Responding to RonF’s Question about Reading, Plus, Just for the Hell of It, a Reading List

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

RonF, in my recent post on reading, Because Reading is Fundamental, asked if I could give an example of the kind of reading I was talking about when I wrote

but it has been years since I have been able to create at the center of my life a space for the kind of reading that nourishes me as a writer, reading that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that experience, that connects me to language in ways that are challenging and revitalizing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world simply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me possibilities of being I would not otherwise have imagined.

His question is a good one, but I don’t really have the time to dig into any of the books I was thinking about when I wrote that passage, so I thought I would answer him by sharing an excerpt of an essay I am working on. The excerpt, though not the essay, tells the story of how I began to read poetry and how that reading led me to want to write poetry, and so it is about reading that took place a long time ago, but the experience it talks about is the kind of experience I was talking about in the post. Regular readers of this blog will likely not need any background to understand some of the larger context, since I have written about it many times before, but for those of you who may not have read some of my previous post, it may be useful to know that part of the context for the excerpt is the fact that I was sexually abused as a boy and that reading and writing played a central role in my coming to terms with that fact. Here’s the excerpt:

The first volume of poetry I remember taking down from the shelf in the public library across the street from where I lived was Conrad Aiken’s Selected Poems. I was fourteen or fifteen years old. I read the first eighteen lines or so of the first poem in the book, “Palimpsest: The Deceitful Portrait” (Aiken’s poem is the first one in the pdf), and I knew I needed to make poetry part of my life.

Well, as you say, we live for small horizons:
We move in crowds, we flow and talk together,
Seeing so many eyes and hands and faces,
So many mouths, and all with secret meanings,—
Yet know so little of them; only seeing
The small bright circle of our consciousness,
Beyond which lies the dark. Some few we know—
Or think we know. Once, on a sun-bright morning,
I walked in a certain hallway, trying to find
A certain door: I found one, tried it, opened,
and there in a spacious chamber, brightly lighted,
A hundred men played music, loudly, swiftly,
While one tall woman sent her voice above them
In powerful incantation… Closing then the door
I heard it die behind me, fade to whisper,—
And walked in a quiet hallway as before.
Just such a glimpse, as through that opened door,
Is all we know of those we call our friends.

To say that I identified with the woman in these lines would be an understatement. I might have been keeping my own door well hidden and tightly locked—I did, after all, have real secrets to keep—but I also needed someone to open it who would hear my voice, as Aiken’s speaker had heard the woman’s, carrying it back into his own life and thus reducing, by however small a degree, her isolation. What I thought consciously at the time, however, was that I wanted to understand how Aiken had made that woman so real for me, how his words had left me feeling that his speaker had heard me too; and so I started reading a lot of poetry, taking books off the library shelf pretty much at random, jumping from Aiken to Frost to Sandberg to Eliot to Williams—I don’t remember if I read any women at the time—and finally to e. e. cummings, whose work, especially his sexual love poems, spoke to me at least as powerfully as Aiken’s poem did. Take, for example, the first three lines of the last poem in & [And], cummings’ second published volume:

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.

Nowhere else in my life—not in the pornography I was looking at or the sex education clas-ses I’d taken, not in what my male friends who’d had sex had to say or in the sexual wisdom the adult men I knew occasionally chose to share, and certainly not in own experience—nowhere else had I heard a man state so plainly that, whatever else it might mean, being sexual with someone could also be about liking his own body. I desperately wanted to feel that way myself, and so I de-voured as much cummings as I could, trying to internalize his vocabulary and technique and then to use them in my own poems about sex, which I failed at for years, well into my early twenties, when I was sitting in the workshop where my teacher told us about her “cunt poem” challenge. In part, this failure had to do with my immaturity both as a poet and as a lover, but it also had to do with the fact that I couldn’t just write the consequences of having been sexually abused away. Learning to like my body meant unlearning the self-hatred, physical and otherwise, that I’d been taught by my abusers, and that meant puzzling through the particular form this self-hatred took in me.

I also thought it might be fun to list some of the books and writers that have had this kind of effect on me since then, even though the specifics might be very different. Here are some, in no particular order, that I see on my bookshelves right now, though most of them are books I read years, and some of them decades, ago:

Posted in literature | 3 Comments

The Trouble With Anti-Tobacco Hiring Policies

Posted on January 12, 2012 by fannie

[content/trigger warning: This post contains a discussion about fat shaming]

I used to smoke, But I’m Not Self-Righteous About Being a Non-Smoker ™. (Seriously, I loved to smoke. Loved it. So I totally get why some people can’t or won’t quit.)

I quit about 6 years ago.

You’ll notice I say “about” because, for me, quitting was a gradual process. One day, I ran out of cigarettes and just didn’t buy more. I stopped taking smoke breaks. And, even though I wanted to smoke, I began using gum, toothpicks, coffee, tea, exercise, water, and fun energy drinks to fill in the gaps of the time I used to spend smoking.

Naturally, I became that annoying person who borrows cigarettes because she “only smokes when she drinks.” And then one day, I stopped doing that too. Now, I’m at the stage where smoking doesn’t even sound appealing to me anymore. I tried a cigarette about a year ago at a party and it tasted/felt like what I imagine it must taste/feel like to people who have never smoked. Like smoke (it taste/feels different and better to many smokers, LOL). I think, for me, I had to make quitting not be a Big Thing that I, like, talked about and shared with everyone. It let me live in denial for a little while about the fact that I was quitting something I really liked to do.

