Christmastide Reflections 2016

Dear Family and Friends,

This stupendous season, following as it does a horrendous spectacle of a year, deserves to end with some bits and pieces of wisdom to guide us on the road ahead:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Voltaire

The person dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny. Wole Soyinka

It is never my custom to use words lightly. If twenty-seven years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die. Nelson Mandela

I have a theory that the word God is actually the beginning of a word that continues endlessly, like the mathematical value of pi. Sparrow

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another. Emma Goldman

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear. Bertrand Russell

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents… The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provisions should be made to prevent its ascendancy. Thomas Jefferson

All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty. Henry Clay

A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of the discussion. Ludwig Wittgenstein

Only converted people, who are in union both with the pain of the world and the love of God, are prepared to read the Bible with the right pair of eyes and the appropriate bias, which is from the side of powerlessness and suffering instead of the side of power and control.  Richard Rohr

Man can be the most affectionate and altruistic of creatures, yet he’s potentially more vicious than any other. He is the only one who can be persuaded to hate millions of his own kind whom he has never seen and to kill as many as he can lay his hands on in the name of his tribe or his God. Benjamin Spock

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they’ve hit a triple! Barry Schwitzer

Life is a foreign language; all men mispronounce it. Christopher Morley

A Christmas Reflection:

As long as the light shines in someone’s heart, the world is not totally dark.

“I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played . . . The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”  Howard Zinn

Just after the Eastertide Reflections, I received an email from a former Nebraskan we had to end up in China to meet (and whom we hope to see again after more than a decade when we end up in DC this summer to celebrate Nancy’s brother’s 70^th birthday.)  To the email she had attached an article she knew would grasp my immediate attention.  One line of it has helped put the whole subsequent year in balance.  It read, “Today, according to some estimates, there are more Christians in China than Communist Party members. Up to 100 million across China celebrated Easter.”

You know, Christendom, as a world geo-political movement, blessedly died decades if not longer ago—after a mercilessly short stay in hospice.  And Christianity, which it sometimes seems is hardly to be found these days, has often succumbed to a kind of Christian-ism, a retrenched and backward looking escape from reality, dressed up in fake and smug piety—“Oh God, thank you that I am not like others!”

But, as an old hymn has it, “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun doth its successive journeys run”.  Do what you like with Jesus—stick him in a foul stable, shuttle him off in exile, stick him in a backwater, hang him from a cross—he keeps showing up.  It is that experience that constitutes real Christianity…the birth in each visited soul of the “stupendous stranger.”

Would that more televangelists would be granted such an experience of the living light. Would that all those who have burdened the human race with an angry God—a God who must, if possible, be appeased—were granted that experience of the light of love. Would that all who look upon the manger scene could see that Jesus did not come to change God’s mind but our hearts—that in the lowliness that marked his life he reflected what Kenneth Bailey used to call “the costly demonstration of unexpected love.”

The Sun (Issue 490 October 2016) carries an interview/article by Judith Hertog entitled “An Unlikely Friendship.” The unlikely friends of the title are Israeli Rami Elhanan and Palestinian Bassam Aramin, two people whose suffering showed them the way to rid themselves of “those canonized values they [had] internalized,” the brainwashing that characterizes so much of society today, Middle Eastern and otherwise.

Elhanan at one point tells Hertog, “Nowadays everyone is hopeless.  It’s fashionable to have no hope. People wave their despair as if it were some kind of flag.  You can’t live like that . . . You can’t just give up because the world is terrible.  You have to find hope in small things” (8). (Believe me, pick up almost any journal of poetry and short fiction today, and you will discover how much the editors like writers that wave that flag!)

The Christmas story suggests God had that idea, of finding hope in small things, before Elhanan, and so contrived to come among us as a baby in a stable.  No doubt someone arrived at this story long after Jesus’ earthly life. No doubt, like the narratives of the Hebrew Patriarchs, it is made up largely of whole cloth. Washington Irving hinted at this same distinction between history and story when he wrote, “I am always at a loss to know how much to believe of my own stories.”

Nevertheless, whoever made it up got the story absolutely right. Perhaps no story ever told got so much so right. And possibly that is why we cling to it all the more in the midst of the world’s cynicism and despair.  We go to it to find hope in small things, to learn how to find the small, vulnerable things from which hope is born, to find how self-emptying and suffering can open our eyes and hearts.

