Hats Talk

When I was still a young man, I realized that I would go bald.  My father was bald, my mother, sparse.  My father’s father, a cue ball.  My oldest brother, ten years my senior, was hairless by the time he was thirty.

I liked my hair but I was going to lose it.  Not that I had much choice, but I decided to embrace it.  That was made easier when I realized that the most important women in my life all loved bald men.  

My hairline began to recede in my early twenties, right on schedule. By the time I was twenty six my hair was half gone.  I bought a pair of electric clippers and learned to cut what was left as deftly as a barber.  No more appointments for me.  I washed it with bar soap.  Later, on the advice of a dermatologist, I switched to a mild dish detergent.  I don’t think it made a difference to my scalp, but it was cheap enough; a single two dollar bottle lasts almost two years.  When it’s shorn close, the wind caused by stepping out of the shower blows it dry.  

Baldness is a cinch.  To me, a man without hair looks just right, while a man with hair looks odd, almost artificial.  I’m not passing judgment, just saying, a head of hair on a man over fifty makes me laugh.  Sorry guys, your hair is lovely, but I feel for you: cut, color, comb, what a pain in the neck.  I’m not surprised that more people don’t shave their heads, but not having hair was a pleasant surprise, and is a genuine pleasure.

Still, despite acceptance, baldness comes with a few minor insecurities.  Do I look older than I feel?  Does my wife like my baldness as much as I do?  How about women who’ve never met me?  Is the skin on my scalp healthy and attractive? Do I have a pleasant shaped head?  What about corners or points?  How about bumps?  But easily the worst thing, in fact, the only drawback exclusive to being bald and what occasionally makes me wish I had hair is cold weather.  

I knew this problem was coming because I had all those role models.   So being a former boy scout who likes to be prepared (yes, I wore one of those vintage boy scout hats that are pointed at each end and come to a peak), I started wearing hats long before I lost my hair.  It gets cold in New England.  I bought no-names and brand names: Stetsons, Kangols, Capas, and every style I could lay my hands on.   I wore dress hats, cowboy hats, fedoras, caps, crushers, outback hats, skullcaps, headscarves, do-rags and stocking caps.  They were cotton, felt, wool, leather, linen, canvas and hemp.  Anything.  Everything.   Hats from Russia, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, anywhere, everywhere.  Almost.  

Of course, if you know me, you know where this is going.  No hat was right.  None of them felt like hair.  I was always aware of having a particular one on and they each made a statement that I didn’t want to make.   Embarrassing or serious or funny.   Take baseball caps for example.  If you wear one everyday, after a while it becomes part of your persona.  I couldn’t be so casual, so acceptable, so ordinary.   I wanted people to look at me and form an opinion, even a bad one.  I couldn’t be just another guy in a baseball cap.  Every other hat seemed to have its own personality too, and after trying each one out, I decided I didn’t like it.  This went on for years, so I gave up a lot of hats.  Some I wore for a while, some just for a day, or a week.  Some I wore until they fell apart, but not too many.  Of course I still have some because they are special or perfect for a particular job or event.  On the coldest days I still wear a nice thick stretchy wool hat that pulls way down over my ears.  In the brightest summer sunlight I like a broad brim that keeps the rays off my head and neck.  I can picture myself in Mexico, sleeping against a whitewashed wall, white cotton everything, droopy straw hat and three-day’s growth of beard and mustache.  What a hat that would be!  Under my bicycle helmet I wear a red headscarf, scorpion adorned, and to a funeral I will often wear either a black or a gray fedora with a black hat band.  Hats talk.

Probably because I like being bald, I didn’t realize how much I wanted a main hat, a hair substitute.  One brilliant, sunny day on Cape Cod, my wife and I were walking around the Wellfleet flea market with our kids.  I was about thirty.  My hat obsession was well into its seventh year.  As usual, we were looking over the hat table and to my shock and dismay she picked up a beret and handed it to me.  I shook my head and put it down, not a beret, I had ruled them out a while ago, I had a navy blue one at home in my closet.  I circled around the table a couple of times and then went back to it.  I picked it up again, showed it to her as if she hadn’t already given me her opinion, hoping she would say no, I even gave her my sad eyes, but she nodded.  Yes, she said.  Try it on.  

You have to understand, not only was this a beret, something I considered too French and effeminate, but this particular beret was red, --no, gorgeously, unashamedly, magnificently, in-your-face red.  How could I wear that?  I looked around, hung my head a little, saw that no one was paying any attention and slipped it on.  I adjusted it with a little twist of the wrist, tipped it jauntily down toward my right ear and then was distracted by my kids.  As you might know, kids in a flea market require a lot of attention, especially toddlers, so I did my job and that’s when the miracle happened.   