So, with that disclaimer noted, I recently came across this article, about how some workplaces are refusing to hire smokers.

The reasoning is that “such tobacco-free hiring policies, [are] designed to promote health and reduce insurance premiums.” Within the article, the following statistics are noted:

“Each year, smoking or exposure to secondhand smoke causes 443,000 premature deaths and costs the nation $193 billion in health bills and lost productivity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…..The bottom line will benefit because health care costs for tobacco users are $3,000 to $4,000 more each year than for non-smokers, says Bon Secours’ Cindy Stutts.”

While I understand employers’ concerns about “the bottom line,” two issues stand out to me with respect to this hiring policy.

One, I wonder if it will have a disparate impact on certain groups. While I do not believe smokers are, or should be, a “protected class” as is understood in the US legal system, smoking does correlate with socioeconomic status, education level, and sexual orientation*.

For instance, according to the CDC’s statistics, 49% of those with a GED reported being smokers, compared to 5% of respondents with a graduate degree. 31% of those living below the poverty line reported being smokers, compared to 19% living above the poverty line. In addition, a (somewhat dated) 2001 study (cited in
this PDF) found that 46% of gay men and 48% of lesbians smoked, a rate double that of their heterosexual counterparts (data on bisexuals was not included).

A blanket policy against hiring smokers is going to disproportionately impact these groups. The assumption seems to be that such a policy will get people to quit smoking, but an argument could also be made that a policy that doesn’t take into account why some people tend to smoke more than others might not be an effective anti-smoking program. It might just end up turning many smokers into people who are good at hiding their smoking, while, say, tobacco companies continue to develop
charmingly-named projects aimed at recruiting new groups of undesirables smokers*.

My second issue is that if we look at the reasons for the policy in light of the dominant narratives regarding obesity, a policy against hiring fat people could also be developed. No one, to my knowledge, is proposing such a ban (erm… right?), but I think we have reason to be wary of a parallel reasoning process being applied to fat people.

Consider:

The employers’ argument is that smokers choose to smoke, smoking has high health and economic costs, therefore, the hiring ban is acceptable. If people want to be hired all they have to do is make different life choices.

Headlines consistently inform us that Obesity Is Overtaking Smoking As the Leading Cause of Preventable Death in the US. The US Surgeon General reports that 300,000 premature deaths per year are attributable to obesity, while the CDC notes that the health costs of obesity are a “staggering” $147 billion dollars per year.

A quote in the smoking article notes that smokers are easy targets, but (as someone who is, or tries to be, a fat acceptance ally), it also seems like fat people are easy targets too. The two words “smoking and obesity” are practically a conjoined phrase in conversations about “preventable” deaths.

Many fat people believe (and I would agree) that being fat and being happy is a radical act given the degree to which fatness and fat people are shamed and demonized. Many non-fat people view being fat similar to how they view smoking, as a bad life choice and an individual you-deserve-what-you-get moral failing, rather than as the result of more systemic, collective issues.

So, to circle back to a point I made earlier, I don’t expect policies that only penalize people who fall into certain categories and do not address the reasons why people fall into those categories to be effective public health measures. When employer honchos say things like, “We’re not denying smokers their right to tobacco products. We’re just choosing not to hire them,” I think a lot of people are going to hear:

“We’re not denying people disproportionately targeted by tobacco companies the right to their tobacco products, we’re just choosing not to hire them”

or:

“We’re not denying people who live in food deserts the right to eat their cheap, high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden food, we’re just choosing not to hire them.”

or, (my personal fave):

“We’re not denying people who get fat partly because they work in front of a computer all day the right to work in front of a computer all- oh wait… yes we are. Whoooooops!”

[*Note: Although, the CDC also reports similar smoking prevalence levels among Blacks, Native Americans, and Whites (with lower prevalence levels among Asian-Americans and Hispanics), it also deserves highlighting that tobacco companies have aggressively and disproportionately marketed certain tobacco products to African-Americans and that African-Americans disproportianately suffer from tobacco-related disease.]

Posted in Class, poverty, labor, & related issues, Fat, fat and more fat, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues | 35 Comments

Adrian Wallace draws Mirka!

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Ampersand

My friend Adrian Wallace, creator of the terrific webcomic Jumbo deLuxe (drawn in a European “clean line” style that I’m envious of), was nice enough to do this drawing of Mirka, the pig, and the Witch from Hereville, along with Emily and her dog from Jumbo deLuxe. I love how everything’s in Hereville colors except for Emily and her dog. :-)

Thanks, Adrian!

Posted in Syndicated feeds | Comments Off on Adrian Wallace draws Mirka!

The Love Song of W. Mitt Romney

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

Every so often, a candidate will accidentally let slip what he or she really thinks.

This doesn’t happen with the better candidates. Not because the better candidates are more guarded — they aren’t — but because the better candidates generally are honest about what they believe. They may slip and say something goofy or off-key, but it’s not revelatory, because it’s not something they’ve been trying to keep hidden.

Mitt Romney is not one of the better candidates. Indeed, he’s one of the worse ones. Guarded beyond all rational levels, his very political positions a mystery to all but him (and perhaps, all including him), Mitt has been running for various offices since tge 1990s on a “Whatever you’re for, I’m for” platform. And in all that time, he’s never expressed a coherent reason for running.

