My cousin told me a casual story about a breakfast three months earlier with a leading Republican senator, by the end of which this senator had vowed to “make the public option radioactive.”
I was souring, noticing the conventional unattractiveness of the crowd. It hinted at undiluted Germanic stock. It had been wrong to think people like this don’t march; they just do it with torches.
Some text message made my cousin have to run. “Good luck with the story,” he said. We man-hugged.
A sign read THIS TIME WE COME PEACEFULLY AND UNARMED. THIS TIME. But the man holding it was smiling the same way they do outside the Today Show studios.
I arrived at the town-hall meeting in Virginia on time, but the doors were locked. Too many people inside already; the fire department had made the call. A bunch of us stood outside, going through the ritual bonding gesture of greeting each new person who came up to try the door. “It’s locked,” we muttered in friendly warning. Really? (Trying anyway.) What the hell? “We know! What the hell!”
I asked a willowy redheaded woman who looked about forty why she was there. “Because I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m really afraid of this president. I mean, they’re starting to talk about limits on family size, how many children you can have. In our America.”
A guy came up and pulled on the door. “Figures,” he said. “He’s a liberal” (meaning the Democratic congressman hosting this town hall).
People around me snort and harrumph, but there are some guys here from a union. “Oh, some of us are pretty smart,” a white-bearded one of them says.
“Oh yeah?” the guy says.
“Yeah,” the labor guy says. “Some of us even have master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s.”
Pretty tame, as political combat goes, but you could tell it made the people in our little group edgy. (A couple of days later, somebody would bite off someone else’s finger at a health-care-related event. We were ready.)
Three people exited, the fireman let in three, that’s how it worked. It took me over an hour to sausage-press my way through this process into the hall itself, where Representative Tom Perriello was facing questions from a constantly self-refreshing queue of disgruntled Republican constituents. It turned out I needn’t have worried about missing anything; this meeting would go for hours. It seemed every person who’d come intended to speak.
As we shuffled up the hallway toward the room with the microphones, distinct words began to emerge from the doors. The one we heard clearest and loudest, and that generated the biggest response by a huge measure, was socialism.
A man you couldn’t see from where I stood got up and said to Perriello—he didn’t so much say as intone—“From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” He paused. “Karl Marx said that was the credo of communism. Now, I want you to tell me the difference between that … and what we’re headed for.”
It was the one time all day the place really thundered.
“But that’s from the Bible,” I muttered. “From the New Testament.” (Acts 2 and 4: The believers “had all things common … as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, and laid them down at the apostles’ feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.”)
The lady next to me looked at me like she’d just caught me sniffing my finger.
“It is!” I said.
The next man up to the mike was very somber, soft-spoken, bearded; a study in browns and khakis; he walked slowly. He had been waiting for this moment. “I have one question,” he said to Perriello. “Where in the Constitution does it state that we are required to provide health care for everybody?”
Perriello had given a defense already of the conventional liberal view on this question (that, I imagine, the Constitution is a system for perfecting the never-ending American project, not a chain to keep us fixed in history). The congressman referred to his statement. “We’ve covered that,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the man, “you have answered my question.” Much cheering.
I liked the man’s question. His attitude was belligerent to a level of several hundred percent past what the moment called for, but he embodied something beautiful about the health-care-reform debate as it has evolved this year. Unlike with most questions of national import, even the wars, you can’t get into this one without talking about the whole point of America. For the first time in the century or so that it’s been an articulated goal of American progressives (beginning with Catholics, moving through labor, into the civil rights and consumer-advocacy struggles), we possess the means, and in some quarters the will, to enact a truly universal “care of the public health,” what Benjamin Disraeli said “ought to be, if not the first, at any rate one of the first considerations of a statesman.” A majority of the people—not huge but consistent—claims to want it, and we’re either going to do it or not. At moments like this one, we remember that we still exist inside the matrix of an eighteenth-century experiment in Enlightenment political thought—we are in a sense the subjects of that experiment—and we interrogate the nature of it. What Would the Founding Fathers Do? becomes not an academic question but in some ways the most relevant one. Is America a place that does this, that cares for everybody? Or is that not our way?
As it happens, Benjamin Franklin, the über–Founding Father, actually got mixed up in health-care reform and the whole public/private funding debate at one point—in 1751, around the time his first papers on electricity appeared. A friend, a surgeon named Thomas Bond, approached him with a suggestion, that they lobby the Pennsylvania Assembly to create in Philadelphia a hospital for “the sick-poor,” one modeled on more advanced practices Bond had observed in England and at the Hôtel-Dieu in Paris.
Bond understood that Franklin, perpetually hounded by schemers, would still get behind something new if he thought it made sense. The doctor focused his pitch on the good such an institution could do for the whole province. Treat the sick-poor and you have, for one thing, fewer poor, since prolonged sickness can make and keep us impoverished. Also, epidemics like to begin among the poor or distressed: you suppress those faster. The hard-tested surgeons produced by urban hospitals train others, who export their art to the countryside or the finest clinics. All reasons to spur Franklin.
In a periodical he’d founded, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and in addresses before the assembly, Franklin built a case over weeks. To begin with, he told them, there’s no such thing as “the poor.” Poor is a way station people pass through, even gentlemen and gentlewomen. “We are in this world mutual hosts to each other,” he said, and pointed to the explosive social dynamism of that eighteenth-century Atlantic world outside the window, so familiar to us now, where “the circumstances and fortunes of men and families are continually changing; in the course of a few years we have seen … the children of the wealthy languishing in want and misery, and those of their servants lifted into estates.”
Franklin proposed an institution that would provide, “free of charge,” the finest health care (“diet, attendance, advice, and medicines”) to everybody, “whether inhabitants of the province or strangers,” even to the “poor diseased foreigners” whose growing numbers in the colony and “dissonant manners” worried many (including Franklin, who wrote that soon everyone would have to learn German).
Franklin had a list of reasons—he cherished lists—but it boiled down to something primal, a sense that it was beyond the pale ever to let human beings suffer because they couldn’t pay when means existed to help. This “seems essential to the true spirit of Christianity,” Franklin wrote, “and should be extended to all in general, whether deserving or undeserving, as far as our power reaches.”
Franklin said to the assembly, You have to build it.
The assembly said, No, you must do it with private donations. You can’t tax people in the country to pay for a city hospital.
Franklin said, That won’t work, it will
never be enough, good health care costs a lot of money, remembering “the distant parts of this province” in which “assistance cannot be procured, but at an expense that neither [the sick-poor] nor their townships can afford.”
And besides, Franklin wrote, “the good [that] particular men may do separately, in relieving the sick, is small, compared with what they may do collectively.”
The assembly said, The people will never support it. Franklin knew the majority of them already did. He knew the people.
He said to the assembly, Here’s the idea. If I and my associates can raise such-and-such an amount of money (an enormous sum for the time), you will match it, and the project moves forward.
The assembly said, Sure! They knew Franklin could never get the funds. This way they looked generous, at no expense.
Franklin went out and quickly raised a good deal more even than the sum he’d named. He used the slightly competitive nature of the matching-funds plan to ratchet up giving. They say we can’t do it! The people were ready. The assembly, to which Franklin would soon be elected, and its powerful landed interests had been screwed. Franklin later said he never felt less guilty about an act of deception in his life.
That’s how we got: the Pennsylvania Hospital. Whence came: American surgery. Whence came: American psychiatry.
The next year, 1752, Franklin had a visit from yet another friend with yet another sane-sounding idea: modern private insurance.
There was a woman at the town-hall meeting carrying a sign that read NO SOCIALIZED MEDICARE.
* * *
I ran into my cousin again at our other cousin’s wedding. She was “both our cousin.” Four hundred people, black tie, reception at the old club, a soul band that had somehow been teleported in from 1967. It was magnificent. I have a black-and-white cat with a trick bladder, and she had urinated on my bow tie, so I was wearing an actual black necktie with my tuxedo. One of my uncles grabbed it and caught another’s eye. “Hey, look,” he shouted, acting like he was impressed, “almost there!”
I’d walked away from the town hall and the march and the Tea Party rallies feeling that despite all the crypto-racism and jokes about guns and whatnot, there wasn’t anything to fear, or any more to fear than ever, at any rate not an impending Civil War II. These people reminded you of the ancient Russians who came out with pro-Soviet signs every winter. They were capitalism’s bizarro reflection of that Cold War nostalgia, victorious version. Mainly they were exercising boredom and frustration. It’s not like you couldn’t sympathize with half of what they were saying. Most people who are against government probably have a point. It even seemed sane to hope that some good could come from the sheer event of so many Americans educating themselves about policy decisions, getting interested in creating coherence between those decisions and our ultimate hopes for the country.
You did see ominous things like news in The Boston Globe that the Secret Service found itself straining to handle the exponential rise in assassination threats since Obama had taken office. And people like Sean Hannity, people with big careers to protect and who are, one assumes, invested in not getting too far out, they were starting to say fairly reckless stuff on the radio, talking openly about the Obama administration as a proto-totalitarian goon squad that would soon be in your living room (the same administration, mind you, that hasn’t been able to attempt passage of an ultralite, Euro-style health care public option without occasioning a national crisis). At times it did seem possible to wonder if the old American Caliban was coming out, that thing in us that knows what’s right but would sort of rather watch a fight.
On September 23, a small AP article appeared, saying that on the day of the 9/12 March, even as we’d been approaching the Capitol steps, the body of a census worker from London, Kentucky, had been found by horrified tourists in the southeastern part of the state. A lot of those radio hosts, the prophets of the 9/12 marchers, had been encouraging listeners to resist the census: the census was a tentacle of the government, trying to penetrate your life and property. Was this murder a first shot over the bow from the radical right? The magazine was sending me there.
“You’re going to London?” my cousin said, and instinctively we both went, “Why leave Kentucky, when you can go to Paris, Athens, London…” (the end of an old joke.)
I’d never been to London, at least not the one in Kentucky. I knew we had distant roots in that part of the state. I kept seeing my mother’s maiden name on billboards driving in. No doubt the spirit of the place would sense the completion of an ancient circle and welcome a native. Sadly, the captain at the police station seemed intensely displeased, I would even say disgusted, to see me.
“Why are you here?” she asked, leaning against the wall with arms crossed.
I thought she was joking, since there’d been more reporters through London in the past month than in the preceding ten years, and all for the same reason. “Right!” I said gamely. “I guess you know why I’m here!”
“No, I don’t,” she said more coldly. “Why are you here?”
She looked a little like Nancy Grace in a state trooper’s uniform. She was younger, and her hair may have lacked the Magneto-helmet power of that famous crime-show hostess’s—whose producers, in my imagination, lower her hair onto her head just before each taping in a darkened chamber where she sits motionless, preparing—but the captain’s silhouette was the same, and so was her sneer, full of dismissal.
“That’s interesting,” I said (implying, I hoped, And a fine day to you, too, sister-protector of our beloved commonwealth!). “You don’t think there’s a story here?”
The census worker, Bill Sparkman, had been found in a mostly forested county adjacent to this one, naked and tied to a tree. Someone had written the word FED on his chest with a felt-tip marker and stuck his ID badge to his neck, possibly in mocking imitation of a deer tagging. This happened not long after a right-wing U.S. congresswoman from Minnesota had gone on TV telling Americans to remember that the census was used to round up Japanese Americans for the World War II internment camps. I hadn’t known but had just learned that they’d found Sparkman on the very day of that rally in D.C. It looked like an antigovernment lynching.
The FBI got involved, but the state police out of London controlled the investigation, and after six weeks they hadn’t so much as declared the case a homicide. Now the captain was telling me—one of the few things she would tell me—that the police actively “wanted to squash” that lynching narrative. The census worker’s body had been cremated. She claimed to be still awaiting the results of forensic tests.
I don’t know about yours, but my onboard story sensor flashed green!
She gave me her card. Actually, by the end of the interview, she was fairly nice. I saw how it would wear on a person, if you were from around here—as she was—and if you loved the place, to have entitled outsiders bursting in the doors, people who remember that your state exists only on Derby Day and when something fantastically horrible happens, and they’re demanding (as occurred in nearby Manchester) to be “taken to the crazy hayseeds who killed the government man.” The captain knew how people around the country perceived her and her colleagues. She also knew she was good at her job. The combination would irk a person.
Her subordinate, a male officer who stood silent through most of the interview, did say one memorable thing—that he believed, however this case ended up, or if it did, people were going to talk about it for a long time.
They wished me luck.
* * *
The hillside cemetery where Bill Sparkman died was visually exquisite in the way that southeastern Kentucky—which has a topographically secretive cove-and-cave-riven landscape—can be abruptly and gasp-inducingly pretty when a small road opens onto some clearing. If Sparkman hanged or garroted himself there, as some believe, it was a dramatic choice of setting. The Ohio tourists who found his body while visiting family graves and came away feeling strongly that Sparkman had not committed suicide but been
cruelly murdered, later told reporters that he seemed to have been left on display.
The graveyard rests like an eroded rock stairway against the rim of a natural amphitheater, in the deepest fastnesses of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Without the GPS in the rental, I doubt I’d have gotten within ten miles (although the spot turned out to be not far from a cabin that belonged to my ancestors and which I saw as a kid—we drove through a streambed in someone’s truck, and my brother found an old snake-oil bottle stashed in the kitchen wall).
You could hardly imagine how they had physically buried people on this hill, it was that steep. The plots were by necessity almost terraced, with little wooden chairs and benches, since you couldn’t stand. The graves went up and up. It took me fifteen minutes to climb to the ridge above. As you ascended, you rose backward through unknown generations of the Hoskins family, from modern tombstones with laminated photographs of guys playing electric guitar, through older concrete slabs with crude lettering and misspellings, back to flat-lying creek rocks with no-longer-legible initials hacked into them, the ur-Hoskinses. Going higher, beyond the graves, you walked on a vast carpet of mosses and lichens, species growing out of other species—the reason the hill had looked oddly green from below, for November.
The death tree itself was glorious, massive. Its leaves clashed incessantly in the wind of a blustery day, like the branches were covered in thin coppery coins. The tree had been here before the first Hoskins.
They found Bill Sparkman strung up to one of its limbs, but not hanging. This last fact had been important (I thought unduly so) to the captain, that the body lay partly in contact with the ground when found. Not suspended there, in other words, the way you see in pictures of lynchings. His hands were bound with duct tape, his mouth stuffed with a red gag. He wore only socks. Apart from the ominous word on his chest, there was the calling attention to his badge. Otherwise, no defensive wounds. He’d died right there, of asphyxiation.
Pulphead: Essays Page 15