The Blistering: Chapter XX

Pelted with Good Fortune 

 
To read this serial novel from the beginning, go here.

Rove stood up behind his desk. As Cardinal and Marsha were ushered in, his face furrowed in righteous anger. "Cardinal, this is the last time we will be using you for any purpose," he said. "You almost single-handedly destabilized the Middle East with your carelessness."

"Now I wouldn't go that far," Cardinal answered. "Everybody seems to have gotten out of this all right."

"All right? After you blew up a building in downtown Damascus, you slipped across the border and got caught in a Turkish airport with a trunk full of baby seal pelts. Do you know what it took to get you out of that prison? I would have left you to rot in there, but I thought eventually you might talk."

"Rove, I just want you to know that all the rumors about Turkish prisons are true. You should send me to Guantanamo immediately. I can give them a lot of pointers."

"This was supposed to be a secret mission," Rove roared. "Don't you know the meaning of secrecy? Or discretion? How about common sense!"

"Nobody knew who I was. In all the newspapers I was Fertus E. Patriot. Nobody said any different. The Fox cable network had a 6 week campaign called 'Free the Patriot.' I guess you had something to do with that, Rove?"

"Well, yes, Fox does take orders from me." He chortled, seeming to remember something that pleased him, then paused. "But that's beside the point. You risked national security. It could even have led to war!" His dander was rising again.

"Rove, you know some things are worth risking the lives of millions over. Like a seal skin coat for your wife to wear to the big Republican spring fund raiser. Think of the billionaires who will envy you."

Rove stopped. He mouth dropped slightly open. Cardinal could hear the burst of his salivary glands kicking in. "You . . . . you . . . you have the sealskin pelts? You have them? One of the rarest clothing items in the world? I thought the Turks took them!"

"No, no. What kind of fool do you take me for? The pelts they seized were fakes. I dropped the real pelts in a Federal Express box and mailed them to a friend here in the States."

"Jesus. I mean, I don't believe in Jesus, I just say I do for political purposes, but Jesus."

"Of course, if you jail us or kill us, those pelts are gone forever."

"Oh, Cardinal, I was just kidding about that cloak and dagger stuff," Rove said, as he practically skipped to Cardinal's side. "If you can deliver on those pelts, I think all can be forgiven. I'll talk to a few people."

"Great," Cardinal said slowly, obviously thinking of something else now. "If I wrote a book about my experiences in the Turkish prison, do you think you could get the Fox network to promote it?"

"Oh, no problem, no problem. Do you think you have enough pelts to make coats for my wife and the vice president's wife?"

"Hell yes," Cardinal said. "I have baby seal pelts to make floor-length coats for your wife and Mrs. Cheney both, and still enough left over for a pair of fur lined gloves for yourself. You should wear them next time you make an appearance at the ASPCA convention."

"Sweet."

Next episode: Land Lines

Election Day Postcard from Mississippi

Election night is over here, and Barack Obama has carried our state with 60% of the vote. Unfortunately, from the looks of things, his victory is a mixed picture. According to MSNBC  reporting, blacks came out by the thousands and voted almost unanimously for Obama, while whites voted roughly 3 to 1 for Hillary Clinton.

On the surface, this looks like an historic day. A black presidential candidate carries the state of Missisippi, and by a sizable margin. This has never happened before, and until about 6 months ago, it was inconceivable that it would this year. And yet, despite the historical milestone, deep down it was the same old story -- deep racial divisions, each voting for his own. There were only a few crossovers, and I was among them.  For the most part, though, we had the usual, disguised as something new. Only because blacks voted with unprecedented unity  did Obama carry the day.

My experience of life in the South is that this is how it goes. On the surface we get a string of firsts: first mixed school, first black valedictorian, first black police officer, first black mayor, first black presidential primary winner. Behind it all we see that most people behave as they always have; they have simply learned to do so with greater subtlety and discretion. What once was "the school for coloreds only," now passes as "the school for the poor kids."

In my examination room over the years, I have heard the most horrible racial epithets. It is remarkable what a white patient will tell a white doctor in the privacy of the exam room. I wish I could charge extra for having to listen to the n-word; I'd have made a tidy sum over the years. That being said, I have only rarely excluded a patient from my practice because they express racism. This is not a thing to be proud of, but on the other hand, racists have a right to decent medical care, too.

Not so very long ago, a patient was talking to me in my office, and mentioned in passing that my children probably attend a certain local school that is 100% white. (I have no proof this ratio is by design, but in a county that is roughly 51% black, it is highly suspicious.) When I told him I did not send my children to that school, there was a silence, much longer than seemed comfortable. He was genuinely surprised, and seemed to be puzzling something out.

It put me in mind of a story told about one of Mississippi's most famous sons, Elvis Presley. The story goes that on the night one of Elvis's records was first played at a Memphis radio station, someone called in to ask what high school Elvis went to. The question was an aphorism for asking what color his skin was, because Memphis high schools were universally segregated and everyone knew which schools were what color. I felt the same way about my patient's reaction to my choice of schools for my kids -- he was drawing a conclusion.

This is the South I know -- physically  in the twenty-first century,  and yet oddly, often unreasoningly, pointed towards the past. So why live here? Stubborn, I guess. If all the open-minded people left Mississippi to be with like-minded individuals elsewhere, what would happen to the South? The least I can be is a buffer in this volatile solution. I live here because I have seen changes on the surface, and hope that over time these changes will deepen. I would rather be a part of gradual, excruciating change, than puzzle over it from the comfort of distance.

Last night, for instance, black Mississippians swung behind a candidate like never before. This could be a good thing. Before other people believe in you, you have to believe in yourself. Maybe, perhaps, black Mississippians are finally believing in one of their own in an arena outside of sports or music. Maybe confidence in the black community that change can happen without violence and upheaval will persuade whites that change could be good for them, too.

Maybe. The Mississippi primary also shows we have a long way to go.

The Honorable Haley Barbour

As a Katrina-displaced New Orleans physician now practicing in Mississippi, I have yet to acquire a taste for our Mississippi governor, Haley Barbour. Maybe it is his political origins, first as a successful Washington lobbyist and later as chair of the Republican National Committee. Or his history of fundraising for the 2000 Bush campaign and consistent opposition to campaign finance reform. Since I arrived in Mississippi, I have watched as he hastily rewrote gambling regulations in 2005 so casinos on the Katrina-devastated Gulf Coast could relocate from gambling boats onto dry land. It always bothered me that one of Barbour's first post-Katina policy acts was to re-establish gambling, even as thousands remained homeless.

It also bothers me that, as Barbour brags about his effectiveness in bringing the Mississippi Coast back from Katrina, he continues to ignore the needs of the poor. As the casino income on the coast soared to a record $1 billion in 2007, Barbour dragged his feet in providing housing to hurricane victims. By November 2007, a full two years after Katrina, Barbour had spent a paltry $167 million of a $1.7 billion emergency federal housing block grant on storm victims living in poverty.

Yes, that's million, with an m. And this is in Mississippi, where, I can assure you, it is not hard to find poor people.

So, it should not have been surprising to hear Barbour utter these words in his State of the State speech on January 21, 2008, which ironically enough was Martin Luther King day:
 

In this past four years, we’ve made significant progress in saving Medicaid for the nearly 600,000 Mississippians who rely on it. We have enacted reforms because we know it is wrong for a family to work hard at two or three jobs, to raise their kids and pay for their healthcare, and then have to turn around and pay extra taxes so others who are able to work and take care of themselves choose not to but instead get free healthcare at taxpayers’ expense. That’s not right.

Under this Administration, the Division of Medicaid checks people’s eligibility face-to-face, and the Medicaid rolls have decreased to fewer than 600,000. This drop is what you should expect when the number of people employed has increased by more than 50,000.

On Martin Luther King Day, of all days, Barbour stoops to blaming the fiscal problems of the state on people "who are able to work and take care of themselves [but] choose not to."  The mythical welfare queen rises from the grave. To be fair, Barbour goes on to enumerate the fiscal challenges that Mississippi faces with Medicaid funding. There are many. But it is irresponsible to crow over how many people Mississippi has kicked off Medicaid, blaming the ejected for being lazy and gaming the system for free health care.

 
Barbour is right about one thing: He has very efficiently denied Mississippians healthcare. He has trimmed statewide Medicaid enrollment from 785,000 in 2004, to 540,000 by 2006. That loss of 245,000 enrollees far exceeds the modest 50,000 job increase Barbour boasts, which incidentally occurred over the much longer period of 2003-2007. By his own numbers, Barbour is publicly admitting he has stripped 195,000 citizens of health insurance, even given his assumption that every single job added to the state economy carries full health care benefits.

His myth of the Medicaid Queen is not even close to being true. In my medical career I have treated thousands of Medicaid patients, and I have yet to meet one who chose to sit at home to collect those fabulous Medicaid benefits. Not that Medicaid is all that great an insurance anyway, but it, like almost every insurance, makes all its payments directly to doctors and hospitals. Not a dime of Medicaid money is ever paid directly to a patient.

Medicaid money goes into my pocket, my nurse's pocket, my office manager's pocket. It pays the salaries of the cooks and maintenance people at the hospital where I work. In fact, I can't think of a federal program where the money  goes to harder working and more honest, caring people than it does with Medicaid. Here in McComb, MS, we have a six story hospital that employs at least 1,000 people. That hospital, one of the largest employers in Pike county, might not exist without Medicaid.

And for Mississippi, Medicaid is a real bargain. State funding is backed by federal matching dollars, and Mississippi, as America's poorest state, qualifies for the highest matching fund percentage in the nation, 76.29%. For every dollar Mississippi spends on Medicaid, the feds kick in three.

In Governor Barbour's mind, cutting thousands of qualified poor people from the Medicaid rolls and thus foregoing hundreds of millions in matching dollars is good for the state. This is the same governor who in 2007 happily engineered a $296 million tax incentive package to lure a Toyota plant to Tupelo. That plant will eventually employ 2000 people, a considerable number, but nonetheless small compared to the many thousands working in the medical field in the city of Jackson alone. Our own county hospital creates half as many jobs, and cost far less tax money to build.

It takes a special gall to seize the occasion of Martin Luther King Day to accuse the poor of dragging Mississippi down. Barbour, of course, would deny that race has anything to do with his statement, but, to put things kindly, Mississippi doesn't have a civil rights history that easily excuses that interpretation. That he said this on Martin Luther King Day, a day when most politicians walk on racial eggshells, suggests extraordinary insensitivity to the needs of his own constituency.

The Medicaid line item is a huge part of most state budgets, and this is especially true for a poor, medically under-served state like Mississippi. It is true that even with a 3-to-1 match Mississippi is having trouble meeting the needs of its citizens. Barbour owes it to the voters to admit money is tight. But blaming the tight budget on poor people, when Barbour has pursued a policy to maintain the nation's highest grocery tax and among the lowest corporate and cigarette tax rates, is, to borrow Barbour's own words, "not right."

Yet this is the Republican way. Barbour is no different from his Republican brethren, who think 100% of Americans would have health insurance if poor people would only behave responsibly. He would have us believe it is acceptable to give away $296 million to one of the world's richest corporations for 2000 jobs with health insurance, but unseemly to fund health insurance directly.

It is time that conservatives be called on their heath care lie. They have no intention of promising health care for everyone. Their game is Barbour's game -- force people off government assistance, and pretend they are better off for the loss. As long as they are allowed to persist in this fiction, they will succeed in their goal of depriving millions of poor Americans of the one thing everyone deserves -- good health.