Never Buy in a Store, Part 1

There are plenty of foodstuffs I would never consider making from scratch. Philo dough pops immediately to mind. The techniques required are too complex, the ingredients are too hard to find, and/or it would take just too damn long. However, for the past thirty years or so, advertizing has turned all cooking into an unholy inconvenience, making all food that requires preparation beyond “peel skin off banana” not worth your time. Like so much in this world, the problem is not that there is processed food, but that processed food dominates the market, even when the those foods don't actually save that much time. Simply put, there are some foods whose from-scratch preparation is so quick and easy, they might as well be “Open and serve.” One should never, as far as never goes, buy these from the store. Food number one in this category: guacamole.

The hardest and most time consuming aspect of making guacamole is extracting the avocado flesh. If you've never done it before, it can be intimidating, but that's what the internet is for.

At most, extracting the flesh of a couple avocados will take you five minutes or so, but it will take less time each time you do it. Then you mash up the avocado with some salt and lemon juice. Then you dip your chips in it. That's it. Watching your salt intake? Add less salt. Like a little heat in your dips? Add some cayenne pepper. By making it yourself you have complete control over the product. Furthermore, guacamole in the “wild” doesn't have much of a shelf life. I mean, if you delay in adding the lemon juice, the guacamole will go brown on your quickly (still edible just doesn't look as good). This means that something must be done to it, in order for it travel from wherever it was manufactured to the grocery store and then sit there long enough for someone to buy it. I'm not saying that anything dangerous is done or that you are automatically going to get cancer or autism or whatever from the preservatives, but I will say that none of those techniques and preservatives have flavor in mind. Your guacamole will absolutely taste better than anything bought at the store.

Some food takes a long time to prepare and buying processed versions of them can make sense. Furthermore, there are plenty of “processed foods” whose process is fairly mild. But with guacamole, and the other foods I'll mention in this ongoing essay series, at most, you save five minutes. And the better you get at dispatching the avocado, the less time store bought will save you. As I've cooked more, I've found more and more foods that aren't much harder to make at home than to buy from the store, and the homemade stuff is almost always cheaper and tastier.

At some point in our nation's history cooking turned into an inherent inconvenience. It's not that certain techniques are challenging, or certain dishes require specialized hardware, or certain foods demand lengthy efforts, but that all cooking is a hassle. (Don't worry, there's a big essay about how we got to this place in the works, or maybe, worry, there's a big essay about how we got to this place in the works.) Our ability to differentiate between “inconvenient” and “requires some effort” has been advertized out of us. The problem, then, is not picking up some guacamole on your way to the party because you forget to make some at home, but our attitude towards cooking in general.

We have a long way to go to free ourselves of this fetish for convenience. The real goal is not to always make everything from scratch all the time, but to get to a point where the convenience of a store bought food is a real value and not just a way to avoid the inconvenience of cooking at home. It's so that you feel positive when you throw something in the microwave and not a sense of obligation. We have a long way to go to reach that world, but it could certainly start with your homemade guacamole.

America's System of Wealth Redistribution

Most of the time when you hear someone use the term “the redistribution of wealth” that person is a conservative arguing against a social spending policy or tax increase on the wealthy. It has become a less than subtle euphemism for “this is kinda socialist;” another way to argue against a policy without actually arguing against the policy. Let's forget for a second that an economy is inherently based on the redistribution of wealth, on the movement of money from one entity to another in a process of exchange, and let's also forget for a second that any change in government spending and taxation is a redistribution of wealth; taking wealth from those whose programs were cut or who had their taxes raised and redistributing it to those whose programs were added or taxes were cut. In fact, any changes in government regulations that effect the making and spending of money are redistributions of wealth. It could be argued that no administration redistributed wealth more than the Reagan administration, but, even if you forget all that there is still a major aspect of the American economy that operates as a redistribution of wealth.

Some people have a level of wealth based on their health. Because of good lifestyle choices, a lucky draw in the genetic lottery, and a benevolent array of circumstance in the wider world, some people rarely have to pay health care bills. I'm one of them. I don't have any congenital diseases, or allergies, I eat alright, I exercise a bit, and I've never been injured enough to require serious medical care. I get check ups, I wear reading glasses, and I have to get some small fillings in my teeth, but on the spectrum of health I'm doing alright. Thus, I have a health based wealth. But I still pay healthcare premiums. 