May you discern how best to reconcile, how best to resist, and how best to protect those who most need your help, and may you this season find light and love and hope!

Love, Chuck and Nancy

I usually end with one of my poems, but since the world lost Neruda Prize winning poet Don Welch this year, I’m concluding with one of my favorites of Don’s poems, one he once sent us for Christmas and one I sent once to Garrison Keillor when I was Don’s Chair–the great storyteller wasn’t able to hear how great a poem it is.

“My Mad Uncle’s Mad Song for Christmas”

One Christmas Eve, my mad uncle, a man-child injured

at birth, took a large wooden bowl and walking

through the gathering dark of the farmyard went

down and put it on the low roof of the shed where

we kept our guineas. He was very careful about it,

and that night it snowed. I remember watching it

through the bedroom window, falling softly, lighting

up the garden.

 

The next morning I found my mad uncle in the kitchen.

It was warm in there, and he was singing one of his

mad songs while whipping milk and sugar and vanilla

into the snow. And he kept on beating the beejesus

out of the bowl until he stopped and spooned snow ice

cream into cereal bowls with blue barns on the bottom.

 

Then he went out and put them down in the yard. What

followed was the most absurd good love song of all.

My mad uncle hovering over the bowls, singing down

to the barn. Telling the guineas and all the rest

of the faithful to come.

 

Blessings to all,

Chuck and Nancy Peek

 

Holiday Greetings–Late Advent

via Inbox (103) – cpeek.cp@gmail.com – Gmail

Dear Family and Friends and Readers,

As we wish all of you the happiest of holidays and some of you a Merry Christmas, Here is a look at our news:

The Peeks seem ever busy. Thank God we are retired because neither of us can imagine how we’d find time to work! Here’s some of what we’ve been doing since Easter:

Spring took us to Lincoln for another OLLI course and the chance as well to record my Breezes on Their Way to Being Winds for Talking Books. When I subbed for Fr. McClure in Alliance in May, we were guests of Merle Hayward and his daughter Holly and family at lunch and so enjoyed telling him that the book was now available to him.

The highlight of the year—Rowan’s graduation from Cedar Bluff’s High School in a wonderful and personal ceremony, with two scholarships for Mid-Plains Community College where he is currently in the welding program taking metallurgy and blueprints along with actual shop work. Friends and family joined in a super celebration. So glad friends Ken and Linda Anderson, Rosemary Northwall, Sandra Squires, and Susanne Titus could come.

Cather Spring Conference in Red Cloud was one of the best in recent years as we welcomed Nancy Savery to the pump organ where Barbara Sprague played so faithfully for years.  Nancy “soldiered” through a sudden bloody nose! Which fit right into the conference theme: “Both Bitter and Sweet”: Cather, Literature, and the Great War.” The homily was based on the words of peace-making in hymns that were spawned by the horrors of the Civil War and Great War…and then promptly forgotten in the increased militarism during and following WWII.  The Great War is one of Nancy Peek’s special interests, so she particularly enjoyed the conference. Chuck also reviewed some submissions for the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review during the year.

We joined our friends Stan and Carol Dart, Jim and Cathy Ganz, Mitch and Katie Bean, Mike and Becky Evers for two of the MONA Sounds of Summer programs—nearly froze through the first, sweltered through the second, but managed spreads that celebrated baseball one night and jazz the other, heard some great music, and saw a number of friends. Later in the year we joined the same group plus Ed and Mary Berglund to wish the Beans well on their move to Omaha.

Nancy and I only managed to get out for the Saturday morning session of the Buffalo Commons Storytelling Festival where I joined Gene Morris and Ben Nelson for the stories of Ben’s service as Governor and Senator. We got to stay long enough to hear Andy Irwin tell a funny and pointed story set in the south but championing a religion of grace rather than of rigid moral pronouncements…believe me, that was a welcome relief from a lot of the bilge spouted during a long election campaign!