I forgot that I was wearing the hat.  Literally forgot.   No one had noticed me put it on and when I walked away from the table, chasing after my kids, no one hollered.  No one asked me for money, my kids didn’t say anything, my wife was otherwise occupied and I was wearing a completely comfortable, apparently invisible, bright red stolen beret.  Eventually I remembered that it was on my head, realized how natural it felt there and found the vendor and paid him his asking price.  Usually I dicker at the flea market, but the hat was two dollars.  Yup, I found my hair replacement and it cost me two dollars.  I’ve been wearing it ever since.   Little babies love it.  It catches their eye; I’m the only man they know with truly red hair.  As for adults, other men probably hate it, but they admire the chutzpah that it takes to wear it and much to my delight, women know a man when they see one in any color hat, but especially in a red one.

Finally, the first one wore out, and I’ve had to spend a little more since then, but I bought one for five dollars from a street vendor in New York about eight years ago.  Sometime in between I bought one from a retail-clothing store.  It was in the women’s section.  There might have been one other, but I think that’s it.  Twenty five years, maybe twenty bucks, four actual hats and I still have two of them, which is what prompted me to write about this in the first place.  I have two of them and they are different.

One is a little smaller than the other and a little lighter, they’re both definitely red, but you know how color is, the slightest variation stands one out against the other.  I prefer the smaller one.  I like its slightly faded color, its barely wider band, its thicker little nub at the top, they’re like your hair’s characteristics, untamed cowlick, left flip on the right side, widow’s peak, gray roots, but no one else even knows that I have two, that there’s a difference, and that it matters to me which one I’m wearing.  I don’t think my wife knows the difference, or if she does, it makes no difference to her.  But these hats are my hair, I know how each looks and feels, and I prefer to wear my hat just so.  I tease people with hair about vanity, but obviously I’m vain too, it’s just that I can take my vanity off or put it on at will and no one suspects a thing.

Today I washed them both and laid them out flat.   See, look at these.  Different hats.  I probably won’t wash them again for a year.  Right now I have to wait for them to dry.  In the meantime, I’ll be bald.

Brown Study

I thought about voting for Scott Brown.  I wouldn't say that I came close to voting for him, but I considered the idea without horror, so I think I understand why so many people did.  Oddly enough, it is one of the same reasons I voted for Obama; I am not happy with the status quo.

In the Massachusetts senate race the choices, profoundly divergent, were also profoundly limited.  After Alan Khazei, a truly independent voice was eliminated in the primary, we were left with either Coakley, a cipher of the Democrats, or Brown, a Sarah Palin Republican with wit and brains.  Martha, the status quo, or Scott, the attractive symbol of change.  In Massachusetts we like to think of ourselves as being leaders in the fray, keepers of the keys to liberty, wise in the ways of politics, a place for the nation to look when it has lost its way.  We have relished being the birthplace of the Adamses, the abolitionists, the Kennedys, a lone voice against Nixon, a strong arm in the election of Barack Obama.  So why did we elect a right wing conservative?  Change.

After eight wearying years of George Bush during which even staunch Republicans became disillusioned, we needed change.  We were tired of being a rogue nation on the world stage that would sooner die than reach accord on inconvenient ideas like climate change in which we could be singled out as one of the chief offenders.  We were tired of Bush's secrecy, his unlimited spending in a cause we never fully understood or supported, his continued assault on privacy and his imperious disregard of international conventions and the laws of our own land.  We were tired of his handling of the economy, our houses becoming worth less and we were angry that our banks and bankers were acting like rich, spoiled brats with no parental discipline.  We needed change.

Obama promised change and we embraced him with both arms.   Daddy, welcome home.  Father Abraham, where have you been?  Conservatives and liberals slapped each other's backs and gloried in our stand against racism, our historic venture into the vast potential of a post-racial landscape.  Look, world, we are Americans, there is no place like this anywhere else on the planet.  It was a prideful moment, but as pride often has a way of doing, it blinded us to our own motives.  We were looking for Abraham Lincoln when we would have been better off with Franklin Roosevelt.  Although it is still possible, change is a tricky master and Obama has not yet figured out how to lead it.  

