This is a picture of my father ready to go on the air, probably in the late 1940s. You might notice he is dressed rather formally, which was the standard then. It was an honor to be invited into your living room.
Yet another elder said: If you see a young monk by his own will climbing up to heaven, take him by the foot and throw him to the ground, because what he is doing is not good for him.
---Zen instruction
The unconscious mind is decidedly simple, unaffected, straightforward, and honest. It hasn't got all this facade, this veneer of what we call adult culture. It's rather simple, rather childish. It's direct and free.
---Milton H. Erikson
You can play a shoestring if you're sincere.
---John Coltrane
I hope to enjoy myself here and there through a weekend. The news on Saturday mornings too often is filled with conniving and capers slipped through late Friday afternoon. The White House may figure they have to announce what they did sometime, and it's always better to do it then when nobody may notice.
It's best not to attempt any business after Friday lunchtime. Don't call your bank, your insurance company, a government office: forget it. They don't want your disability claim over the phone at Social Security...not at 4:00 Friday afternoon. Was it always thus?
Why was my father all dressed up in that photo? It was radio! He could be in his boxer shorts, and who would know? Well, that's the point. They knew it would "show." By the 1950s things became much more casual...at least on radio. Television was formal though. But radio now was your buddy in the kitchen. It was just between you and me. If Arthur Godfrey didn't like how his advertised product tasted, he told you. The advertiser then could decide whether the novel publicity would get people to try the item. Most stuck with Godfrey anyway.
Instead of the honor of being in your home, the media now competed to get your attention. The ads presented no longer were written by a secretary in the station office area. You had to hire a special agency that had statistics and psychologists to do it. Commercials were more expensive, and if you were an announcer you had to start shouting them. My father told us radio was no fun anymore, and he decided to do something else.
He had worked his way up from the very beginnings of radio to become station manager. But now his health was suffering. In the 1950s he developed ulcers. Many people did. A cold war made things hot in the belly. Pressure. My father told me toward the end of his life that he never had a job that he liked. He had become bitter. After radio, he had sold cars, he had sold furniture. He became vice president of the best local furniture retail outlet in a city known for wonderful furniture manufacture. But local stores were on their way out in the 1960s, and the big boxes were coming in. Radio had been fun and he had enjoyed it...but the cutting edge was being born in America.
Hmmm, I don't see that this is very funny yet. Well fortunately we have people around now who can take the material of these reflections and reveal the absurdity of some of the paths we have taken. Thank heavens for Comedy Central! Would we have made it through last year's election without them? Now we have Bill Maher coming on stronger all the time. Around midnight yesterday morning, he posted some observations on all this at Huffington Post. This morning it served its purpose for me. Sarcastic as heck, nevertheless his words are healing balm for me.
Bill Maher
Host of HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher"
New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit
How about this for a New Rule: Not everything in America has to make a profit. It used to be that there were some services and institutions so vital to our nation that they were exempt from market pressures. Some things we just didn't do for money. The United States always defined capitalism, but it didn't used to define us. But now it's becoming all that we are.
Did you know, for example, that there was a time when being called a "war profiteer" was a bad thing? But now our war zones are dominated by private contractors and mercenaries who work for corporations. There are more private contractors in Iraq than American troops, and we pay them generous salaries to do jobs the troops used to do for themselves -- like laundry. War is not supposed to turn a profit, but our wars have become boondoggles for weapons manufacturers and connected civilian contractors.
Prisons used to be a non-profit business, too. And for good reason -- who the hell wants to own a prison? By definition you're going to have trouble with the tenants. But now prisons are big business. A company called the Corrections Corporation of America is on the New York Stock Exchange, which is convenient since that's where all the real crime is happening anyway. The CCA and similar corporations actually lobby Congress for stiffer sentencing laws so they can lock more people up and make more money. That's why America has the world;s largest prison population -- because actually rehabilitating people would have a negative impact on the bottom line.
Television news is another area that used to be roped off from the profit motive. When Walter Cronkite died last week, it was odd to see news anchor after news anchor talking about how much better the news coverage was back in Cronkite's day. I thought, "Gee, if only you were in a position to do something about it."
But maybe they aren't. Because unlike in Cronkite's day, today's news has to make a profit like all the other divisions in a media conglomerate. That's why it wasn't surprising to see the CBS Evening News broadcast live from the Staples Center for two nights this month, just in case Michael Jackson came back to life and sold Iran nuclear weapons. In Uncle Walter's time, the news division was a loss leader. Making money was the job of The Beverly Hillbillies. And now that we have reporters moving to Alaska to hang out with the Palin family, the news is The Beverly Hillbillies.
And finally, there's health care. It wasn't that long ago that when a kid broke his leg playing stickball, his parents took him to the local Catholic hospital, the nun put a thermometer in his mouth, the doctor slapped some plaster on his ankle and you were done. The bill was $1.50, plus you got to keep the thermometer.
But like everything else that's good and noble in life, some Wall Street wizard decided that hospitals could be big business, so now they're run by some bean counters in a corporate plaza in Charlotte. In the U.S. today, three giant for-profit conglomerates own close to 600 hospitals and other health care facilities. They're not hospitals anymore; they're Jiffy Lubes with bedpans. America's largest hospital chain, HCA, was founded by the family of Bill Frist, who perfectly represents the Republican attitude toward health care: it's not a right, it's a racket. The more people who get sick and need medicine, the higher their profit margins. Which is why they're always pushing the Jell-O.
Because medicine is now for-profit we have things like "recision," where insurance companies hire people to figure out ways to deny you coverage when you get sick, even though you've been paying into your plan for years.
When did the profit motive become the only reason to do anything? When did that become the new patriotism? Ask not what you could do for your country, ask what's in it for Blue Cross/Blue Shield.
If conservatives get to call universal health care "socialized medicine," I get to call private health care "soulless vampires making money off human pain." The problem with President Obama's health care plan isn't socialism, it's capitalism.
And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my question is: what's wrong with firemen? Why don't they charge? They must be commies. Oh my God! That explains the red trucks!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-maher/new-rule-not-everything-i_b_244050.html
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