Throat Clearing Section
My entire professional life, I have been accused of “throat-clearing” in my writing; insisting on starting my stories with vaguely relevant digressions before I get into the meat of them. One editor of Windows Magazine claimed he could edit my stories easily: just start with the second paragraph. I have been embarrassed and ashamed of this habit, but in old age I have come to accept it.
If you just want to hear what I have to say, rather than why I am saying it, (as Pat Sajak said to me, “Just tell us what letters you want, you don’t have to tell us why you want them.”) skip down to the Nut Graf sub head.
When I arrived at MIT in 1970, one of its major appeals to New Yorkers was that Boston was the only major city in the country outside of New York and Washington, D.C. with same-day morning delivery of the New York Times. That meant that when I wanted to discuss a story in that morning’s Times, I could be assured (at least in the crowd I ran with) that everyone had either skimmed it or read it. We had a common base for weighty discussions.
Today, of course, you could shoot a tee-shirt cannon down the Infinite Corridor and not hit a student who had seen the Times, nonetheless read it. I am sure their conversations about “eu ex dx ex dx” are as fascinating to them as ours were to us. But still, Bret Stephens makes me crazy.
Nut Graf
I am arguing with New York Times Guest Essayist (the term Op-Ed has been retired) Bret Stephens. He bloviated last week that President Biden’s desperately needed repair job on the American safety net would send us into permanent decline. I don’t know whether it’s ignorance, hypocrisy, or mere inconsistency, but the right in general pushes me to the edge with something they are consistent about. If it’s a right-wing nut-job concept, no need to bother with logic, facts or cost/benefit ratios.
I should note he doesn’t specifically attack the idea of a National Health Service, but he attacks it by implication. I know something I know he knows, and chose to ignore. He wrote about the U.S. advantage in research and technology, ignoring the fact that every single day, without exception, bright people in the United States decline to leave their job to create a startup because they can’t afford to lose their health insurance. National health insurance would unleash American ingenuity like nothing else ever has. Today, only the foolhardy take the plunge, with no thought to their health or that of their loved ones. What if everyone with a good idea could start their own company and not be bankrupted by health costs!
Yes, Bret, the safety net has costs. Maybe the next time you write about it, you’ll consider the counterbalancing benefits. Frankly, I have my doubts. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
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