That is no more evident than in Massachusetts where there is already a universal state health insurance plan signed into law by a Republican, where banks have not failed, where unemployment is under 10% and declining, where, until last night, not a single Republican graced its congressional delegation.   Despite all of the apparent good news here, people still want change.  I want change, I can feel it deep and inarticulate burning within me.  The Obama revolution, which promised to speak it, is still burning inside me without a voice.   So I asked myself, what change do I want?  Is Scott Brown going to bring the change I want?  My answer was no, so I voted for Coakley because her party's positions are more closely aligned with my own.  But far many more people, independents like me, said yes.

Yes, they said, we want change.  We don't like the way that our politicians behave.  In Massachusetts we have seen the results when a single party controls it all.  We have watched politics as usual become corruption as usual.  We know what the party can do when the party is the only party.  In Massachusetts, you are either a party member or you are on the outside.  Outside your own government.  There is no dialogue, no loyal opposition, no consideration or deliberation.  It's a lot like George Bush's government all over again; you're either with us or against us.  Martha Coakley embodied that and she took it for granted that that was enough to win the election.  In fact as she began to lose control, a control she never really had, and all of the national Democrats came pouring into the state to rescue her from herself, the Republicans came here for the opposite reason.  They came to ride the wave behind a man who stood up on his surfboard, bronze and tan in the Massachusetts winter and said that he was the new voice of change.

Sadly, people believed him.  Gridlock will go on.  Incivility will continue to fester.  Money will continue to rule.  Perhaps now even more than ever.  Scott Brown is the color of the day, another change in shoes who will no doubt become a part of the business as usual machine.  Scott Brown is not a voice for change because neither the Republicans nor the Democrats can be the voice of change.  They are just different sides of the same old coin.

Tiger Mauls Owner

First, I’d like to make one thing clear: I’m a hypocrite.  No question.  I’m not proud of it and when my kids or my wife point it out, I’m not always easily convinced, but that doesn’t change anything.  I’m still a hypocrite and after a few seconds, maybe a few minutes, sometimes a day or two, I’ll finally come around and recognize how right they are.  Sometimes I repeat the same mistake over and over again.   The lessons aren’t easy to learn, but that’s one of the lessons, right?  Learn from my mistakes.  Grow, mature, improve.  Hopefully.

Does that protect me from further criticism.  No.  So if you don’t like the rest of this commentary, have at it, lay into me.  I deserve it.

Here’s what you deserve.  You’re a fool.  You are disappointed by Tiger Woods, you expected more from Roger Clemens, you can’t believe that David Ortiz took performance enhancement drugs.  You think that Manny Ramirez is a decent man just because he is the greatest natural hitter to play the game since Ted Williams, another splendid spoiled brat who thought that he was a better specimen than the rest of us.  You’re buying it.  You think that there are some people who are so much better than the rest of us at what they do that when they prove susceptible to the illnesses wrought by money and fame, you’re surprised.  Worst of all, it matters to you.  After all, you say, they’re the role models for your kids. 

You’re a fool.  You pay big money to watch the world’s best athletes.  You subscribe to the sports networks, you get a warm feeling when your athlete wins.  You buy products that they endorse.  You think that their name imbues your sneakers with skill, perseverance and grace.  You wear their swoosh where everyone can see, you glory in their image, you admire their likeness.  They mean something to you.  You’re the role model and you are a fool.

Your son or daughter aspires to their fame; that would be one way to get your attention.  You don’t have a library worth a damn but you have season tickets to the Sox.  You skip the PTA meeting because the game is on.  You don’t ask them how they are feeling, what they are doing in school, who they are spending time with, but you soak up everything written about the latest Belichik scheme, the weaknesses in the secondary, the machinations of the people who talk about the people who manipulate the people who play professional sports.  You are a fool. 

Here’s my recommendation to you.  Shut it all off, until you heal and can see athletes for what they really are.  Stop making high school, college and professional sports a transcendent priority.  Don’t buy tickets, heck, don’t take free tickets.  Don’t buy their foolish jerseys, don’t wear their caps, don’t buy the newspaper to read the sports page, don’t listen to sports talk on the radio, unplug ESPN, take up your own sport, play with your own kids, get the skinny on physical education in the sixth grade.  Don’t be such a fool just because Tiger can hit a stupid little ball further and more accurately than anyone ever before.  Can he teach you anything truly worthwhile?  Tiger Woods, the idol, doesn't really matter.

Before Reading a New Biography of Lincoln.

Lincoln endures. I have a new biography in hand, A. Lincoln by Ronald C. White. I’m excited to begin. I wonder what he’ll bring to Lincoln, what he’ll offer, what he’ll attribute, how he’ll try to humanize him.

