Mencken and Medicine

    What a pity the Sage of Baltimore is not here today to lead us through the bewildering maze that is health care reform.  What a ball he would have had examining the fiduciary relationships many of our congressmen have with  insurance and pharmaceutical companies, doctors' organizations, tort lawyers and others who have a direct interest in the outcome of their deliberations.  Fat targets for his verbal skewers are everywhere in this debate, from far left to far right and back again, including the likes of  Senator Baucus who has been the recipient of hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from insurance companies.  Who could blame him for giving the back of his hand to the proposed "public option" that might give some real competition to his friends and benefactors in the industry? Nor would Mencken spare the lowly consumer as this passage from his "Minority Report" suggests:


    The socialized medicine scheme, even assuming it to be rational, plainly needs certain amendments. It would be brutal to inflict scientific medicine upon the generality of American morons, for they never turn to it when they have clear choice.  They always prefer patent medicine, chiropractic, faith healing or something worse. If the Federal bureaucracy ever really takes over the job of  looking at their tongues, it should choose as its agents not graduates of  Class A medical schools, but such Hippocrateses of the folk as the heirs and assigns of  Lydia Pinkham, Dr. Munyon, Brinkley (the goat gland man), and Mary Baker G. Eddy.


     One can only imagine what Mencken would have to say about the pharmaceutical companies' lavish advertising campaigns for expensive prescription nostrums aimed directly at consumers,  many of whom then demand the drugs from their doctors whether they need them or not.  
     The absurdities in our present system of medical care (and the way we pay for it) are sickening (no pun intended) but enormously profitable to many of the major players so Uncle Jack does not expect to see much in the way of meaningful reform coming from our bought-and-paid for lawmakers in his lifetime.  Perhaps when the national bill for medical care reaches the point that there is no money left in the treasury for making war on small countries in faraway places we will see some radical changes.
      In the meantime we will be left to ponder medical bills like the one Uncle Jack received from the Duke cardiology department after his last check-up before moving to Baltimore.  He was in his cardiologist's office for less than an hour (most of it alone) during which he had an echocardiogram and a few minutes of pleasant conversation with his very good and conscientious doctor.  The total bill, paid for by Medicare and his supplementary Blue Cross policy (which is another way of saying by himself and other taxpayers), was slightly over $3000.  Uncle Jack wishes he could have handed it to HLM for his reaction.

                                                   Mencken takes his Lipitor?
     
      
      

Fair Portland

          Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. went to Portland, Oregon last weekend for a wedding and they have to say their visit was an eye-opener.  After nine months in Baltimore they had both decided that they couldn't imagine a nicer place to live than Charm City but their three-day sojourn in Portland has forced them to reconsider. They would have to experience the rainy season before making a definitive statement but right now Portland looks like a winner.  

         Portland doesn't have a Harbor Place but it does have two rivers (the Willamette, above, and the Columbia) which between them provide plenty of water to look at and to play on. A long promenade along the east side of the Willamette attracts thousands of walkers, joggers and bike riders on a pretty day.  Obesity is not yet a felony in Portland but it's probably only a matter of time.  

     South Park is one of several downtown parks that provide respite from the hurley-burley of the business streets surrounding it.  The Art Museum, Historical Society, a university and several churches surround the park in what is known as the Cultural District, reminiscent of  Baltimore's Mount Vernon neighborhood but even prettier.

       This bronze in front of the Historical Society commemorates Teddy Roosevelt the Conservationist who did much to preserve the natural beauty of  the west, including Oregon.  

     
     Trompe l'oeil murals depicting scenes in Oregon history decorate two sides of this building next door to the Historical Society museum.

     
     Baltimore was already a thriving city by the time Lewis and Clark and the other western explorers got to this area so Portland's history as a metropolis is relatively short.  Late 19th century buildings are considered ancient.

       This new city park across the street from Uncle Jack's hotel will be the latest downtown amenity when it
 opens next year.  The glass roof will cover an open-air restaurant. The central business district appears to be thriving with all the fancy stores that in Baltimore are consigned mostly to shopping malls out in the burbs. (A Nordstrom's consumes an entire city block across the street from Macy's). Public transportation by streetcar, bus and light rail is free throughout the downtown area.  The streets are immaculate and very few storefronts are empty.

     Like Baltimore, Portland sports a number of classy, modern high-rise buildings, most of which have been built to "green" standards.  

     This futuristic glass confection sports its own wind turbines. Portland bears the appellation "Greenest City in America" with great pride.

     The world famous Powell's Bookstore occupies an entire square block in downtown Portland as well as several satellite spaces with specialty collections.  Book lovers like Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. could spend the entire rainy season in Powell's and never notice the precipitation.

          The vast interior is color coded (this is the Purple section) to help readers find what they are looking for.

     Every Saturday during the clement months a huge outdoor market convenes in an area between Chinatown and the Willamette River where hundreds of craftspeople offer their wares to thousands of potential buyers.  Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. could not resist a beautiful handmade wooden cribbage board with which they will while away many an hour during the winter season when neither the Ravens nor the Orioles are playing.  The market also features a bewildering variety of ethnic foods and some first class free musical entertainment.

    
      The exquisite Governor Hotel, called the Seward when it was built in 1909, is a downtown landmark.  It was expensively refurbished in the 1990's and it is an art deco gem with Native American flourishes.


      Oh yes, about crime.  Baltimore and Portland are roughly the same size, a bit over a half-million within the city limits.  There were 26 murders in Portland last year (residents are appalled) compared with Baltimore's 234.  Portland has a female police chief.  Perhaps Charm City should try that next.

Mencken on "Progress", Tuesday, September 22, 2009

     Uncle Jack wore himself out hiking the Gwynn's Falls trail yesterday so he decided to put his feet up today and continue his sedentary exploration of the voluminous writings of  H. L. Mencken,  "The Sage of Baltimore." For most of the first half of the 20th century Mencken made his opinions known on just about every subject under the sun, expressing his ideas in colorful, forceful language that made him one of the most widely read writer of his time.  Readers either loved him or hated him but he was hard to ignore.
     Much of what Mencken wrote is still relevant today which is not surprising inasmuch as knotty problems of politics, economics and society in general tend to hang around from generation to generation.  In the following quotation from a collection of  his writings called "Minority Report" (published posthumously in 1956) he holds forth on a subject that is very much alive today, using his beloved Baltimore as a cautionary example.

     It seems to be the common belief in the United States that a new factory is a valuable acquisition to a city or town, and that any man who sets up one is a public benefactor.  The local Rotarians and other such imbeciles always give him a hearty welcome and not infrequently he is accorded substantial tax exemptions. In the days following Reconstruction many of  the one-horse cotton mills that still afflict the South were built by public subscription, and large subscribers were honored as notable philanthropists. This delusion raged all over America in the high days of the Coolidge prosperity and was revived during World War II.  In consequence many a peaceful and charming town was polluted and ruined; indeed there was scarcely a town in the country that did not suffer more or less damage. The injury to Baltimore was large and palpable. The new factories brought in during boom days brought in hordes of low-grade labor and the result was a marked decline in the average intelligence and decency of the population. During World War II the effect was even worse, for nearly all the strangers recruited to man the war plants were either hill billies from Appalachia or lintheads from the more languishing Southern mill towns.  These newcomers propagated disease, filled the public schools with their filthy progeny, kept the police jumping and wrecked whole neighborhoods.  Of the 250,000 or more, white and black, who came in first and last, probably not more than 200 were of any value as citizens. They were, in fact, so uniformly inferior that even the even the constructive thinkers who at first hailed them ended by praying to a sportive and unjust God that they would quickly return home.  The patriotic entrepreneurs who afflicted Baltimore with these revolting morons made no contribution whatever to civilization in the town.  Some of them set up as civic leaders, made endless speeches and whooped up all sorts of costly and idiotic "improvements," but they never had anything worth hearing to say, and not many of them returned in taxes the extra expenses they laid on the community.  The cost of one of them, Glenn L. Martin, the airship manufacturer, must have run to many millions, but the values the city got out of him were precisely nil.  One S. Teackle Wallis........was worth more than a whole herd of such fellows. 

     Post script:  At its peak Martin Marietta employed over 50,000 persons in the Baltimore area but after the failure of its aircraft business after WWII the company's operations mostly moved elsewhere and employment has declined to a tiny fraction of what it once was. If you're curious about S. Teackle Wallis here's a picture of his statue in Mount Vernon Square in Baltimore.  Google him to find out why he went to jail but still earned a statue in the park.



      

Dickeyville, Monday September 21, 2009

     A Baltimore novelist named Madison Smartt Bell did the world an enormous favor a couple of years ago by taking time out to write a book called "Charm City: A Walk Through Baltimore".  Uncle Jack discovered it soon after he arrived in the city last December and it has become his Bawlmer Baedeker.  In this delightful book Bell describes his findings as he wanders on foot through many Baltimore neighborhoods, including  a few that present a clear and present danger to any strolling stranger.
     Bell is a wonderful writer and his colorful commentaries have enticed Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. to set forth in all directions in search of   parts of town they might have been a long time discovering on their own, such as Fells Point, Federal Hill,  Canton, Bolton Hill, Patterson Park----and especially Dickeyville.  Uncle Jack would be willing to bet that the vast majority of Baltimoreans, including those who have lived here all their  lives, have ever set foot in Dickeyville or even know it exists.
    Lucky for Uncle Jack Mr. Bell devotes an entire chapter of his slim volume to Dickeyville which he explored in the company of Laura Lippman, one of Baltimore's most celebrated novelists (and wife of David Simon, producer of  "The Wire" TV series) who was born in Dickeyville and knows it like the back of her hand.  After reading their description of this fascinating part of Baltimore he knew he would have to see it for himself---if he could find it.

          It wasn't easy.  Perhaps the major reason that Dickeyville has retained so much of its 19th century charm is that it is truly off the beaten path;  finding it can present a serious challenge to even a state-of-the art GPS system.  Readers who want to visit Dickeyville will have to rely on their own ingenuity to find it because Uncle Jack isn't  sure exactly how he got there himself and even less sure about how he found his way back to Charles Village yesterday afternoon after he and Mrs. U.J. had spent a couple of delightful hours in this amazing living museum.

    Many houses and other buildings in Dickeyville date back to the early 19th century when it was a thriving mill town on the banks of the Gwynn's Falls river, miles from Baltimore Town which has since engulfed it.
  

     This magnificent structure, originally the Odd Fellows Lodge,  now houses an art gallery on the ground floor.  .

     
         This stone warehouse across the street was for many years in the mid-20th century the home and studio of a well-known Baltimore artist named R. McGill Mackall . It appears to be occupied now but Uncle Jack knows not by whom. It was built in 1823 and looks like it could survive for a few more centuries.

     The Gwynn's Falls river, which still carries a lot of water, provided  power for the several mills and factories that were the raison d'etre for Dickeyville and its predecessors.  For a capsule history of the village go to http://www.livebaltimore.com/neighborhoods/list/dickeyville/

  
     This perfectly preserved child's playhouse is in the back yard of  a Dickeyville home.

        This back yard has had a couple of centuries to develop and looks like it could get completely out of control at any time.

     Dickeyville is the starting point for the Gwynn's Falls Trail which follows the course of the river for fifteen miles to its end at the Inner Harbor.  Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. could hardly believe they were walking in the middle of a booming, bustling city.  Baltimore is a city of parks, many of which are connected together by hiking/biking trails.like this one.

         And if you are lucky enough to get to Dickeyville one day be sure to heed this sign.  Not even Dickeyville is perfect in every respect, although it comes close.

Crime should not pay. Ask Mencken.

