The Truth Is Funny Sometimes

A real-estate developer is about to build a monstrous set of apartments in the field at the end of my street. The impression you get on first seeing the drawings for it is that it looks like a prison. All my neighbors are aghast and hate the thing. The plans have been debated back and forth for two years, and about twenty changes have come before the Zoning Board and the Zoning Board of Appeals. The thing was obviously not properly thought out at the beginning. 

Anyway, there was another hearing at the Zoning Board of Appeals last week and I got up and gave a five-minute talk on why I thought the plans had not been properly thought out and why the neighbors hate the thing so much. There were newspaper people there and TV cameras, money-people with neckties and such, developers, and the architects. 

So, I'm giving my short talk and I notice people laughing, as if this were a comedy of some kind. I couldn't figure out why they were laughing, but I went right ahead and said what seemed to be the obvious truth, that the thing hadn't been adequately thought out and was hated by the people who live in the neighborhood. 

No one spoke to me after the speech or after the meeting adjourned, so I walked home from City Hall quite lost and confused. I didn't have a clue as to why they were laughing, or how well I had gotten my two points across. I was a bit upset and decided to go out to a restaurant to have something to eat to think it over. No clue.

But the next morning I get a note from a lady who attended the hearing saying that I had “stolen the show,” that I was right on target, educated, articulate, witty, effective, etc. Later, a couple neighbors said similar words. But I still feel that I don't quite get it. My best guess is that I apparently got at the heart of the problem and articulated it so simply and clearly that it seemed sarcastic, funny, ironic or something like that. I think I was so right, and what I was combating was so clearly wrong, that it seemed comic. Also, what I stated had a lot of life behind it, a lot of thought and experience with the absurdities of society. It also has gone through my mind that somehow my mother's arch irony played into it. 

Anyway, I had the audience's startling and complete attention, and I could see that some of the audience was “with me,” and that there was laughter. But I was just concentrating on what was the obvious, clear truth, and feeling that I will just say the truth regardless of what all the respectables or anyone else might think. I'm still a bit amazed by the reaction, as you can tell, and I still don't quite get why they were laughing. 

What goes through my mind right now is that perhaps people already know the truth about many things, but they are surprized when somebody unexpectedly comes right out and thoroughly says it.

Medical Errors

I keep discovering new depths of the incompetence in the medical industry beyond what I had imagined before I had my recent hospitalizations. There is a large and growing literature on the subject and the most recent piece appeared on TV, in major newspapers like The Washington Post and on the Internet at the same time.

This piece, which has received such remarkable attention, is an article in the BMJ, formerly known as “The British Medical Journal,” by Martin Makary and Michael Daniel , entitled “Medical error—the third leading cause of death in the US.”

Makary had already published a book on the subject in 2012 which I've just finished reading, “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care.”

Makary is worth reading because he has clearly put a lot of experience and thought into the subject of medical errors and because he definitely cares about it. You sense that he has seen it, that he means what he is saying, that he truly cares about it.

 His remedy is transparency, sunlight - “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he writes. So he writes these books and articles, hoping to increase awareness within and without the profession of the nature and extent of medical errors.

My best guess is that he is probably right about enlightenment being the best cure, knowledge being the best hope for reducing the problem.

But there is a part of me that feels that knowledge alone – sunshine and transparency - is only part of the remedy, and probably even a very real part of the problem.

For one thing, there is already a massive amount of knowledge, sunshine, about the existence and prevalence of medical error. Just Makary's stuff alone proves it. The doctors themslves know this better than anyone else. I think it is well established that when you go to a medical doctor, you are more likely to be harmed than to be helped.

And there is also this matter of the almost universal spiritual corruption involved, especially when it comes to “making money” or “keeping one's job” or “supporting one's family.” If you speak the truth, spread the sunshine, it is almost certain that you will not be able to support your family, or even yourself.

Now that makes the solution tougher than what we normally think of as knowledge, enlightenment, transparency, sunshine, or such. In fact, the belief that knowledge itself is the cure may itself be the biggest part of the problem. If it is thanks to human love that we live, then just knowledge itself, is not enough. It seems to me that Makary consciously avoids coming anywhere near mentioning this.

e.e. cummings Is Good Medicine

Now begins the month of May, so full of the joy of re-emerging life and love, the time when I think of e. e. cummings' poems.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

This contrasts greatly with everything I was taught at university. I can remember my first course in English literature, at McGill University, the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Learning, then very much British, in Montreal as I young man. I was just starting out on the great adventure and exploration of “higher education,” and was given the following T. S. Eliot line by my serious, highly-qualified, trusted, highly-honored and paid professor:

       “April is the cruelest month.”

Such great insight, such penetration right into the essence of Spring! It was considered important, great literature. And wisdom. April is the cruelest month. Then we had to read Eliot's “The Wasteland” and “Murder in the Cathedral,” and to ferret out all the obscure allusions.

That poetry, that higher education, that tradition, was pure poison - or a disease. It nearly killed me. I now hold, however, that being given that poison or disease when I was young required of me, through reflection and later life experience, to understand how deeply corrupt the establishment is. It was necessary either to overcome it through understanding or to die, and, surprisingly I didn't die. I did die, in the sense that cummings refers to it above - but “i who have died am alive again today and this is the sun's birthday...”

e.e. cummings was Good Medicine, my best medicine.