I've been trying to understand Abraham Lincoln for quite a while. I read my first biography of him when I was a boy, and he has been my hero ever since. It sounds funny to me, odd, for an adult to have a hero, but it’s true. When a significant new biography of Lincoln comes out, I usually manage to get my hands on it pretty quickly. I never tire of reading the basic facts of his life and I love the nuances that almost always lead to the same conclusions. I haven’t read anything new lately. I think the last one I read was by David Herbert Donald. It was magnificent. With my apologies to a great writer, a Lincoln biography written well can’t help but be magnificent.

In my mind, my father shared the heroic pedestal with Honest Abe for a long time, but Dad had a natural advantage; he was flesh and blood and loved me personally. We hugged each other. He grew up in a poor family in a small Midwestern town, was a proud descendant of William Bradford, was farmed out by his parents for money at an early age, performed very well in school, worked on the Mississippi River, left home, fell in love with and married my mother, put himself through college while in the service, sired nine children and gave up his own financial security in the process, started and ran his own business for decades, expressed his opinions comfortably, taught me how to camp and hunt, gave me his great spelling genes and his easy smile, failed at one or two very important things and survived. That was the nub of what he taught me. He learned his lessons and grew. Ultimately, he changed; it wasn’t easy, life’s lessons can be hard to face, but he did and as a result, he changed and that was also the essence of Lincoln. Learn. Acknowledge. Change.

For a long time I thought my father and Lincoln looked alike. Dad was tall, his face was weathered and lined, but other than those few similarities, they didn't look alike at all. Not really. Dad was bald, but much better looking, especially as a young man when compared to the recently discovered photo of Lincoln in which he appears haughty and possibly even conniving, much like a Dickensian villain. Yet Lincoln grew into his face right up to the end when in the last photos taken shortly before his assassination, his expression spills over with love and compassion. His eyes seem to embrace, understand, forgive and even see deep into the future; after all he looks directly into my soul two hundred years after he was born.

Is that fair? Can a few photographs reveal the soul of a man so thoroughly? If he had not risen from poverty, had not fought the Civil War, penned the Emancipation Proclamation, delivered the Gettysburg address, had not been murdered at the height of his success would I see love and sadness in his eyes? Does everyone see what I see, or is it simply that I need the tales and personality, the power and the myth, his willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice more than do other people? Is it possible that now when both men are dead that Lincoln loves me as much as my father loves me? I think so. In fact I think that in some ways Lincoln loves me more.

When I’m feeling small, unsafe, my father’s ready smile and big warm hands are talismans of memory that I can conjure to feel more secure. When I am demoralized by the latest political scandal or the degradation of politics in general, Lincoln rejuvenates my hope. These days politicians on the left and on the right seem to fall all over themselves to embrace Lincoln, to be seen as his heir. It’s a sign of recognition, an acknowledgement that there is a transcendent ideal that at least inspires voters if not the politicians themselves. Because of that, Lincoln has almost as much impact on my day-to-day life as my father’s warm smile and ready hand.

So I will read this 676 page tome with great interest and try to look at Lincoln anew, but I don’t really expect to find anything new. It never fails, a writer intends to tell us about Lincoln the man, and publisher’s blurbs proclaim the latest insights, Lincoln resurrected, but inevitably the author ends by telling us how unlike other men he was and confirms what we already believe. Lincoln was a better man.

I also want to be a better man, but I’ve always been slow to give up my own misconceptions, so I’ll go on reading the biographies, looking for a way into Lincoln that I can pass on to my children. After all, they should know their father.

A conversation with my grandson

My grandson asked “What’s in it for a good man?” as if I’d know.  It took me by surprise, such a sophisticated question, and not for the first time the thought of lying crossed my mind.
"Let's talk about a thief, a bad man.  Maybe we can get to it in a round about way.  What’s not in it for a good man is a question I can handle better.” I replied.
“A thief isn’t welcome in his own family, and though he might be loved, his mother hugs the boy he was, not the man he has become. And if he has a girlfriend or maybe even gets married, his girlfriend or wife will want his money, which she rightly knows is not his, and so she knows she has as much claim on it as the thief.”

“Oh, but it is his, isn’t it?  He stole it? No?”

“Yes, he stole it, and that's why it will never be his.”

“I get it, but he can give it to his friends and it will be theirs, won't it?”

“A thief’s friends are thieves.  They are the only ones who accept him for what he has become because they want the same acceptance, something they realize is hard to find and that they can't steal.  They sell their friendship for friendship.”