My health insurance company redistributes my wealth to those who have a health based poverty; people who because of poor health decisions, an unlucky drawn in the genetic lottery, and an malicious array of circumstance in the wider world have to pay a lot of health care bills. Being a radical lefty, I don't have any problems with the idea of mechanisms that redistribute wealth from the wealthy to the poor...if they work.

The thing about the redistribution of wealth as done by the mechanism of health insurance (and all other insurance really) is how inefficient it is. How inefficient is it? Well, it's fairly easy to get at least a sense of this. First look at the profits taken in. One study stated that the five largest for-profit insurers “closed 2009 with a combined profit of $12.2 billion.” This means that, at an absolute minimum, health insurance companies redistributed to those with health based poverty, $12.2 billion less than what they took in from those with health based wealth. And this doesn't count the overhead; printing those extremely complex descriptions of benefits books, paying customer service representatives to answer questions about those extremely complex benefits, billing, mechanisms for denying benefits, lawyers if they are sued for denying benefits, janitors to keep their offices clean, executive and management salaries, office supplies, utilities... 

Despite what some might say, our health care system is already a system of wealth redistribution. Through the mechanism of private health insurance, the health based wealth of some is distributed to the health based poverty of others. Some might argue, with an eye towards critiquing the recent health care reform, that an individual could opt out of this redistribution by not carrying health insurance, and though there is some truth to this, those individuals (assuming they are able to pay out of pocket the costs they incur if they get hit by a car or diagnosed with cancer) wouldn't avoid redistribution all together. Since doctors and hospitals, by law, are required to treat people in need of care, whether they can pay for the care or not, doctors and hospitals must roll the cost of treating those who cannot pay into the fees charged to those who can. In the exact same way that the cost of all retail goods are slightly higher than they need to be to make up for lost inventory, the cost of treatment is slightly higher to compensate for treatment that is not paid for. In this case, the wealth is redistributed from those who have money to those who don't through a pricing mechanism.

There is nothing inherently wrong with a system of wealth redistribution. All economic activity, at it's core, is wealth redistribution. The problem with health care insurance as a system of wealth redistribution is its inefficiency; not nearly enough of the wealth actually gets to those who need it. Too often, people who carry insurance still can't pay their health care bills, even with the benefits from their insurance policy. Even if those massive profits (all those companies had enough to pay lobbyists, don't forget) were cut to nothing, the private insurance system would still be fairly inefficient as someone would have to administer it.

Soon, House Republicans are going to waste our time and tax payer money by bringing a bill to repeal the recent health care reform to the floor even though there is no chance such a bill could pass the Senate, and even if by some miracle it did, it would certainly be vetoed and Republicans do not have a big enough majority to overturn a Presidential veto. To me, this is more proof that they have no concrete policy solutions to the problems of the American health care system, and, frankly, only seem interested in the issue as a way to discredit, in general, the efforts of the administration. Regardless, as anyone with a lot of prescriptions or an impending surgery knows, the recent health care bill has not solved the problem of inefficient wealth redistribution.

The Greatest Sports Statistic

Statistics serve a lot of different purposes in sports, but for most spectators they serve as something to argue about over nachos. They are fodder for definitive statements and though, like all statistics, they can be made to prove just about anything and a stat can be found for just about any statement, there is some primal joy we get out of arguing about sports by throwing numbers at each other. (The source of that joy, though, is another essay.)

With the birth of fantasy leagues and the easy access to data provided by the internet (especially now that the internet can be easily accessed in bars) the world of sports statistics has grown even larger, whether the casual spectator actually gains any addition insight into the sport of their choice or not. (Hi Bill James. That's a nice new car you've got. Anyway, catch you later.)

Not all statistics are created equal though, and what distinguishes the insightful spectator from the rest is knowing which statistics actually communicate useful information in evaluating or enjoying whatever you're watching. For all our hyper-specificity (my personal favorite is from baseball: batting average with runners in scoring position in the 7th inning or later with the difference in score 2 or fewer runs. Hi, David Ortiz. Glad to see you're hanging out with Shawn Thorton. He's good people.) it's hard to argue that anything tells you more about a batter in baseball than batting average, or about a running back in football than yards per carry, or a basketball player than field goal percentage. There's a reason why those show up on standard players displays on TV. However, one statistic rises above the rest. Its uniqueness in sport, its rarity in occurrence, and its communication of the character of the player make it far and away the greatest sport statistic.