But I think yesterday morning, while discussing the envy and jealousy that we all feel about the über-rich — because we can’t be concerned about income inequality for any other reason than that — Mitt accidentally let slip his entire worldview, and the precise reason he’s running for office:

LAUER: When you said that we already have a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy, I’m curious about the word ‘envy.’ Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?

ROMNEY: You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on the 99 percent versus one percent — and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent — you have opened up a whole new wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.The American people, I believe in the final analysis, will reject it.

LAUER: Yeah but envy? Are there no fair questions about the distribution of wealth without it being seen as ‘envy,’ though?

ROMNEY: I think it’s fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms and discussions about tax policy and the like. But the president has made it part of his campaign rally. Everywhere he goes we hear him talking about millionaires and billionaires and executives and Wall Street. It’s a very envy-oriented, attack-oriented approach and I think it will fail.

Did you catch that? (Probably. I bolded it, after all.) Mitt thinks things like inequality are subjects for “quiet rooms.” Not a campaign. Not even in Congress. But in quiet rooms, away from the limelight, away from the prying eyes of the hoi polloi. That’s where the decisions get made, after all. Not by the plebes. But by rich men in sharp suits who discuss these things over a fine dinner, perhaps some drinks for one’s non-Mormon friends.

And that’s how Mitt sees things. He’s not running because he has any particular ideology — he doesn’t. He just wants to be in those quiet rooms, discussing things with his fellow Very Important Men. And he’s willing to change his positions like some people change underwear because his positions don’t matter. This is all a show for the rubes. Discussing actual policy positions? That’s unseemly. The public should have no voice in these matters. And the idea that they should — well, that’s just stoking envy and class warfare.

That’s Mitt’s worldview. That’s Mitt’s core. You don’t matter. Nobody matters except those select few who manage to trick people into giving them power. It would be best if all of us just shut up and elected Mitt so he can do what he thinks is best, which itself doesn’t really matter.

It is an interesting way to view the world, one far more consonant with 16th century England than 21st century America. But one that never went out of fashion with a certain subset of wealthy people, who really do believe that they are born to lead, and we are born to serve. He hid it well, but Mitt has finally come clean about what he honestly believes.

Posted in Elections and politics | 14 Comments

Adherents of the Repeated Meme

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

How good is Bob Cesca’s post on Ron Paul? So good that I’m actually linking to HuffPo.

The word “cult” is often employed in political contests, but seldom in recent history has it been more appropriate than when describing the so-called Ron Paul Revolution. Specifically, Ron Paul has no chance of winning the nomination (and he doesn’t really want to); if a miracle happens and he actually does win the nomination and, subsequently, the presidency, he has no chance to successfully govern; and his libertarianism is pure hocus-pocus science fiction, evidenced by the fact that it’s never been successfully implemented. Ever. But Ron Paul’s supporters don’t know it. Or, at least, none of them can describe a single instance in history when such a system has prospered without serious consequences and horrendous side-effects.

[…]

The election of Ron Paul is a minor conundrum compared with implementing his libertarian ideas. If we presuppose that he wins and then achieves any of his proposed changes to the system in the face of a divided electorate, few working coalitions and no party support in Congress, those policies would absolutely crush the economy and, ultimately, the very “liberty” which Ron Paul cultists repeat like hiccups in response to any challenges to their leader.

[…]

Among other monikers, Ron Paul fancies himself a “constitutionalist,” but that strict adherence to the Constitution ends with the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court, according to its explicit powers enumerated in Article III, decided that the 14th Amendment includes a right to privacy and, thus, the right for a woman to have an abortion. I fail to understand how constitutionalists and those who cling so dearly to the ideals of limited government and “liberty” can so casually and oppressively order strict government regulations dictating what occurs within the bodies of every woman of child-bearing age.

Furthermore, with the rolling back of the Civil Rights Act, entire sectors of the free market would be free to discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity and gender. At the state and local level, we would see an inevitable return of Jim Crow laws that allowed, among other things, poll taxes andneo-slavery, and so the growing American minority population would find itself trapped in a new American apartheid without any recourse for justice.

But, you know, “liberty!”

[…]

See, Ron Paul isn’t a candidate. He’s a meme. Much like a popular YouTube video, Twitter hashtag or literary blog metaphor, if you’re aware of it, you’re savvy — you’re one of them. Ron Paul is a shibboleth for nihilistic hipsters. If you can work “Ron Paul” and “liberty!” into a tweet, you’re one of them. You’re anti-establishment. People who are devoted to Ron Paul appear to be more interested in the fantastical, fictitious idea of President Ron Paul than the realistic manifestation of President Ron Paul.

Read the whole thing level: off the charts.

The beauty of the article is that it completely and accurately diagnoses the Ron Paul fandom. It isn’t rational — no matter how “rational” the Ronulans style themselves. It’s not really a cult of personality, as Ron Paul has no personality other than vaguely menacing crank handing out zines on the corner. It’s a fandom. It’s based on the idea that Paul is Liberty Incarnate, and that if he just wins, then we’ll all be free. It’s why articles that state facts about Paul are met with incredulous posts by Paulbots demanding that the authors go Google Ron Paul, because if they just read about the man’s genius, they’d see that these concerns about civil rights and women’s rights and economics and isolationism are wrong, because Ron Paul is the Constitution, man.

