Early in his book, “Orthodoxy,” G. K. Chesterton makes the case that zealots generally reduce their world to the size of their particular issue of passion, making themselves a sort of king of the reduced kingdom in which they live. Someone who believes the government is eavesdropping on their phone and monitoring their comings and goings, by example, becomes the sole center of their world because suddenly everyone is an enemy and a co-conspirator. This resembles nothing so much as the old TV show, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” which depicted a city in which every shoe-shine provider and newsstand attendant was either an agent or a retiree-on-pension, providing service and regular reports.
There are church bodies whose entire approach to ecumenical activity revolves around whether the other denomination absolutely and completely has the same position about abortion; only with that agreement in place can they work together to provide food and water to non-aborted children in Haiti and Chile.
But in a Northern Virginia conference room on a recent Wednesday night, I got another example of how this “small world” works. The event was a non-partisan presentation on the terrific book, “The Checklist Manifesto,” which tells of a surgeon working with the World Health Organization to create a checklist for operating rooms (if this sounds like a 2009 episode of “E.R.,” you may be watching the same too-much-TV as your correspondent).
The presenter went off-slide for a moment to say that he had learned a lot about medical procedures in the book (which also covers gourmet dining, high-rise construction and rock and roll along the way). He asked the group, “For example – do you know why they put a sterile gown over the patient instead of just putting a dressing on the area in which they're working?”
A quick, haughty response replied loudly, “Because Medicare pays more for a whole gown.”
All the air left the room.
The speaker, significantly startled, tried to bypass the outburst.
“It's because the wires and tubes can catch on the patient's skin, they can touch non-sterile surfaces and then contaminate the patient, and they can get stuck. With a full gown, there's a smooth surface without drag and less chance of contamination.”
Nothing anywhere approaching insurance fraud. How dull.
The person answering the question didn't comment further, but he had made his philosophy clear:
All health care is crooked.
Hospitals conduct health care.
Hospitals are crooked.
The recently-passed health care bill is as crooked as Medicare.
A strangely simple world, that. Believe one premise and the rest falls into place.
I was startled when a friend began arguing, with remarkable precision and an evident mastery of facts, why the health care bill is insanely bad for the country. I learned later that she has made her living as a writer and research for a conservative lobbying organization, deeply entrenched in fighting the health care bill. Sad to think that for some parties, perhaps including her, the passage of the health care bill could severely reduce income.
She brought up the amount of money the government would spend on health care. I mentioned some of the pallets of cash that had “gone missing” in Iraq and Louisiana. She snapped that she rejects my comparison because there has always been government graft but there has never been so severe an entrenchment of government control over extraordinary debt levels. A nice try, and I allowed her to take the point for the moment as I saw no chance she would understand why I thought there was - is - a difference.
Even Michelle Bachman on the Fox Sunday talking heads admitted that (“unfortunately,” she whispered) the deficit preceded Obama. In fact, Michelle was so far out there that the soulless Chris Wallace had to express some concern about her casual attitude about facts.
This cultural chasm is the reason I'm becoming more and more engaged with ambiguity. P. J. O'Roarke told NPR that the British are better at cognitive dissonance than Americans, and I think we will need to get much better at it if we're going to go through mid-term elections and what is already being identified by most as “an enormous fight” over a Supreme Court justice.
Why not simply nominate Hillary Clinton, get it over with and double all the deals made for health care?
You'd have to be a master satirist to devise the Tax Day scenario where Tea Party attendees were complaining about paying the lowest taxes in 50 years, or a few days later when folks who want to carry guns around (all the better to shoot themselves in the calf, as one athlete recently discovered) said that the state laws are too variable, and demanded a nationwide law from the government they despise. But irony died quite a while back, and the hatred that dare not speak its name is ranting in all directions at once, as usual. Jon Stewart thinks they're mad because they lost an election. Bill Maher is much closer.
But back to ambiguity. In a world that is round and thus has no sides, ambiguity is the large majority point between the rather thin “black” and the equally-thin “white,” the lovely gray middle-ground. Where there is no “either”and no “or,” just a lot of really interesting “possibles.”
There is a risk, of course, that within the wide, uncrowded space of ambiguity, we might actually be discussing with reason instead of emotion. We might become so preoccupied with facts that we are again startled when a public official says two different things on two different days while being filmed with two different cameras, all the better to see through them with. Perhaps we can even help some of those officials retire, and have more time to learn about the 24-hour news cycle and how easy it is to re-run footage over and over and over.
There is the risk that we might not be able to snap our fingers and have emotional mobs attend to our hyperbole.
There is the risk that our stakeholders will expect us to deliver on the promises we make.
But, to borrow a phrase from Orwell, standing in the narrow confines of “black” or “white” seems too much like allowing others to think our thoughts for us.
And for some of us, predictability is overrated.
PS - Happy 87th birthday to rock's longest-working drummer, Spirit's Ed Cassidy on May 4th.
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