The Gordie Howe hat-trick occurs when a player, in a single game of hockey, records a fight, a goal, and an assist. There isn't another statistic like it. No other major sport has institutionalized fighting like hockey does, and though I supposed one could argue that pitchers in baseball hitting batters is a form of enforcement, I don't think there is a statistical way to differentiate plunking a guy in the back in response to a cleats-up slide from a curve ball that slips out of the hand. In other words, no other sport has a clear enforcer statistic, so no other sport has a statistic that keeps track of when enforcers score or when scorers enforce.

As in all sports, hockey players have roles and specializations within the game. Since offense and defense flow into each other, hockey isn't as specialized as American football or baseball, but it still has its roles. To put it bluntly, fighters don't usually score and scorers don't usually fight. Most of the time a Gordie Howe hat trick is evidence of someone doing something they don't normally do, and most of the time, it's the fighter doing the scoring. In this case, the Gordie Howe hat trick is a reward for spending most of one's time willingly getting punched in the face.

Perhaps what makes the Gordie Howe hat-trick so special is how it encapsulates the entire spirit of the game of hockey all in one stat. In all other sports, the relevant statistics describe particular aspects of the sport, and you can build a picture of the sport through the accumulation of statistics; but hockey is a sport that mixes moments of profound violence fluidly with moments of profound dexterity. To earn a Gordie Howe hat trick a player needs to individually demonstrate that fluidity. And this fluidity is at the core of what is entertaining about hockey. That not only can grace and violence can exist in the same space of sport, but they flow back and forth into each other as the game moves.

And to make it even better, it's not an official statistic. Though one could crunch the numbers and figure it out, no one will be inducted into the Hall of Fame because they have the most Gordie Howe hat tricks. The stat is a pure expression of what fans find exciting about hockey. And there's something interesting about the term “Gordie Howe hat trick.” The stat is named after Gordie Howe, Mr. Hockey, one of the game's first superstars and ambassadors to the world. He scored goals. He recorded assists. He hit people. He got in fights. He was tough and fast and skilled. He was the embodiment of hockey, so naturally, a stat that embodies hockey would be named after him. The interesting thing, is that Gordie Howe did not record that many Gordie Howe hat tricks. Despite his lengthy career, he only recorded two.

In a way, one of sports most important roles is conversation fodder. Being social animals and being verbal social animals, we are often in situations, with strangers, co-workers, friends, and family, where we are compelled or even obligated to converse whether there is something to talk about or not. Sport is often perfect fodder for those moments. In fact, a worldly and astute individual could simply offer a “Did you catch the game?” and then figure out what the game is from the context of the conversation. And if someone then mentions a Gordie Howe hat trick, not only do you know the game was a hockey game, you will also know that the game included one of hockey's perfect expressions.

Wrong About the Odyssey

I recently read the Iliad and the Odyssey, back to back, in their entirety. I'd encountered bits and pieces of them in high school and college, reading excerpts necessary for understanding subsequent works (damn near all of Western literature if you're to trust some sources, but that's a different essay), and I've read Joyce's Ulysses which uses the structure of the Odyssey to tell the story of hapless and heroic Leopold Bloom. There is a lot to say about both epic poems, especially when re-imagining and re-interpreting the events and images in terms of contemporary society, but one thing above all else stood out for me; how wrong I was about the Odyssey.

Being an object of culture, referenced in all media and all different levels of artistic expression, just about everyone knows something about the Odyssey. We have a cultural familiarity whether we've read the Odyssey, read excerpts of it in school, or just encountered it in references in movies and comic books. We all have an idea of what the Odyssey is about and what happens in it. Well, we're wrong.

The Odyssey is a story of the strife endured by Odysseus as he struggled against the gods to return home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. However, of the ten years it takes him to get back to Ithaca from Troy, seven are spent in the strife and struggle of being the lover of the nymph Calypso, where she fed him ambrosia, had sex with him every night (and not just regular sex, but nymph sex), kept him from aging, and promised to make him immortal if only he stayed with her. (Did I mention it was nymph sex?) That's 70% of his time abroad. May all of your struggles and strife be 70% nymph sex.