It’s not rational. It’s just something to mutter in a corner while seeking purity. Ronulans don’t support Ron Paul, the man. They support Ron Paul, the idea. And fortunately for all of us, he’ll never get elected president, so none of us will have to live in the world that Ron Paul, the man, would lead us to.

Posted in Elections and politics | 7 Comments

Health care and non-compete agreements

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Guest Writer

[Written by Kay Olson, and crossposted from The Gimp Parade with Kay’s kind permission].

Two years ago this week I got caught up in a legal dispute that briefly threatened my life. Obviously, I’m still alive, but a version of what happened to me could happen to anyone who consumes health care in America, so I figure people should know a little about it.

First, a little background on me: Because I have a sort of muscular dystrophy that weakens my diaphragm muscles, I’ve used a trach and ventilator to breathe for the past six years. Generally, lungs react to this artificial breathing set-up by making secretions that must be suctioned out of the lungs several times each day by a trained assistant using sterile gloves, a sterile catheter and a suction machine. I have 24-hour home care assistance for this and other help I need. But the most important thing my nurses do is to keep me breathing, put the circuit tubes between my trach and my vent back together if they fall apart, troubleshoot vent alarms and keep me from drowning in my own secretions. Life is better than you might think, but I have to have this care to keep breathing.

So. This dispute between the business partners of my vent-specializing home health care agency eventually led to my choosing the management of one set of partners over another, and that’s when their legal dispute began to directly involve me. At that time my nurses all worked only with me within the agency. And I’m the only vent client my metro-area-based agency has had in my small town 60 miles outside of the Twin Cities. So my nurses followed the job and switched agencies with me in order to keep getting a paycheck. The agency I departed sued all my home care nurses for breach of a non-compete agreement (NCA). They also sought a temporary restraining order (TRO) to keep all my nurses from showing up at my house to work and, you know, keep me breathing.

Are you familiar with non-compete agreements? They are contracts between an employer and employee that restricts what the employee can do after they leave the employer for a different job. It’s meant to protect an employer’s business, client list, company secrets, etc. It requires the employer provide the employee “reasonable compensation” and typically restricts competing work within a geographical area for a set time.

It used to be that NCAs were mostly just for tech companies protecting research and development secrets, but increasingly these agreements are used by all kinds of businesses now, including for-profit health care businesses. What this means for ANY health care consumer is this: in the terms of an NCA all clients/patients are considered business assets. If your health care provider — primary care physician, psychiatrist, obstetrician, oncologist, surgeon, dentist, etc. — is suddenly barred from having you as a client because they change partnerships/clinics/employers and there’s an NCA, you have no legal standing in a dispute between employer and employee. (Your provider could also suddenly lack access to your medical records, by the way — one of many reasons you should always have copies of the most vital aspects of your medical history.) Need some sort of life-saving medical care and want the professional who knows your case? Your individual preference to stay with that medical professional likely will be no part of the legal discussion about financial harm to the employer and the livelihood of the employee.

An exception is if the legal discussion includes consideration of the “public welfare”. For example, if the medical specialty of the employee in question is rare in your geographical area, an NCA may be disallowed or limited in scope to protect the public welfare. And some states disallow NCAs involving all physicians. But the “private welfare” of one individual client/patient is not “the public welfare” and your right as an individual to choose your health care provider may not be considered.

State policies vary wildly. All employment NCAs in California and North Dakota are disallowed. Florida very seriously favors employers over employees. Colorado, Delaware, Illinois and Kentucky disallow NCAs for all physicians, Tennessee and Texas protect some physicians, New Jersey disallows NCAs for psychologists, and Massachusetts disallows for physicians, nurses, psychologists and social workers.

I’m in Minnesota and my nurses being sued as third-party defendants for violation of their NCAs was considered by the court a viable part of a big messy case. I have a lot I could say about that messy case that complicated the lives of hard working people just trying to make a modest living by giving me knowledgeable and competent health care, but I’ll try and stick to the topic of NCAs and health care here.

In my situation, I wrote an affidavit to the court about how my life would be endangered by the temporary restraining order (I needed both a lawyer and a notary public for that.) Then I showed up in court for the hearing when the TRO was being considered, even though — and I find this both galling and very key to my whole point — without me present, discussion of the TRO and my life-saving daily care would have gone on without me. Remember, as neither plaintiff or defendant in this case I had no legal right to participate. Although I’d like to believe the judge wouldn’t have ruled on a TRO that interfered with life-saving medical care, I suspect it was my presence in the courtroom that day (with my vent huffing and puffing loudly) that got my former agency to immediately withdraw the request for the TRO. I do not know for sure if the judge ever read my affidavit.

After months and months, the full case settled and the question of the NCAs and their validity was never ruled on. There’s a Minnesota Home Care Bill of Rights (MN statutes, section 144a.44.) that states that any client has “The right to choose freely among available providers and to change providers after services have begun, within limits of health insurance, medical assistance, or other health programs.” The conflict between that statute and an NCA was likewise not adjudicated or even debated at the court dates I attended. In any case, those matters would have been addressed long after the TRO, if the TRO request hadn’t been withdrawn.