"I am friends with my friends."
"Yes, you are."
"So does that mean I buy my friends with friendship?"
"Only if you would stop being a friend to someone who doesn't promise his friendship in return."
He thought about that for quite a while.
"That's hard to know."
"It's something we find out about ourselves as we go along."
“But the thief has friends?”

“Yes, but mostly they are thieves, so he can’t trust them.  They aren’t the same kind of friends a good man has.  And anyway, he can't tell the difference.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, but that gets at what's really in it for a good man.  I guess you could say it's things that are not things.”

“Like what?”

“Real friendship.  Trust.  Love.”

“But what about money?”

“What about it?”

“Can a good man have money, lots of money?”

“Yes, but good money is the hardest kind of money to earn.”

“What does THAT mean?  I thought money was all the same.”

“Money that was never stolen, that never comes from a thief, that didn’t harm anyone in its travels from palm to palm, is rare money indeed.”

“How can a good man tell?”

“Sometimes it’s obvious.  The money of a thief, for example, is obviously rotten.  But sometimes the money that paid the killer to kill gets spent in the supermarket and is used by the supermarket manager to hire the artist who designs the advertisements who spends the money to buy a chair that I built.”

“So is it all bad?”

“No, but mostly.”

“So why do you sell your chairs?”

“I need the money to live.”

“You need the thief?”

“I do.”

“That’s sad.”

“It is.  That’s another thing in it for a good man.”
“What?”

“Sadness.  Friendship, trust, love, AND sadness.”

The boy was helping me build a chair.  He worked diligently sanding the legs, occasionally stopping to feel his work with his fingertips.  He had a fine and delicate touch.  His finished work was almost as good as my own.
“Grampa, am I a good man?”

“You’re still a boy, but you will be.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve seen the past.”

“I’m asking you about the future.”

“I know.  It’s all the same.”

“No it isn’t.  I haven’t been there yet.”

“I suppose not, but I have.”

“How could you have?  You’re here now.”

“Yes, but I was you once and now I’m in your future.”

“Will you always be in my future?”

“I believe so.”

“I’m glad.”

“That’s good, gladness is another thing that’s in it for a good man.”
"Grampa, why do you tell me these things about a thief?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean why a thief, why not a murderer or a liar or a cheater?"
"Well, they are all thieves."
"How do you know?"
"It's what they are.  A murderer steals lives.  A liar steals the truth.  A cheater steals trust."
"Oh, I get it."
"Good.  Can we go back to building this chair?"
"Yeah, one more thing.  What do I do if I find out my friend is a thief?"
"I'm glad you asked, that's the hardest and the easiest thing.  The easy thing is being friends with the part of him that isn't a thief.  The hard part is figuring out what that part is."

Ernst Primeau

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon with Ernst Primeau, who was an artist of some reknown, but who has recently, about a year ago, given up painting and is now lonely, miserable and in denial and whose son, Robert, has just returned from Europe to Boston to tell him of his marriage to a widow with three children and four grandchildren.  Ernst is now a pissed off step great grandfather.  He did not have much good to say, but his life stands up like a bleak backdrop against joy, a reminder of the meaning of love.  I decided to try to write his story.  He is cooperating, although quick to cast aspersions on me and everyone else.  His story is underway.  Maybe his outlook will improve before I'm done writing.

Health Care and Rugged Individualism

In the debate over health care, it seems that the proponents of the status quo have an edge over the rest of us. I think it’s fair to say that their primary spokespeople are members of the insurance industry. In the main, they are not suffering a lack of care, nor are they victimized by high rates. As individuals they are covered by their own best products and profit from their sale. They are unlikely to be among the people who fall through the cracks of insurance coverage. They were the victors in opposition to the last national healthcare reform led by Hillary Clinton in the early 1990s. Their chief tactic was the dissemination of fear to all of the enfranchised parties: consumers, physicians, healthcare workers, pharmaceutical companies, equipment manufacturers, hospitals and HMOs. Additionally, they evoked the American spirit of independence and emphasized the success of free market capitalism in creating the most versatile, flexible, and dynamic economy in world history. They convinced a majority of people, from pundit to pauper that they would be best served by doing nothing. What an attractive choice! No wonder they’re at it again.

After reading David Brooks’ recent article regarding the late Senator Kennedy’s evolution as a lawmaker, I was struck by his assessment of the American character and his opinion that this is why we, as a nation, have resisted national healthcare. He writes:

“We in this country have a distinct sort of society. We Americans work longer hours than any other people on earth. We switch jobs much more frequently than Western Europeans or the Japanese. We have high marriage rates and high divorce rates. We move more, volunteer more and murder each other more.