While we're on the topic of what Odysseus actually spent his time doing during his trip, he spent a whole lot of narrative time with the Phaenicians, who were not cannibals, or opium addicts, or man-eating monsters. No sea beasts. No deceitful women. No angry gods raining petty vengeance upon a powerless mortal. Rather, they are a wealthy and generous sea merchants who treat Odysseus to a massive feast, imply that he could marry the daughter of the king, and shower him with more gifts than he won in all of his plunder of Troy (which of course, went down with his ship) before returning him to Ithaca on a ship so fast and so smooth that he sleeps through the entire journey.

Furthermore, a full third of the poem takes place after Odysseus has returned to Ithaca and involves his plot to deal with the suitors, a goal “nudged” along by Athena. To recap; 70% of the journey was spent as the boy toy of a nymph, another big chunk of the story takes place on Ithaca, another substantial percent is taken up with the Phaenicians, and there's a whole bunch of stuff about Telemachus that doesn't even involve Odysseus at all. The big events from the Odyssey that we all know about even if we haven't read it; the Cyclops, the Sirens, the Lotus Eaters, Odysseus in Hades, Circe and the whole turning the crew into pigs thing, are a very small part of the actual story as it is told.

Cultural memory is a process of extrusion; as an artifact whether it's an epic poem, story, person, or idea is transferred around a culture its complexity is shaved off and members of the culture are aware of a simplified version of the entity. What a cultural artifact becomes when most in the culture do not have direct contact with it, is important, not just in understanding Homer or Shakespeare, but in more general issues of society. How many of our political decisions are based on the cultural artifacts of the American Revolution? How many of our politicians appeal to concepts of “freedom” and “liberty” without any examination of the documents and events that built those concepts? The most direct example of this is the constant claim that the United States is a “Christian Nation,” a claim that can be made when the distinction between, “a spirituality based in Christian mythology,” (which is what most of the Founders actually had) and “Christianity” is lost or ignored.

I haven't met anybody with the time to read every major readable cultural artifact and the point is not that everyone should feel obligated to read everything (there's a lot of Shakespeare out there, and frankly the Federalist Papers get a little dry after a while), but that we realize that what we know of all of these artifacts are simplified versions. This is fine when enjoying art or entertainment that references these entities, but this is not fine when, say, making a policy decision or establishing a personal belief structure. In terms of important decisions, it seems reasonable to ask people to do a little research.

Oh, and the Trojan Horse thing; doesn't happen in either of them. A bard mentions it in a song about the Trojan War (a song Odysseus requested). Nor does Achilles die his famous death. The Illiad actually ends with the funeral for Hector, the only honest to god decent human being in the entire story (No, seriously, Agammemon is an arrogant jerk, Achilles sulks in his tent while his friends die because he didn't get the slave girl he wanted, and well, Odysseus himself sacked an innocent city on his way home from the war and executed servant girls who were born after he left for Troy for sleeping with suitors.) who valiantly fought hordes of invaders and spent his last night before he knew he was going to die with his wife and infant son. And what does he get for his bravery and general decency; he gets his dead body dragged back and forth in front of the gates of Troy behind a chariot. In the extruded versions of these epic poems it's Achilles and Odysseus who are thought of as the heroes, but after actually reading them, Hector is the one worthy of respect.

The Story of Big Government

The first major expansion of federal power in our nation's history came early in, well, our nation's history, when the Constitution was ratified, replacing the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation barely constituted a national government as it had virtually none of the power we associate with, well, national government. In the context of history, this was by far the biggest expansion of federal power over society, at least in this country, in that federal power as we know it was incorporated. There was one other major expansion but I'll get to that later.

Almost from the word go, the government experienced a still unabated piecemeal expansion. In order to solidify a truly national economy, especially in the face of Revolutionary War debt, the Bank of the United States (which was eventually followed by a Second Bank of the United States and a period of open banking before a panic in 1907 lead to the establishment of the Federal Reserve) was established. Thomas Jefferson wasn't sure if the president had the power to purchase land, but he couldn't turn down France's offer and thus expanded federal power with the Louisiana Purchase. The state of Alaska (from which a certain “small government” proponent supposedly is kept visually aware of Russo-American relations) might not have existed otherwise.