Things might have turned out differently. I might not have had a nurse who showed me the complaint she was served. I might have been unable to read it and understand the immediate threat of the TRO. I might not have had access to a lawyer for the affidavit, or a ride to the courthouse to attend the day the TRO was brought before the judge. I might not have had such loyal, brave nurses who stuck with me through months of threats of financial penalties to each of them. I might not have had such an excellent home care agency to choose as I currently have and been stuck under the management of the agency that aimed these troubles at my nurses and me. But because consumers of health care are basically the collateral damage of NCAs, you don’t hear many stories like mine.

In fact, Googling “non-compete and health care” offers mostly lawyers selling their expertise and almost nothing about the clients every enforced NCA against a health care provider must displace. There are a few cautionary tales besides mine, however.

In May 2010, Madeleine Baran of Minnesota Public Radio reported on the story of Nadine Parker and her two daughters. The eight- and ten-year-old girls had been seeing a mental health professional for about a year and were finally experiencing some progress with troubles including bedwetting and self-injury when an NCA came between them and the one counselor they had developed trust in. The only current remedy in Minnesota for these children’s traumatic loss of support appears to be litigation.

[Mental health] advocates also said that the situation serves as a valuable lesson for mental health consumers. Many clients, they said, have no idea that their therapist, case manager or other provider would not be able to see them if the provider switched to a new agency.

“Realistically, the average client is not going to be thinking that far ahead,” [Frederic] Reamer, [a national expert on social work ethics and one of the chief authors of the code of ethics for the National Association of Social Workers] said. “It’s usually, ‘I’m depressed. I need help. Can you help me?’ [Not] ‘Oh, by the way, do you work in a place that has a non-compete?'”

In the 2006 Kansas case Caring Hearts v. Hobley and Hardy, the appellate court upheld the original ruling in favor of the employer and against the defendant home care nurses. In reviewing the issue of “the public welfare” the appellate court stated (italics mine) that “there is no evidence that public welfare would be harmed by enforcement of the agreements. Hobley and Hardy did not present evidence at trial that the desires of any of their former patients would be thwarted if an injunction were issued and they were denied care that they specifically desired to receive from Hobley and Hardy. But even if there were such evidence, the issue is public welfare, not the private welfare of an individual patient.”

Does the court imagine that the elderly clients do not care who provides their health care? The court doesn’t consider it relevant.

So, how to avoid losing your oncologist halfway through your chemo treatments? How to keep the social worker your mentally troubled child is getting support from? How to hang on to the primary care physician who has seen you through the birth of all your children? There aren’t any great answers unless you live in a state that has a statute disallowing NCAs.

But here’s my list of things you can do to protect yourself as much as possible:

Ask your health care provider if they are bound by a non-compete agreement.
Ask if they have any plans to leave the business where they are currently employed.
If possible, choose a provider not bound by any NCA.
Repeat this process if and when you add any new health care provider to your life.
Repeat this process if and when your health care needs become more extensive or dire and continuity of care becomes more vital to your health.
Talk to your elected officials about protecting patient continuity of care by limiting or disallowing NCAs for medical professionals in your state.

Other stuff to know about NCAs:

The American Medical Association believes “restrictive covenants” to be unethical:

Covenants-not-to-compete restrict competition, disrupt continuity of care, and potentially deprive the public of medical services. The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs discourages any agreement which restricts the right of a physician to practice medicine for a specified period of time or in a specified area upon termination of an employment, partnership, or corporate agreement. Restrictive covenants are unethical if they are excessive in geographic scope or duration in the circumstances presented, or if they fail to make reasonable accommodation of patients’ choice of physician. (AMA Code of Medical Ethics, Opinion 9.02)

A physician in internal medicine in rural Idaho where doctors are scarce writes about taking a two-year sabbatical as the only reasonable way she can find to escape an NCA.

An academic paper on how NCAs affect the labor market for physicians. (If the math scares you, skip to page 27 for the research conclusions.) Spoiler: States most supportive of NCAs have fewer docs per capita.

In 2005, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that NCAs for physicians were against public policy and unenforceable. In response, the state legislature has repeatedly tinkered with statutes mostly having the effect of overruling that court decision and allowing NCAs for most physicians.

One researcher finds that NCAs often derail careers.

For a good primer on NCAs read the paper “The Law and Policy of Non-Compete Clauses in the United States and Their Implications” by University of Illinois professors Jay P. Kesan and Carol M. Hayes.

Posted in Disabled Rights & Issues, Health Care and Related Issues | 9 Comments

Bain of My Existence

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

New Hampshire Primary, January 10, 2012

Republican Party

✔Mitt Romney            39%
Ron Paul                 23%
Jon Huntsman             17%
Newt Gingrich             9%
Rick Santorum             9% 
Rick Perry                1%
Buddy Roemer              0%
Write-In                  0%
Michele Bachmann          0%
Fred Karger               0%
Kevin Rubash              0%
Gary Johnson              0%
Herman Cain               0%
Others                    0%

Democratic Party

✔Barack Obama (Incumb.)  82%
Write-In                  10%
Ed Cowan                   2%
Vermin Supreme             1%
Randall Terry              1%
Cornelius E. O'Connor      1%
John D. Haywood            1%
Craig Fries                1% 
Bob Ely                    1%
Others                     2%

So Who’s Up, Who’s Down, and Who’s Out?

