WRAPPING UP OCTOBER 2009
We hear than Afghanistan needs a runoff election. We hear there’s a runoff problem from some dairy farms. Too much manure.
This morning I heard a sound that was part of my childhood, but hasn’t been that common in recent years. With the weather cloudy, a jet flew nearby, at a much lower altitude than a commercial liner, followed by a second jet. During the Cold War, bad weather served as an opportunity for military exercises out of the Burlington Air National Guard base, and perhaps this is becoming the case again. But I doubt it will reach the proportions it did when I lived in Brandon and owned one of two historic barns at the east end of town. On one occasion, a fighter jet slowed and banked and circled the barns, perhaps to get oriented. I put that incident into a poem that begins “My son, your fears/ I can do nothing to relieve/ But agree:” .
It ends, “Like your mother/ You fear the dark;/ Like me,/ The knock at the door by night.”
Someone at a poetry reading asked me, “Why would you be afraid of someone knocking on your door?” Ah, the innocence of America.
Today’s “Vermont Edition” on Vermont Public Radio concerned the Champlain Bridge. As a professional copyeditor, I recommend to Vermont Secretary of Transportation David Dill that he stop using the expression “have really gone overboard” when talking about the efforts of those operating ferries.
I’m surprised people haven’t started calling the new epidemic the High-knee virus. That’s how it would be pronounced; I’m not sure how that would be spelled.
The health care bill’s provision for a 12-year period of exclusive rights for new biotech medications doesn’t look like a pure power play when virtually all of your nest egg (such as it is) has been invested in one biotech company for about a decade. It isn’t discovering a new drug that is a costly process, it’s going through the stages of approval, which involves testing to determine any toxicity and side effects, testing how it interacts with other drugs, and testing its effectiveness in randomized blind trials. The company in question is so deeply in debt that it had to assign 90 percent of its American and European rights to the profits from its leading candidate to get the backing of a big pharmaceutical company, which in return will make “milestone” payments for going through the stages of approval, and will use its worldwide network to recruit test participants and do marketing if the drug is approved. Call it personal interest, but I think the greatest power the biotechs are wielding, in trying to get a sales window free from competition from generics, is a compelling argument.
“Health care reform will destroy the doctor-patient relationship.” So why is the American Medical Association behind it? “Health care reform will harm older people’s Medicare coverage.” So why is the American Associated of Retired Persons (now just AARP) backing it? “It’s a government takeover, it’s socialism,” at the speed of an elderly doctor walking with a cane.
Grow up. Come off it. Remember what I wrote before, citing the Quaker rule for conflict resolution: be able to state your opponent’s point of view in terms that your opponent would accept.
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Posted by: Term Paper | February 17, 2010 at 06:36 AM