The second of the two major expansions of federal power happened in the Civil War, when the fundamental right of States to leave the United States of America was eradicated. The Civil Rights amendments were a coda that expanded the federal government's power over how states interacted with their residents, but, as we learned from the Jim Crow era, this expansion wasn't enough to ensure legal dignity for all Americans. Despite what some might say, with the debatable exception of the establishment of income tax, which required a constitutional amendment, no expansion of federal power since has matched this one because it ceded to the federal government the power to determine whether or not states were subject to its power.

The industrial revolution, the urbanization of society, the massive amount of immigration, the development of the stock market, and other societal changes created an entirely new economy with entirely new problems that society, as it was, did not have the ability to solve. In response to this new economy, government expanded again through a series of regulations and then, in order to hold society together after that economy collapsed, through massive infrastructure projects and other spending initiatives. The ultimate result of the Depression (which was ended by an even larger government spending program commonly referred to as “World War II”) was a system of regulations on finance and production and a material safety net in order to ensure the Depression never happened again, including the third rails of politics, Social Security and Medicare.

There were expansions of federal power in response the Cold War such as the Committee on Unamerican Activities. The tragedy of Jim Crow was resolved by another expansion of Federal power most dramatically demonstrated by the National Guard forcibly integrating Central High School in Little Rock, and culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Along the way, the government continued to accumulate regulatory agencies such as the EPA and OSHA. The EPA, of course, was established by everyone's favorite tax and spend liberal, Richard Nixon. Of course, not all of these expansions of government were institutionalized. There certainly isn't anything in the Constitution or in legislation about selling weapons in exchange for hostages, for example. There have been more contemporary expansions of government as well, the biggest of which was not the recent Health Care Reform, but the original Patriot Act, which gave the government far more power to observe and detain American citizens than it has had since the Alien and Sedition Acts. And this doesn't even include the size and effect on our society of the ever expanding American military or the actions taken by the CIA (See Legacy of Ashes for that story).

Another way to tell this story is as a story of economic crisis. The private market could not free the slaves. It couldn't prevent factory machines from pulling the arms off of children or stop factory owners from locking their workers in. It couldn't keep human fingers out of our sausages and rat poison out of our medicine. It couldn't stop companies from lying to consumers. For some reason it couldn't teach investors that it was a bad idea to buy stock with the projected dividends of other stocks. Since we're on the topic, the private economy also couldn't stop companies from dumping poison into our water and spewing toxins into our air. Regardless of whether the administration in power was Federalist, Bull Moose, Republican, or Democratic, they almost always responded to these crises through expansions of government power and influence.

This means that the story of “big government” then is not one of liberal or Democrat power grabs, but the accumulation of responses to economic and societal crises. Whenever a Republican or conservative accuses a Democrat or liberal of something about “big government” they are completely ignoring the history of the development of the United States Federal Government. What we have today is the result of two hundred plus years of people responding to problems.

I have no problem with arguing about the costs and benefits of particular government policies, but the “big government” label doesn't do that. The debate between big government and small government was settled over a hundred years ago with the Civil War. My problem with the Republican technique of the “big government” card is that they use it to argue against a proposed Democrat policy without actually arguing against the policy itself. Rather than helping to determine whether a particular proposed regulation will actually stabilize investment banking for example, they simply argue that “big government” as an abstract concept is inherently negative. This argument itself is bad for governance. It's not that I want Republicans to rubber stamp Democrat legislation, but the proposed policies cannot be improved if the opposition led critique doesn't actually engage the policies themselves.

This is a particular example of a more general problem with our political discourse. The sound-byte has no room for nuance and debates have become ballets of sound-bytes, and somehow, despite the presence of three 24-hour news networks, no one seems to have the time to establish the historic context of a given issue. I don't have a solution for this general problem. So much goes into our inability to have productive political debates and so many forces benefit from that inability that a solution will be long in coming. But hopefully, the next time you hear someone try to end an argument by arguing against “big government,” I hope you'll remember this story.