Who’s Up

Barack Obama

Obama’s 82 percent may look less-than-overwhelming to those who want to view it that way, but it compares favorably to the 80 percent George W. Bush took in 2004, and is right in line with the 84 percent Bill Clinton took in 1996. All three men had the overwhelming support of their parties behind them, despite (in the case of Bill and Barack) some grumbling from the usual suspects.

Obama’s not just up because he trounced Vermin Supreme, though. He’s also up because the Republican primary has devolved into a game of throw-wild-haymakers-at-Romney. More on Mitt in a minute, of course — but suffice to say that a great cheer went up in Chicago when Rick Perry — Rick Perry! — called what Romney did at Bain “vulture capitalism.” Will the Obama campaign run Newt calling Mitt a liar on infinite loop from June through November? Yes. Yes they will.

Ron Paul

Paul rebounds somewhat from his disappointing Iowa showing, coming in second in friendly territory. 23 percent won’t set the world on fire, but it’s good enough for him to keep trudging on.

If Paul were a conventional Republican, he’d be clearly Romney’s most dangerous opponent.  But of course, he isn’t — and just as Mitt has seemed to have a ceiling, Paul does too. And while the GOP may unify behind Mitt because, well, he at least pretends to be a doctrinaire conservative, Paul is not going to get the same benefit of the doubt.

The big question is whether Paul will bolt for a third party run. I’m kind of thinking no, simply because it would screw things up for Rand. But we’ll see.

Who’s Down

Mitt Romney

From one point of view, Romney did well in New Hampshire. He pretty much met expectations, Ron Paul finished second, Newt and Santorum finished way back. Mitt basically tied Iowa and won New Hampshire; if he can win South Carolina, he should be the nominee.

But from a more important standpoint, Mitt’s finish in New Hampshire was disastrous. Because for the last 72 hours leading up to the vote, Mitt was on the defensive — and was doing a disastrous job of defending himself. What’s more, his  GOP opponents were blasting him, not from the right, but from the left — attacking his “vulture capitalist” days at Bain Capital.

That this line of attack was so open — and that Mitt had no real answer, other than to mutter about “envy” — had to send a chill down the spine of the humans Mitt picked to run his campaign. Because this will be Obama’s attack, an attack that Mitt’s been preparing for since 2008, and Mitt looks utterly unable to parry it.

Will it kill him in the GOP primaries? Probably not. The party’s been drinking from the well of Objectivism for too long to turn on Mitt now. But will it hurt him with the vast majority of the country that recognizes wealth inequality as a problem? You bet your sweet bippy.

If Mitt had something else to offer save business acumen, that wouldn’t be fatal. But he doesn’t. Much as the swift boat attacks on Kerry damaged his raison d’être, so these attacks damage Mitt’s — and these attacks, unlike the swift boaters, are true, and backed by Mitt’s closest ideological allies. It would be as if Howard Dean, mad about losing Iowa, had launched the swift boat attacks in February of 2004. It would have destroyed Kerry. And this will destroy Mitt.

Rick Santorum

Santorum dropped precipitously from his Iowa finish, and stumbled badly during the week leading up to it. He’s not dead until after South Carolina, but he’s not going to get far if he keeps trying to explain that he didn’t say black, but blah or plives or to blave or what have you.

The good news for Santorum is that South Carolina really is more fertile ground for his particular brand of evil than New Hampshire. He’ll run into fewer students attacking him for hating gay people and more, well, people who hate gay people. But because of that, he doesn’t have an excuse if he tanks there; he will have to finish at worst a strong third behind Paul to remain even quasi-viable.

Newt Gingrich

Gingrich eked out a fourth-place finish in New Hampshire, and has some financial backing going into South Carolina that should help him remain barely alive. But he’s clearly an also-ran at this point, having finished out of the money in both early tests.

The real question is whether that matters to Newt at this point, and I think the answer is no. I think he really is pissed off at Mittens for going negative, and that he’s adopted a new campaign slogan of “to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Newt is out to destroy Mitt, and if he can’t do it in the primary, he’ll do it for the general.

That’s what the attacks on Mitt’s Bain record do. Some have suggested this inoculates Mitt against Obama attacks; I think just the opposite. It mainstreams Obama’s attacks, because all Obama has to do is quote Newt. And Newt is very quotable.

Which is why I hope he stays in the race indefinitely. Can he win? Probably not. But the longer he stays in, and the more bitter he gets, the better it is for the Democrats.

Who’s Out

Rick Perry (again)

Rick Perry went back to Texas to reassess his campaign. And after reassessing it, he decided it was super-awesome, and he should keep going.

That was not a good reassessment.

The problem, of course, is that “reassess” doesn’t mean “reassess” in American political kabuki. It means “I quit.” And you can’t come back from quitting. Nobody likes a quitter. And Rick Perry quit.

He’s done. Completely and utterly done. If he was smart, he’d quit now. But he’s Rick Perry, alas.

The sad thing is, I don’t know why he soldiers on. I understand why some of the other hopeless candidates continue. Santorum thinks he can actually win. Gingrich is out for vengeance. Paul wants to build his cult of paleoconservatives. Buddy Roemer is running for…whatever reason it is Buddy Roemer’s running. But Perry? What’s he accomplishing, other than to create anti-Mitt ringtones? I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all.

Fred Karger

Karger drew less than 1 percent in New Hampshire, below Michele Bachmann, who wasn’t running, and just ahead of Kevin Rubash, who may or may not exist. Karger was never a viable candidate for the presidency; this underlines it.