In mid-summer Nancy and I enjoyed two Sundays at Church of the Holy Spirit, Bellevue, where I subbed for Fr. Tom Jones during part of his sabbatical (even as we Facebook-followed Fr. Ernesto Medina’s inspiring pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, where he was joined his last week by Fr. John Schaeffer). Each week I stayed over to celebrate a Wednesday mid-week Eucharist followed by a Bible study, so between the Sundays and Wednesdays we got to spend some time with the Ptomey’s in Cedar Bluffs.

Nancy’s annual visit to Dr. Allward, the iris-specialist at the University of Iowa Hospitals, went very well and afforded us the opportunity for dinner with Fr. Mel Schlachter and his sister Elaine and her husband Larry.  On the way home we stopped in Waterloo to see George Day and his son—wonderful visit.

Oxford, Mississippi drew us for the Faulkner Conference and another gig doing a Teaching Faulkner session with Terrell Tebbetts (who has dug up some distant cousins of mine in Batesville, Arkansas where my mother’s mother, Lena Hail Urie, was from) and enjoying the other session offered by Jim Carothers and Theresa Towner and a special session by Brian McDonald. Love the place and conference and friends there (Grayson Schick, Jennie Joiner, Colby Kullman, and John Lowe), especially this year a wonderful brunch hosted by Dale and Ann Abadie. But always glad to pull into the drive of Marty Townsend and Clark Swisher in Columbia Missouri for a stop on the way home.

Just time to do our laundry and pack our car, get in an overnight with John and Katy Hall in Davenport, and then head for a month in Milwaukee at Prospect and Brady and near the Peeks.  There, I spent a good deal of each day preparing to teach the History of the Episcopal Church this fall at the Bishop Kemper School for Ministry (BKSM).  I agreed to teach only if we could examine the history to find times we have best found our own identity and purpose and thus lit a fire that shed both light and warmth.  That meant, however, mixing and matching what I could extract from standard histories, so it kept me busy. We enjoy our chances to be with George’s inlaws, the Bruss family, and we also enjoyed a daily set of Yoga/Pilates/Tai Chi exercises usually on the grass near Lake Michigan—which we sometimes undermined with coffee and rolls at Colectivo. (We’ve kept up the coffee and rolls–now if we only had the resolve to keep up the exercise routine all year long.)

Returned to Kearney in time to celebrate Steve Buttress’s 75^th with Jan Weber, Jerry and Janet Fox, Clint and Pat Jones, Galen and Marilyn Hadley, Stan and Carol Dart, and to teach a fall course in the Parables for our Senior College and for Nancy to culminate her summer’s work in soliciting panelists and planning the panel for our World Affairs Conference that focused on what we might be able to do together for immigrants and other new populations. [Nebraska now leads the nation in welcoming the new wave of new populations.] One respondent’s conference evaluation said it was the best panel of the conference and it opened the way for lots of subsequent contacts between churches and agencies. Bonnie Payne and Michelle Warren helped set up the panel and Lutheran Family Services, the Diocese of Grand Island, First Presbyterian-Kearney, Evangelical Free-Kearney, St. Luke’s Episcopal-Kearney, and Kearney’s Jubilee Center all took part.

A side benefit came from a conversation at the opening reception at Mike Anderson’s Cunningham’s Journal with our paper editor Mike Konz and his wife Pilar and a woman on the international studies staff at UNK, Yao Zheng and her husband Alex—that conversation led all of us plus International Studies Director Michael Stopford and his wife Elizabeth to a “from the Chinese menu” dinner at Hunan’s—the closest we’ve come to the taste of authentic Chinese food since being in China a decade ago and a very fun gathering.

I’ll let others here speak to our feelings about the election (see another blog), but part of what kept me sane was offering a workshop on 12-Step spirituality at our Diocesan Annual Council (based in Richard Rohr’s Breathing Under Water, which the Bishop kindly bought for the first 25 participants) and teaching my class in Topeka for BKSM—which had the added pleasure of a thoroughly enjoyable drive down and back with Dean Craig Loya and lunch after the closing session with him and Theresa Houser, a truly engaged Christian enrolled in the program from Nebraska, along with Greg Burke of St. Mark’s Hastings and Kim Culp of CHS Bellevue. The only bad part was getting out of Topeka so late I couldn’t make the afternoon of Fr. Jason Emerson’s music to which he’d so kindly invited us.