               Something rather unusual happened in Uncle Jack's neighborhood this week which has left him  puzzled.  It seems that a 20-year-old Johns Hopkins student who lives just two blocks down the street from Uncle Jack's condo went forth from his house late at night, armed with a Samurai sword, to investigate a noise coming from his back yard.  According to police reports he there encountered an intruder who may or may not have been the same person who burglarized his house a few hours earlier and stole an xBox game-playing device.  Either with malice aforethought or in self-defense (only the student knows for sure at this point) he smote the intruder with his sword and inflicted a wound of sufficient gravity to cause the alleged burglar to bleed to death before he could receive medical treatment.  Police reported that the dead man was a 49-year-old resident of the neighborhood
who had just been released from jail three days earlier and who had over 20 previous convictions, mostly for burglary and car theft.
      Being the type of person often referred to as a "bleeding heart liberal" this unfortunate event gave Uncle Jack pause. While he can empathize with the student whose xBox had been purloined, perhaps by the same individual who was now prowling his back yard, he had to wonder if  the killing was legally or morally justifiable under the circumstances.
     The vast majority of those Baltimoreans who have commented on the incident in the pages of the Sun  in the past few days obviously do not share Uncle Jack's qualms.  In their view the victim got exactly what he deserved and they praised the student for defending his property.
     Driven by his own uncertainty Uncle Jack decided to turn for guidance to the Sage of Baltimore himself, H.L. Mencken, whose works he has been reading sporadically since he moved to Bawlmer in January.  He thought that surely Mencken would have an opinion and that it would be forceful and unambiguous.  He was right, as the following quotation from his book "Minority Report", published by Alfred Knopf in 1956, suggests:
    
Well, getting rid of criminals is a practical matter.  If psychiatry could really cure them, every rational man would be for it, if only as an easy way to dispose of a nuisance.  But as long as psychiatry remains mostly quackery we must contrive to get them into such a position that they can't do any further harm.  The one certain, swift and cheap way to deal with them is to put them to death.
    
     While Uncle Jack doubts that many of the Sun's
dwindling cohort of readers are acquainted with the writings of  the illustrious Mr. Mencken, it appears that his spirit lives on in Charm City.


      

                     H. L. Mencken at rest.

The Lord moves in mysterious ways his wonders to perform.

            William Cowper said it a long time ago but he could have been talking about Uncle Jack's move to Baltimore last January from the Outer Banks of North Carolina.  He and his wife, Sue (a.k.a. Mrs. U.J.)., had originally planned to spend a couple of months helping her daughter cope with her newborn son, her four- and five-year-old daughters and her career, and then return to Nags Head where they had lived and worked for more years than they cared to remember.

                                                Home, Sweet Home, in Bawlmer


          That isn't the way it worked out.  Even in the dead of winter Charm City worked its magic and by the end of January they were the happy new owners of a condo in Charles Village, right across Charles street from the Johns Hopkins Homewood campus, where they hope to reside for the rest of their lives. 
           This was not widely considered to be a particularly wise move, especially among those of his friends who had derived their impressions of Bawlmer from repeated viewings of the award-winning TV series, The Wire, which did a magnificent job of portraying some of the  less-charming aspects of Charm City.  Many of the longtime readers of Uncle Jack's Outer Banks blog (www.obxconnection.com)  thought he had gone quite mad as did the two young Baltimoreans who moved a truckload of furniture from  Nags Head to his new digs in Charles Village.  "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" they asked,  after seeing Uncle Jack's South Nags Head home for the first time. After nine months in Baltimore, though, he is more sure than ever that he and Mrs. U.J. did the right thing; this is a fabulous city.
           Uncle Jack's intention in this blog is to "unwire" his adopted city---to seek out and celebrate the many charms of Charm City as he and Mrs. U.J. discover them over the coming months. Wherever he goes his camera goes, too, so there will be lots of pictures like these:

                                            Part of the incredible view from Federal Hill

                                           Sherwood Gardens tulips in bloom, April 23

                                            One of Monument City's lesser monuments


           Uncle Jack's Baltimore blog will reflect a journey of discovery for him and hopefully provide some insight for others into why he has been so completely smitten by this vibrant, beautiful city.  He hopes you will join him.