The Pasty Little Putz, Cohen and Krugman

The Pasty Little Putz, in “A Different Kind of Liberal,” gurgles that it’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted Kennedy shared some of his sister Eunice’s qualms about the practice.  Mr. Cohen, writing from Cherence, France, gives us “Advantage France” in which he says time bows at the altar of gastronomy in France. In the U.S., time is the altar.  Prof. Krugman is “Missing Richard Nixon.”  He says in the Nixon era, leaders in both political parties were capable of speaking rationally, and decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now.  Here’s the Pasty Little Putz:

Only 13 days separated the passing of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics, from the death of her brother Ted last week. But amid the wall-to-wall coverage and the stream of retrospectives for the senior senator from Massachusetts, it was easy to forget that he wasn’t the only famous Kennedy sibling to enter eternity this month.

Liberalism’s most important legislator probably merited a more extended send-off than his sister. But there’s a sense in which his life’s work and Eunice’s deserve to be remembered together — for what their legacies had in common, and for what ultimately separated them.

What the siblings shared — in addition to the grace, rare among Kennedys, of a ripe old age and a peaceful death — was a passionate liberalism and an abiding Roman Catholic faith. These two commitments were intertwined: Ted Kennedy’s tireless efforts on issues like health care, education and immigration were explicitly rooted in Catholic social teaching, and so was his sister’s lifelong labor on behalf of the physically and mentally impaired.

What separated them was abortion.

Along with her husband, Sargent Shriver, Eunice belonged to America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals. Like her church, she saw a continuity, rather than a contradiction, between championing the poor, the marginalized and the oppressed and protecting unborn human life.

Her brother took a different path. Not at first: In 1971, in a letter to a voter that abortion opponents would have many opportunities to quote, he declared that “wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” But like many other Catholic liberals, from Joseph Biden to Dennis Kucinich, he moved leftward with his party, becoming a down-the-line supporter of abortion rights, with a voting record that brooked no compromise on the issue.

For abortion opponents, cruel ironies abounded in this sibling disagreement. Because of Eunice Shriver’s work with the developmentally disabled, a group of Americans who had once been marginalized and hidden away — or lobotomized, like her sister Rosemary — was ushered closer to full participation in ordinary human life. But because of laws that her brother unstintingly supported, that same group was ushered out again: the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.

In 1992, Eunice participated in the last significant effort to push the Democratic Party away from abortion on demand, petitioning her party’s convention to consider “a new understanding” of the issue, “one that does not pit mother against child,” but instead seeks “policies that responsibly protect and advance the interest of mothers and their children, both before and after birth.” That same summer, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court upheld a near-absolute right to terminate a pregnancy — a decision made possible by her brother’s demagogic assault on Robert Bork five years earlier, which helped doom Bork’s nomination to the court.

At times, Ted Kennedy’s fervor on abortion felt like an extended apology to his party’s feminists for the way the men of his dynasty behaved in private. Eunice, by contrast, had nothing to apologize for. She knew what patriarchy meant: she was born into a household out of “Mad Men,” where the father paraded his mistress around his family, the sons were groomed for high office, and the daughters were expected to marry well, rear children and suffer silently. And she transcended that stifling milieu, doing more than most men to change the world, and earning the right to disagree with her fellow liberals about what true feminism required.

It’s worth pondering how the politics of abortion might have been different had Ted shared even some of his sister’s qualms about the practice. One could imagine a world in which America’s leading liberal Catholic had found a way to make liberalism less absolutist on the issue, and a world where a man who became famous for reaching across the aisle had reached across, even occasionally, in search of compromise on the country’s most divisive issue.

That was not to be. And it’s entirely fitting, given his record, that Kennedy’s immediate legacy is a draft of health-care legislation that pursues an eminently Catholic goal — expanding access to medical care — through a system that seems likely, in its present design, to subsidize abortion.

But his sister would have written it a different way.

Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Arrival is usually defined as reaching a destination, but of course it’s more than that, it’s the moment when you have shed enough of where you came from to be present at the place you’ve reached. This offloading of layers takes time, like peeling an onion.

My French arrival this year was time-consuming. Iran, which is another story, had me. But the moment came, and when it came, it was not the dawn swooping of starlings, the softness of the dusk light through the sycamores, or the chiming of a village bell that delivered me to “la douce France,” but the sight of glistening guts.

The guts in question were being coaxed by a hand — ungloved — from the belly of a four-pound sea bass — unfarmed — at the market in the Norman town of Vernon, which has one stand devoted solely to watercress. The fish, iridescent, its gills bright scarlet, was fresh from the waters off Dieppe.

My friend Marcel Bossy, who had made the pre-dawn drive from the coast with his glossy load, had his hand deep in the fish. He was laughing about something as the guts slithered onto a scale-coated chopping board.

My 11-year-old daughter, Adele, covered her eyes, but I was riveted. Marcel’s wife, Sandrine, also laughing — something ribald between them — was gutting firm mackerel with swift incisions and finger movements, when one dropped to the ground. She scooped the fish up and resumed work on it, putting me in mind of Julia Child’s famous statement about a miss-flipped potato pancake: “You can always pick it up.”

Since Child, in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” and in her groundbreaking 1960’s television show “The French Chef,” brought Gallic secrets to riveted Americans, the shameless gutting and picking-up of real food in ungloved hands has given way to the hurried-hermetic-hygienic U.S. fever of plastic gloves, processed foods and precooked meals.

Those fish guts delivered me to France because, although this country has its share of fast-food outlets, it has preserved a relationship to food distinguished from the American in three essential respects: fear, time and “terroir.”

If Americans want their fish pre-filleted, their chicken breasts excised from surrounding bone and conveniently packed, their offal kept from view and the table, and any hand that touches a slice of ham or lox sealed inside a glove, it is because fear of the innards that will not speak their name, the guts that reek of life, and the germs we all carry has become rampant.

By contrast, the French don’t believe what they’re eating is genuine unless they’ve seen gritty proof of provenance. They like the alchemy of the peasant hand that does the pâté grip.

American anxiety is related to the American perception of time, which is always short in a land that prizes efficiency above all. Precooked meals — food divorced from its origins, food without guts — is faster to prepare and therefore attractive.

I bought a couple of the female ducklings the French call “canettes” the other day. It took 15 minutes for the cutting-off of head, feet and wing-tips; for the innards to be removed; for the placing in the cleansed insides of the liver, kidneys and neck; for singeing over a gas burner; and for discussion as to whether I wanted the plump ducks trussed for rotisserie cooking (I did not).

Most stores in New York don’t bother selling ducklings — they’re inefficient birds in that the meat-to-size ratio is low — and if they did such protracted preparation would be unthinkable. Time bows at the altar of gastronomy in France. In the United States time is the altar.

The third fundamental difference relates to “terroir,” the untranslatable combination of soil, hearth and tradition that links most French people to a particular place. France sees American mobility with a sacred immobility; attachments trump restlessness.

These are attachments of the gut, which brings us back to why the French take such pleasure in those hands at work cleansing a sea bass or a duckling, and why a stand selling watercress (with the unique taste of a particular patch of soil) is viable.

The French Paradox, so-called, is really the French self-evidence. Change your relationship to fear, time and place, and you change your metabolism. This has less to do with the specific foods eaten, or the specific wine drunk (although of course they count) than it has to do with how food is approached.

According to the 2009 C.I.A. World Factbook, the estimated average life expectancy in France is 80.98 (84.33 for women and 77.79 for men), against 78.11 for the United States (80.69 for women and 75.65 for men.) France ranks 9th in the world; America ranks 50th. There’s something to be said for ungloved hands picking mackerel from the ground.

The American healthcare debate is skewed. It should be devoting more time to changing U.S. culinary and eating habits in ways that cut the need for expensive care by reducing rampant obesity, to which anxiety, haste and disconnectedness contribute. France has much to teach, guts and all.

And now here’s Prof. Krugman:

Many of the retrospectives on Ted Kennedy’s life mention his regret that he didn’t accept Richard Nixon’s offer of a bipartisan health care deal. The moral some commentators take from that regret is that today’s health care reformers should do what Mr. Kennedy balked at doing back then, and reach out to the other side.

But it’s a bad analogy, because today’s political scene is nothing like that of the early 1970s. In fact, surveying current politics, I find myself missing Richard Nixon.

No, I haven’t lost my mind. Nixon was surely the worst person other than Dick Cheney ever to control the executive branch.

But the Nixon era was a time in which leading figures in both parties were capable of speaking rationally about policy, and in which policy decisions weren’t as warped by corporate cash as they are now. America is a better country in many ways than it was 35 years ago, but our political system’s ability to deal with real problems has been degraded to such an extent that I sometimes wonder whether the country is still governable.

As many people have pointed out, Nixon’s proposal for health care reform looks a lot like Democratic proposals today. In fact, in some ways it was stronger. Right now, Republicans are balking at the idea of requiring that large employers offer health insurance to their workers; Nixon proposed requiring that all employers, not just large companies, offer insurance.

Nixon also embraced tighter regulation of insurers, calling on states to “approve specific plans, oversee rates, ensure adequate disclosure, require an annual audit and take other appropriate measures.” No illusions there about how the magic of the marketplace solves all problems.

So what happened to the days when a Republican president could sound so nonideological, and offer such a reasonable proposal?

Part of the answer is that the right-wing fringe, which has always been around — as an article by the historian Rick Perlstein puts it, “crazy is a pre-existing condition” — has now, in effect, taken over one of our two major parties. Moderate Republicans, the sort of people with whom one might have been able to negotiate a health care deal, have either been driven out of the party or intimidated into silence. Whom are Democrats supposed to reach out to, when Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who was supposed to be the linchpin of any deal, helped feed the “death panel” lies?

But there’s another reason health care reform is much harder now than it would have been under Nixon: the vast expansion of corporate influence.

We tend to think of the way things are now, with a huge army of lobbyists permanently camped in the corridors of power, with corporations prepared to unleash misleading ads and organize fake grass-roots protests against any legislation that threatens their bottom line, as the way it always was. But our corporate-cash-dominated system is a relatively recent creation, dating mainly from the late 1970s.

And now that this system exists, reform of any kind has become extremely difficult. That’s especially true for health care, where growing spending has made the vested interests far more powerful than they were in Nixon’s day. The health insurance industry, in particular, saw its premiums go from 1.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1970 to 5.5 percent in 2007, so that a once minor player has become a political behemoth, one that is currently spending $1.4 million a day lobbying Congress.

That spending fuels debates that otherwise seem incomprehensible. Why are “centrist” Democrats like Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota so opposed to letting a public plan, in which Americans can buy their insurance directly from the government, compete with private insurers? Never mind their often incoherent arguments; what it comes down to is the money.

Given the combination of G.O.P. extremism and corporate power, it’s now doubtful whether health reform, even if we get it — which is by no means certain — will be anywhere near as good as Nixon’s proposal, even though Democrats control the White House and have a large Congressional majority.

And what about other challenges? Every desperately needed reform I can think of, from controlling greenhouse gases to restoring fiscal balance, will have to run the same gantlet of lobbying and lies.

I’m not saying that reformers should give up. They do, however, have to realize what they’re up against. There was a lot of talk last year about how Barack Obama would be a “transformational” president — but true transformation, it turns out, requires a lot more than electing one telegenic leader. Actually turning this country around is going to take years of siege warfare against deeply entrenched interests, defending a deeply dysfunctional political system.

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