Other occasions for serenity and thanksgiving included both speaking and hearing Fr. Jim speak at the Tuesday Night Workshop in Grand Island, always preceded by burgers and fries at Pam’s with Rita, Jolene, Tom, and Bonnie.  George, Bill, Mike, Erich, Steve, and others are often at the TNW as well. Over the years, these nights have been like arriving at an oasis for us.

Another great pleasure: I drove down to Lawrence, picked up Jim Carothers (just returned from being in Victoria with Bev and Cathleen), and we drove together to Cape Girardeau for a Faulkner and Hemingway Conference.  We started by following Jim’s adage that “a journey of a thousand miles begins at Arthur Bryant’s,” pursued that thought through a tour of Jim’s old haunts in St. Louis that included Rigassi’s for a wonderful Italian lunch, and then dinner at the conference with Bob and Kaye Hamblin.  Highlight of the conference: Jennie Joiner’s panel on teaching the two great writers (with Susan Marshall, Emily Bobo), Bob’s guided tour of the new L. D. Brodsky poetry collection, Barry Hudek’s ‘Global, Regional, Local’ panel (with Han Qiqun and Francoise Buisson), as well as the chance to put in a bid for a future conference on Faulkner and Cather. (Or perhaps the highlight was the panel I couldn’t stop laughing through while wanting to suggest that someone actually read Faulkner and Hemingway!)

That trip, too, had its dessert! I was invited to dinner in Lawrence at Terry and Anita Faddis’s.  Anita was the first person to befriend me when we moved to McCook, became at times a girl-friend, and was a “make it with wool” and cherry pie baking champion. I had only met Terry once before and hadn’t seen Anita for 50 years, but over another of her cherry pies we picked up our friendship right off the bat.  So great to see her again and get acquainted with Terry.

Nancy continues with her weekly Yoga and her prayer group at St. Luke’s. I continue to belong to Torch Club and began my three-year term on the Nebraska Library Commission, enjoying a lunch with Molly Fisher after one of the meetings. Had the privilege of reading a couple of poems from Breezes at the Center for the Book’s Celebration of Books where Breezes won the 2016 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry, hosted by NLC’s outstanding Director, Rod Wagner, his very fine staff person, Mary Jo Ryan, and emceed by State Poet Twyla Hansen who, together with another fine poet, Marge Saiser, deservedly received the Mildred Bennett Award.

Only got a few words in with Ted Kooser, but got to meet Amy Plettner, a fine poet, and Chigozie Obioma, Man Booker Prize finalist. I’m reading her Undoing Orion’s Belt and his The Fisherman now. Watching the PBS show about the Durrell family in Corfu has prompted Nancy to pick up the Alexandrian Quartet.

Read again in November at the Frank Museum here with Rick Marlatt and then led a book group discussion in Grand Island on poetry in general and my book in particular…wonderful lunch with some fine, intelligent women, many of whom we had come to enjoy while living in Grand Island a few years ago. I was invited by Liz Baxter, possibly the human being outside of family I’ve known the longest in this world—somewhere there is a photo of two little infants in a crib in Denver, one me, the other her.  Our host for a marvelous lunch served by Riverside from recipes of members of the group was Pam Price, and our extra treat was two tickets from Pam and Hank for the Nebraska/Maryland football game.  Proud of Nebraska for playing every senior not on the injured list for their last home game.

While I am being proud of things, let me add that we are very proud of our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry, for showing up at Standing Rock and shoring up the Native American led protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Bismark, largely white, protested the pipe-line for endangering its water, so the company moved it where it could endanger the water of the tribal lands nearby! The protesters received vicious assaults by outsourced “police”–people protecting their land and sacred grounds were gassed and beaten. Bishop Curry was just the right person to go, preach, celebrate, and support.  The United Thank Offering is building some small houses for the winter there and Bold Nebraska built some small energy barns as well. The Army Corp of Engineers finally denied the easement to the pipeline company, the camp may scale down or disband, but the structures will remain should we have to return.

As I wrote part of this, the Ptomeys were about to arrive for a celebration of Brody’s 14^th birthday before they made their way to Holyoke to give thanks with Ray and Jan Ptomey. Brody’s treat: the Broncos/Chiefs game at Mile Hi.