Buddy Roemer

Roemer is the Mike Gravel of 2012, and there’s no doubt about it. Indeed, given that we long ago determined that Mike Gravel was a surrealist performance artist, it’s entirely possible that Buddy Roemer is, in fact, just a character created by Mike Gravel, sort of the Borat to 2008’s Ali G. I can’t wait for the video where he throws a rock into a fire.

Vermin Supreme

Had I but known he was running, I would have mentioned him in power rankings; alas, this probably isn’t a strong enough showing to go on.

That Anti-Choice Douchebag

That guy got less than 1 percent (he gets to 1 in the rundown only by rounding), and finished behind both Vermin Supreme and Ed Cowan, who appears to be your general, run-of-the-mill vanity candidate. To top it off, he’s planning to run grisly anti-choice ads on the Super Bowl, because nothing rallies people to your side than video versions of the anti-choice ads that everybody, including anti-choicers, despises.

Remember, his goal was to embarrass Obama by proving there are a bajillion anti-choicers out there who hate him. Well, he proved that he can motivate an army that is almost as large as the one mobilized by Vermin Supreme. His pathetic last act in American life thus played out, let him scuttle back under the rock from which he crawled.

Posted in Elections and politics | 5 Comments

A Freshly-Hatched Tone Argument

Posted on January 11, 2012 by fannie

If a man who is critical of feminism writes a flippant post at his “menz” blog that plays right into stereotypes about Angry Feminists, it should be a statement of the obvious to say that many feminists will view him as walking on extremely thin ice.

So, it was with trepidation that I read Noah’s post at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz (NSWATM) on “Freshly-Hatched Gynocratic Rage.” He begins:

“The title of this post, ‘freshly-hatched gynocratic rage’ [“FHGR”], is a phrase I came across in an issue of Bitch magazine, lo these many years ago, and I apologize for not being able to dig up the name of the author who originally coined it.

She described it, more or less, as the phase every feminist woman goes through where she takes her first women’s studies course, suddenly sees and understands the pervasiveness of the damage and unfairness our society subjects women to, and spends a year or two completely pissed off” (emphasis added).

In explaining this phenomenon of FHGR, Noah suggests:

“Discovery of the incredibly pervasive nature of gendered injustice combines the power of novelty with the power of legitimate outrage at something profoundly wrong, and it’s easy to overshoot.”

He then proceeded to invite his audience that is predominately comprised of men (presumably, since it’s a men’s issues blog), and is certainly dominated by men’s voices (since many commenters shared their experiences as men), to share their stories of “gynocratic rage” and how they were able to move beyond this phase of feminism.

Aside from the problematically vague diagnosis criteria for FHGR, notice how the author who coined the term did so in the context of women discussing their own anger upon perceiving the vast nature of gendered oppression against women.

Let me share a story.

In June of 2010, I posted the following quote from Sarah Sentilles, a feminist scholar of religion:

“It was only when I heard a prayer that said ‘she’ instead of ‘he,’ when I heard God called ‘mother’ instead of ‘father,’ that I realized how much translating I had to do when I sat in church, how much energy I spent wondering if I was included, how much I longed for theological language I could see myself in.”

No matter how allied, sympathetic, feminist, or gender-egalitarian a man is, I’m not sure an experience like that is going to resonate with him in the way it resonates with many women. Now consider a man who is predisposed to be critical of feminism or is not allied or sympathetic, and well, I can quickly imagine him minimizing women’s anger at religious institution’s alienating us from god.

Some Zen Buddhists say that in order to really know something, one has to experience it.

Along with that idea, even if men may have their own experiences of oppression as men, I’m not sure the sense of alienation that many women feel within male-centric religions, and the consequent anger at how such religions dominate many societies, is something many men can truly fathom. I think it is, in fact, understandable for many men not to be as angry as women might be upon first learning about feminism and first hearing the oppression of women articulated.

Indeed, my point here isn’t to spark a conversation about male-centric religions, for that is but one example among many, but rather to question an assumption Noah seemed to be relying on in opening the floor to his audience predominately comprised of men: that they would have experienced FHGR at all upon first learning about feminism.

While some commenters did seem to discuss their own experiences, others… not so much. Instead of sharing their own experiences of having gone through FHGR themselves, some interpreted the post as a call to talk about how feminists with FHGR have Turned Them Away From Feminism (aka- The trusty “They’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar” excuse for not taking feminism seriously).

A sample:

“When I first discovered feminism, I felt very guilty about the bad things men have done.”

“I was expressly told that as an egalitarian, I had no part in feminism. For the most part 99% of feminists I meet are pure shit, but hey isn’t that a law somewhere?”

“I’d had my fair share of crazies screaming at me for being a man, but they were just that: crazy. After reading a lot of feminist material on the internet, however, I started to feel really bad about the whole patriarchy thing.”

My issue with the above commentary, aside from a suspect and ableist interpretation of feminist “crazies,” the above commentary wasn’t FHGR at all, but rather, a sharing of Freshly-Hatched Male-Centric Guilt and Defensiveness.

See, a qualification of having had FHGR, is that a person has, at some point discovered the pervasive nature of gendered injustice against women, has had that injustice resonate, and has consequently felt angry about it. The above comments seemed to have missed basically all of those components.