Out of this dynamic but sometimes merciless culture, a distinct style of American capitalism has emerged. The American economy is flexible and productive. America’s G.D.P. per capita is nearly 50 percent higher than France’s. But the American system is also unforgiving. It produces its share of insecurity and misery.

This culture, this spirit, this system is not perfect, but it is our own. American voters welcome politicians who propose reforms that smooth the rough edges of the system. They do not welcome politicians and proposals that seek to contradict it. They do not welcome proposals that centralize power and substantially reduce individual choice. They resist proposals that put security above mobility and individual responsibility.”

I don’t disagree with Brooks in this characterization, but I believe it points the way for the next generation of healthcare reformers to show how national healthcare fits our character.

Healthcare is a unique kind of consumer "product." In its necessity to the pursuit of happiness it is like national defense, freedom to travel, free speech, clean air, clean water, the rule of law and private property. Without these we do not have a free society. Just imagine if we each had to contract different providers for each of these "products."

An individual’s freedom to change jobs is profoundly affected by a prospective employer’s health care plan or lack thereof. Our insurers dictate the kind of care we receive. The prices we pay for services are not the result of a free market where information is readily available, but by a byzantine and accidental cabal of government and insurance near-monopolies who adjust willy nilly to support an overall structure of profit and gain, often at the expense of health and almost always at the expense of transparency.

As an example of this, I ask you, and this is not meant rhetorically, does anyone know how much a mammogram costs? I use mammogram as an example because this is one of hundreds of diagnostic tools that is widely accepted and used throughout the country. It has been touted as the best way to detect early stage breast cancer. Insurance companies pay for it without question once a year. But what if a woman has a feeling a month after her annual check up that she should get another one, and her doctor disagrees, how would she go about getting one. If her insurer won’t pay for it, can she buy one? What will it cost? Who will administer it? Furthermore, does anyone know if a mammogram really works? Does anyone know if there is a risk to flattening a woman’s breast to the point of pain? Does anyone know if a mammogram is more effective than breast examination by a qualified physician? Is there a marketplace where these questions are answered?

In determining the price for a mammogram, like the price for anything, a seller of mammograms must take into account the cost of the machine, the cost of the service (which includes examination and administration), the cost of real estate, the cost of advertising, marketing, and modernization and the number of mammograms it will deliver. Within each of these costs there are deeper and hidden costs such as the upkeep of the machine, the education of the personnel, the tax on the real estate, the market study, etc. etc. etc. Over centuries, businesses have developed sophisticated techniques for managing and anticipating those costs. The price is set and in every component of that price, there is a built-in profit. For the most part, that is at it should be. It’s the American way. So how much does a mammogram cost? If you ask your HMO or your physician or your insurer, you’re bound to get different answers if you can get any answer at all. Healthcare is in a special marketplace not governed by typical rules.

While a healthcare provider can make many typical business assumptions, there are many it cannot make. For example, if a drug became available that could virtually heal breast cancer, the maker of that drug could expect, with an ordinary product in a traditional business model, to be able to charge an incredibly high price for it and quickly recoup its research and development costs. As the new treatment became more widely used and subsequently produced, the price would fall as production became cheaper. But in fact the reality is, if a company was to deny its customers a wonder-drug, we would decry its inhumanity and probably force it to forego the windfall profits so that our daughters and wives and mothers could benefit. We all want the benefits of healthcare breakthroughs and we all feel entitled to them. Additionally, we have come to a point in our cultural growth where we believe that denying those breakthroughs to others, especially children, is inhumane.

How do we manage this special situation? It’s fairly simple, a system that creates benefits for everyone should require everyone to pay. There is already a system in place for requiring everyone to pay; it’s called national income tax. We use it now to do the most American of things: national defense, enforce clean air and water standards, administer a national legal system and provide social security and healthcare to our oldest citizens. We even use it for arguably narrow interests such as the space program, the national endowment for the arts and national programs for higher education for our soldiers. We do not find these to be anathema to our self-definition. We all agree, it is as American as apple pie to pay for what we get. I posit that our national stubbornness in clinging to our outdated healthcare system comes not from an expression of our national character, but a denial of the principles we espouse, a failure of individuals to acknowledge our common humanity and a failure of our politicians to recognize and articulate the way in which universal healthcare rises to the greatest common good and guarantees individual mobility and personal responsibility.