Closing out the year with a small part (Scrooge, of course) in the Crane River Theatre Christmas program, stopping in at the holiday soiree in honor of Javier and Sammy Fox, a housewarming for Bobbie and Rachel Fox, and very enjoyable dinner theater at Kearney Community Theatre with Galen and Marilyn Hadley for A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Shortly we head for Milwaukee for Christmas!

Mostly, of course, we are thankful for our family—about whom some news:

The PEEKS

Huck (Henry), turned 3, can tackle some of the neighborhood teens, and must sit still sometimes, though we never got a siting of that, a shark for Endaris Park Halloween and about to be potty-trained (and I quote) ‘come hell or high water’;

*Greta (Margaret), 5, Rey for the Endaris Park Halloween bash—perfect personality match! we got to see her in her tap/ballet class where she shows great grace and energy and sometimes even attention;

Willie (Will the Thrill), just now 8, who closed out his last stint on the Toledo Mud Hens with great stats in every category and then got student of the month in his grade at Mt. Olive school; (Ninja, of course!)

*Laura Grace, whose new job puts her in charge of compliance and quality control at OnCourse Learning, and who, with the help of an occasional glass of wine, still manages the ups and downs and spills of three children 3-8 and a husband, namely—

George—continuing as a partner with Crivello and Carlson law firm in Milwaukee, President of the school board for Mt. Olive school, teaching paralegals at Carthage in Kenosha, and often heard to say “as I was preparing my brief…”

The PTOMEYS

Brody (#72 on the Jersey, George’s number we’d all thought permanently retired), just now 14—an all-around champ who can boast about sports, academics, a sense of humor, one ratty set of Husker p.j.s, and a super personality;

Rowan,19, whose last Facebook post was with a very attractive Baillie Simmerman, and who just completed his physical and aptitude tests for joining the National Guard and for half of whose vast store of weapons we were for a while the armory (no fears about the 2^nd amendment in our family—though a few for the 1^st!), and who continues to enjoy the welding program at Midplains Community College;

*Noelle, ageless, who continues to direct our Diocese’s Camp Canterbury, serve as Senior Warden of St. Augustine’s, Elkhorn, where Fr. Ben Varnum is the new Rector; this year she has helped develop a new one-day program of fellowship, fun, spirituality, and service called GROW for our teens; she also occasionally helps with parish discernment processes and stewardship drives;

Harlan, whose work as Superintendent of Schools at Cedar Bluffs earned him a spot in the Fremont paper’s recognition of the year’s “Pathfinders,” and whose school sports a new shop and art wing, bus barn, concession stand, and playground; Harlan is taking the family to Nashville for the Nebraska-Tennesse Bowl Game.

*Special thoughts this year for our girls—you all put cracks in the glass ceiling!

“Set ‘em up for the whole damned crew/Say a prayer for your absent friends” from Goodnight Ruby—more than the usual number of losses in the RIP section this year:

Of our friends and acquaintances:

Tabu Abu, beloved family snail, gift of Brody, named for my ‘Men in Tights’ fictional husband

Judy Amber, active in Diocese of Nebraska outreach

Helen Amsden, one of the original “life-project” deacons in our Diocese

Mary Jean Andrews, communicant of Holy Trinity, Lincoln, and early supporter of St. Monica’s

Agnes Ayoub, mother of friend and writer George Ayoub

Joseph Barker, much-loved father of our much-loved Bishop

Stevie Baxter, long-time St. Stephen’s acolyte, trained by my dad, who never let being a Downs Syndrome child stand in the way of serving at 8:00 a.m. mass—with a smile

Maxine Borley, long-time family friend, communicant of St. Mark’s, Hastings

Edmund Browning, former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church

Lois Carlson, long-time member of my old “home” recovery group

Kendrick Child+, one time college chaplain at Boston U

Phyllis Fahrenbruch, veteran of KCT productions, onstage and off

Duncan Gray Jr. former Rector of St. Peter’s Oxford, former Bishop of Mississippi, Civil Rights hero

LuAnn Haller, mother of long-time friends, Linda Clark and Nancy Towne

Kathleen Higgins, our sister-in-law’s cousin

Elmer Holzrichter, artist and teacher in UNK’s Art Department

Chris Hunnicutt, beloved English teacher at KHS who did Noelle a great favor once

Hazel Jordan, Methodist minister and co-Cursillista

Joel Lundak+, college class-mate and fellow priest

Delores McCallum, long-time widow of former rector of All Saint’s, Omaha

Sally McDearman, Nancy’s cousin

Dorothy Minister, widow of Marshal Minister, one of dad’s old seminary buddies and long-time friend from Colorado

Ormonde Plater, instrumental in the restoration of the Deaconate

Fred Prellwitz, dentist, scoutmaster (Julie Dennis’s father-in-law)

Mick Ross, hard to imagine a heaven where Mick wouldn’t be at home

Chris Rundstrom, friend of our son and daughter and our family

Mel Schumacher, much beloved drama teacher at KHS

Chuck Wahl, UNL a couple of years ahead of us, who married our friend Jan from the Sandhills, my boon companion during my internship at St. Mary’s Bassett

Paul Welter, counselor to the counselors of our region

Click Westin, 12-step sponsor to too many to number

Sam Whiteman, blissful benefactor of the “divine nine”

Lorma Wiebe, whose good will and good heart will be greatly missed, whom Nancy called “one of the joys of living in Kearney”

And notable celebrities:

Edward Albee, playwright of and for our times

Mose Allison, still singing, different choir

Muhammed “Sting Like a Bee” Ali (Cassius Clay) the 2^nd Brown Bomber, who loved justice and mercy and walked humbly with his God

Kenneth Bailey, scriptural exegete, many years at American University, Beirut

Fr. Daniel Berrigan, brave soul of the ‘60s, Roman Catholic priest

Fidel Castro

Leonard Cohen—Hallelujah!

Florence Henderson, think Brady Bunch

Gordie Howe, his last shot at the goal

Merle Haggard, different chorus, different hymn

Tom Hayden, counter-culture advocate of the ‘60s

Sam Foltz, NU Cornhusker punter

John Glenn, a hero for our times

Gwen Ifill, we’ll miss your weekly review!

Jaws (not the shark)

Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense

Arnold Palmer, who beat par right up to the end

Billy Paul (him and Mrs. Jones)

Shimon Peres, who did more to secure Israel than anyone but who, at great cost to him, would not sell out its reason for being

Janet Reno, former Attorney General of the USA

Doris Roberts, the sometimes exception to “everybody”

Andrew Sachs, Fawlty Tours factotum from ‘Barthelona’

Morley Safer, his “60 Minutes” are over

John Saunders, witty and exuberant sports announcer

Fred Shuttleworth, Civil Rights leader

Pat Summitt, famed basketball coach

Milt Tenopir, McCook High coach who went on to be line coach for the Huskers

Alan Thicke, experience the last Growing Pain

Grant Tinker, former head of NBC who gave us Mary Tyler Moore

The Man from U.N.C.L.E (Robert Vaughan)

Elie Wiesel, moral light, holocaust survivor

Gene Wilder, comic genius

May you all find light and life in the joys of this season of holidays,

Chuck and Nancy

Accompanying photos: Rowan with us taken at his graduation in May 2016, Brody keeping alive the family #72, and “three of a kind,” aka Willie, Greta, and Huck

On trading a birthright for a mess

via Inbox (85) – cpeek.cp@gmail.com – Gmail

On trading a birthright for a mess

By Charles Peek

The first 100-days agenda is being set and apparently “repealing Obama-care” is the number one priority, at least of Paul Ryan who seems confident Mr. Trump is in tow.

Sometime during the campaign, Trump snuck in a bait and switch.  Simple “repeal” was amended to “repeal and replace.”  His adoring throng didn’t seem to notice.  What they should have noticed was that, even if you don’t like much of the Affordable Care Act, simply to repeal it would be an economic disaster for millions of people it insures and for the nation. And at some time, someone got the Donald’s ear in a rare moment of attention and soon “repeal and replace” took the place of simply “repeal.”

It is idle now to note how these folks could never get the name straight—Affordable Care Act doesn’t seem that hard to learn, but then it wouldn’t pack any political punch—it wouldn’t help fulfill the resolute determination to obstruct anything the President proposed.  It does little good now to note that in survey after survey people said they would much prefer the Affordable Care Act to Obama Care—clearly not knowing they were one and the same.  And clearly deploring their ignorance only deepened their resentments.

These are not minor elements contributing to the current debacle, but I will save them for a later blog post.  What is more important is that we now face a full-scale attack on the Affordable Care Act.  And why?  The attackers say it is because “Obama-care” is terrible—and the real reason is (as is so often true in these things) just the opposite.

Let me cite here Paul Krugman:

“The cost-saving measures included in the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, have been remarkably successful in their efforts to “bend the curve” — to rein in the long-term rise in Medicare expenses. In fact, since 2010 Medicare outlays per beneficiary have risen only 1.4 percent a year, less than the inflation rate. This success is one main reason long-term budget projections have dramatically improved.

So why try to destroy this successful program, which is in important respects doing better than ever? The main answer, from the point of view of people like Mr. Ryan, is probably that Medicare is in the cross hairs precisely because of its success: It would be very helpful for opponents of government to do away with a program that clearly demonstrates the power of government to improve people’s lives.”

This is the same power to improve lives that Trump-Pence recently employed in granting tax breaks to Carrier as the sop to keep 800 jobs from leaving the country (this compared to 8 million jobs created during the Obama administration), a sop that will surely now become the demand of every company seeking to export jobs.  This is, however, not a wholly illegitimate use of the government’s power to tax…except that denial of the government’s ability to help the private sector improve lives is a cardinal feature of right-wing ideology.  Oh, well, what’s a contradiction here or there!

In one way, you can understand why Republicans with no other vision than to obstruct Obama have had to deny plain facts.  What else are they to do in the face of the successes of their opponents in the White House?  Here is what, in the words of New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, they are up against.

Modern Democratic presidents have a better economic record than their Republican counterparts. It doesn’t much matter which measure you use—G.D.P., jobs, incomes, the deficit—or exactly when you consider a given president to be responsible for the economy. True, presidents don’t control the economy. Luck plays a substantial role. But presidents and their policies matter.

Well, I suppose we can hope they won’t matter too much!

The replacement of “Obamacare” will take a good deal of time…it means taking once piece at a time and replacing it with, well, with something very much like it. It’s not impossible that along the way they will improve it…it could stand improving, as the administration itself noted.  Instead of 50 attempts to repeal it (and consolidate their base), 5 good attempts to fix it would have yielded a workable program…but then, as a direct result of their labeling, the success would have been credited to Obama.  No doubt the “replacements” (wasn’t that a rock band once?) will bear someone else’s name and the current President will have to remember what one of his predecessors, Harry Truman, once noted: you can get a lot done in Washington as long as you don’t care who gets the credit.

And be assured, too, that it will be the cover the story for the less-publicized attempts to gut (read “privatize”) Medicare.  They are coming to get our guns was never more than a clever meme that sold more guns and ammo. (Memes are the substitute for facts among the fecalphiliacs!)  But, in fact, they are coming to get our Medicare.  The claims of Ryan and company are again specious: it’s broke, it’s an entitlement, it’s a bureaucratic nightmare. Most of the nightmare is the result of the involvement of health insurance and pharmaceutical companies, it is not an entitlement, and with a few quick and easy fixes it is not anywhere near broke.  But how are you going to keep ‘em down on the farm if you don’t scare ‘em to death!

As I write, the news is that the economic outlook is the best in eight years, the housing market is just about back to where it was before the 2008 disaster, unemployment is down, new jobs are up.  This will be what Mr. Trump inherits.  You can contrast it with what Mr. Obama inherited if you like, that is if you think remembering the past is a key to moving toward the future, that national amnesia is not a good basis for policy.

As Congress talks about privatization, it would be well for all of us to remember 2008, at least all of us who depend on Social Security and Medicare.  But it would also benefit us to remember what the 2016 benchmarks are—so in 2018 and 2020 we can see what the attempts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and Medicare (not to mention calls to Taiwan and new degradation of our environment) do to our economy.

I’m all for accountability, aren’t you? Isn’t that what we were told the 2016 was all about?

Kearney, Nebraska      December 7, 2016

Willa Cather’s Birthday