The thing is, many men won’t feel the same sense of “ragey”-ness about the oppression of women, because they simply don’t experience the oppression of women in the way that women do. And because they’re not going to understand feminist anger, they’re going to be more likely to trivialize it, exaggerate it, or use it as a reason to not take feminism and feminist women seriously.

If men are the beneficiaries of certain institutions and belief systems that are sexist against women, I would garner that some of them might even see a vested interest in not understanding or appreciating the legitimacy of a woman’s anger about such systems. In fact, some men might see their own defensiveness and guilt as more legitimate, important, and central than women’s oppression.

And that’s the crux of my criticism of Noah’s piece, really.

Is there really a shortage of people who think feminism and feminist women have an anger problem? Is there a shortage of male “allies” or “egalitarians” who will only support feminism if their hands are held, their defensiveness coddled, and we assure them that we know, we really really know, that they’re not personally responsible for every bad thing men have ever done?

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc | 36 Comments

Because Reading is Fundamental

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I miss reading. I really do. In a big, big way. And it has, especially over the past couple of days, been making me very, very sad. It started after I read Joshua Bodwell’s article in the most recent issue of Poets & Writers, “You Are What You Read.” “Not long ago,” he begins

I had an unsettling epiphany that probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise but nevertheless left me disheartened for the better part of an afternoon.

I won’t get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime.

For the average reader, this is one of life’s relatively benign epiphanies; as a writer it’s a serious limitation. After all, writers are readers first. Most of us were consuming books long before we ever picked up a pen or pencil, and confronting the fact that there is a limit to the number of them we will read feels a bit like realizing there’s a finite amount of oxygen in the room.

I don’t really buy the oxygen metaphor, but I endorse wholly the idea Bodwell is trying to get at. Indeed, a jolt of regret ran through me more strongly than I have felt in a long time when I read the words “writers are readers first,” because I can’t remember the last time that statement would have been saying something true about me. Sure, I read. I read for school, both material that I am teaching and that my students write; I read the newspaper and articles in magazines; I read blog posts and occasionally the discussion threads they spawn; I read emails and memos and occasionally scholarly articles and other similar material that feeds my academic work; but it has been years since I have been able to create at the center of my life a space for the kind of reading that nourishes me as a writer, reading that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that experience, that connects me to language in ways that are challenging and revitalizing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world simply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me possibilities of being I would not otherwise have imagined.

It’s easy to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of my adult responsibilities–having a job, needing to work extra hours because we need money, being a partner to the woman I married nearly twenty years ago and a parent to a thirteen year old boy–and, to some degree, putting the blame there is not inaccurate. Those responsibilities do take up time I could otherwise spend reading. It is also true, however, that I simply have not prioritized reading the way I used to, not so much in terms of how much time I can give to it, but in the sense that I’ve made choices about how to use my time that have pushed the kind of reading I am talking about here to the margins of my life. I did not start this post thinking about New Year’s Resolutions–since I don’t really believe in them anyway–but it is appropriate that I should be starting it on New Year’s Day, the day after I finished the first book in a very long time that I read just because I wanted to read it–though I didn’t start reading for that reason (about which more below)–Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.

Fish divides his book into the two sections named in the title, treating the first, roughly, as a discussion of form and the second, more or less, as a discussion of content. Of course, since the two are not really separable, his analysis of one often bleeds over into an analysis of the other. Nonetheless, the distinction is useful, since it allows Fish to ground a lot of what he has to say in the notion that a sentence is a material thing, like paint, an object with a structure and characteristics independent of the particular content the sentence has been fashioned to convey. Too many people who want to write–at least this is true of too many of the students I meet who say they “lo-ove” to write (and they almost always turn “love” into a two syllable word)–just don’t get this. Here is the first paragraph of Fish’s book:

In her book The Writing Life (1989), Annie Dillard tells the story of a fellow writer who was asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sentences?'” The student is surprised by the question, but Dillard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sentences he could begin,” and she remembers a similar conversation with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.'” The point, made implicitly (Dillard does not belabor it), is that you don’t begin with a grand conception, either of the great American novel or a masterpiece that will have in the Louvre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other. (1)

There are few pleasures that I enjoy more than getting my hands dirty in the tangled mess that the sentences of my first drafts usually are; and if we’re talking about poems, in which case you need to add to that mess the lines over which the sentences break, and perhaps a meter and/or a rhyme scheme, then the pleasure is even greater. Right now, there are two piece I am working on, an essay and a poem, each one needing revision. I have set them aside until I finish prepping my technical writing class for next semester–I am writing this post to take a break from that preparation–and I can’t wait to be able to pick each one up again and give to revising it the solid chunk of time that it will need (and deserve).

Continue reading →

Posted in Education, literature | 11 Comments

Introduction

Posted on January 10, 2012 by fannie

Hello readers of Alas!

I’ve been a reader of Alas for several years (and an occasional commenter), and Barry recently invited me to be a guest blogger here as well. I also regularly write at my own blog Fannie’s Room, and currently am also a guest blogger (presenting a lesbian, feminist, pro-SSM perspective) at the (anti-SSM-leaning) Family Scholars Blog.

I want to thank Barry for the invitation. One thing I’ve always appreciated about Alas, and that influenced my decision to guest blog here, is that the level of discourse among the bloggers and commenters is relatively civil and engaged.

Thanks for having me here!

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments