fall dramatically if Americans moved toward this type of diet.  This raises many questions:

1. Should individuals who don’t take responsibility for their health be allowed to transfer their healthcare expenses to the rest of society?  In other words, should they be bailed out?
2. As long as the medical industry is set up to focus on treating acute sickness through expensive drugs and surgeries, how will medical costs ever be significantly reduced?
3. Why do so many Americans grow up without even a rudimentary knowledge of what contributes to a healthy diet and a healthy lifestyle?

And there is a larger question: When will our current health care system collapse? The current system is simply too expensive and wasteful. We cannot afford it!

We have seemingly learned nothing from the collapse of our housing and banking industries. When the housing bubble was well underway, experts assured us that housing prices could go up at a rate of 30% per year for many more years. Anyone who had even some knowledge of the history of bubbles understood that these forecasts were made by people who were ignorant, or by government officials, or industry shills.

Should we now trust so-called healthcare experts who tell us that more government involvement will fix what ails our health care system? More government involvement?  What has government involvement given us already? How about financial incentives to pay for expensive drugs and procedures rather than incentives that encourage prevention? How about an educational system that teaches little of what promotes health? How about privileges to the drug companies and the AMA?

Mish Shedlock has called taxpayer supported banks “zombie banks”—they are the living dead of the financial industry and they would collapse without bailouts. But what of zombie patients—those who take little responsibility for their health and consume much of our healthcare resources? I have no easy answer. Americans are bighearted; we give generously to charities that help those who played no part in their misfortune. But we cannot continue to fund zombie patients.

Am I being cruel and heartless? The day will come when the healthcare bubble will burst; we will no longer be able to afford the current health care system. Those who take little responsibility for their own health will be suddenly wrenched off their support system; that will be real cruelty. It is far better to begin the process of change now while there is still time for individuals to get the care they need as they wean off the old system and adjust to new realities.