Tassie Keltjin is a student at a mid-western college in need of a job.  She signs on as a nanny for a middle-aged couple who adopt a biracial child.  The relationship between Tassie and little Emmie is delightful, and Moore does a great job depicting the insidiousness of racial bias.  But the past life of the adoptive parents intrudes, and all goes downhill.

One of the first rules of fiction is that it must be believable.   Moore, a writer of the highest caliber, violates this rule.

No mother would ever allow her husband to put their four-year-old son out of the car beside a busy interstate because the kid was kicking the seat.  And if there were such a mother, or father, and if the four-year-old should walk into traffic and be killed, surely such terrible parents would go to jail for the rest of their lives.  They could not simply change their identities and move on to become a highly respected scientist searching for a cure for cancer and the owner of a successful gourmet restaurant.

No sane person would ever climb into a coffin with someone who had been dead for several weeks, close the lid, and ride from the church to the cemetery inside that coffin with that putrescent body.

Sadly, this book is filled with things that are simply not unbelievable.  The Brazilian lover suddenly turns terrorist, cleans out his apartment, and disappears.  The restaurateur mixes up a batch of unknown ingredients and has Tassie put them in her frig with orders not to eat it. There is no explanation for this odd behavior.

Tassie goes on such wild, rambling, flights of imagination one wonders about her sanity.

This book, and the things that happen, do not meet the test of believability.  I should have put it down long before I got to that funeral scene.

The story takes place against the backdrop of Perestroika, a political movement within the Communist party that began in the year 2000 and is associated with Mikhail Gorbachev.  Hornung shows us  the city as we’ve never seen it before:  towering hills of garbage, rodent infestation, a feral dog population, a cruelty towards the citizenry that is hard to imagine.

Such is the world in which this little boy finds himself.  He follows a stray dog to the outskirts of the city. There, in the cellar of a ruined church, he finds a pack of feral dogs.   In that dark underground place he is welcomed.  He finds warmth, food, companionship, and love.  Ultimately adopted by the pack, Romochka lives with them for two wrenching years.

It’s a shocking book. You’ll flinch in places. You’ll want to put it down. But you care so much for this boy, and for the dogs, you won’t be able to. 

Duvall’s performance is stellar, as are those of co-stars Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray.

The movie is based on a true story.  It moves like a glacier.

I’ve been thinking a lot about recessions lately.  They’re cyclical, economists tells us.  They happen when people stop buying.  Goods pile up.  Companies, responding to high inventories, lay off workers.

I’m just about ready to say that government is responsible for recessions.  More specifically, our Senators and Representatives.  When the public perceives that the government is in bed with industry, and the bills that are passed benefit not the people, but big business, we get discouraged.  When we realize we are powerless to do anything about it, and it will only get worse, we close our wallets and prepare for hard times.

We go into recession when the working people in America are squeezed to the point where they can no longer stand the pain.  The pressure is applied a little at a time.  They put a surcharge on our electric bill when summer is at its hottest or winter its coldest.  Our property taxes go up.  What our health insurance policy once covered, it no longer covers.  Social programs go on the chopping block so we can finance wars that never end.  Bankers and Wall Street bandits pocket billions of tax-payer dollars, and our government does nothing about it.

Little by little, the screws are tightened, and we suffer, but we get used to living with the pain, and we go on with our lives.  Then the government in collusion with big business ratchets it up a bit more.  More pain.  We adjust to this new level of suffering, and we go on.  Finally, there comes a point where we can stand it no more.  The pain is too much.  We quit going to stores.  We don’t buy that new car or new pair of jeans because we’re afraid of what tomorrow might bring.  We don’t go to movies.  We stay in our houses and we worry.

All wealth in this country comes from the hard work of the lower and middle classes.  But it’s the rich who rake it in.  The poor keep on working, trying to pay their bills.  We talk about things like “throw the bums out.”  But deep down we know that if we throw the bums out, the new bum will be just as bad as the old one.

The bills passed by Congress with very few exceptions benefit big corporations, not the people.  The new health care legislation surely benefits big insurance companies.  They got millions of new customers.  They have four years to reject people with pre-existing conditions, and in that four years, they will surely figure a way to make it eight.  They beat back the public option, our only chance to force insurance companies to treat people fairly.  The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, formerly the US Minerals Management Service, allows oil companies to submit fraudulent documents, to drill baby drill with no plans to deal with calamities like the Deep Horizon Oil Well.  The EPA tells BP to cut  its use of the dispersant Corexit by 50 to 75%, but BP ignores the directive, keeps right on pouring the stuff into the Gulf.  NOAA tells us 75% of the oil  is gone, but scientists from the Universities of Florida and Georgia tell us it’s still there, on the bottom of the Gulf,  poisoning plant plankton which is the basic food source for all living things in the Gulf.  The FDA allows GlaxoSmithKline to continue to market drugs that are killing people.  A massive spill of toxic ash flows from a TVA power plant in Kingston, Tennessee, covering over 300 acres, polluting the Emory and Clinch rivers.  TVA uses taxpayer money to fund a study that, predictably, shows no adverse health effects associated with the toxic spill.

Three years after the financial meltdown, Congress passes financial reform, but it is so full of loopholes no one really believes it will help.  Nothing is done to cut the “too big to fail” banks down to manageable size.  They neglect to do anything meaningful about derivatives.

Congress passed credit card reform, but they left enough loopholes to drive a truck through.  That new business card you got in the mail to replace your personal card?  It’s not subject to the new rules.

The Tea Party and conservative Republicans  would  like to get rid of Social Security and Medicare, repeal the new Health Care legislation, apologize to BP for asking them to pay for the damage they’ve done to the Gulf, retain the Bush tax cuts for the rich, keep women in bondage by repealing Rowe vs Wade, allow coal and energy companies to pollute the environment at will, allow banks and credit card companies to tie their customers in knots and extract every dime they possibly can.

Recessions happen when hard working people can no longer take care of their families.  They’ve been squeezed too hard.  By taxes.  By corporations who fire people in order to protect their bottom lines.  By politicians who want to rip away the safety net from those who are unable to pay their bills, afford a place to live, buy food for their tables.

He worked all his life to feed his family….

It’s a shock to learn the meaning of the word “completed,” yet the author has prepared us so well, it is not a shock at all.  The same with other words that have special meaning in this new world:  carers and donors, guardians and exchanges.

In Ishiguro’s last book, “The Remains of the Day,” the butler immerses himself in the minutiae of everyday life.  He takes no notice of the fact that the man he serves, Lord Darlington, is a Nazi sympathizer.

So too the characters in this book.  Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy focus on the details of their lives at the private school in the English countryside.  They do not question their fate, nor the roles they will assume when they move from Hailsham to the cottage, then out into the world.

“Never Let Me Go” is a powerful work of art.   It is complicated and unsettling, and in the end, we are left with a profound sense of sorrow, that science could lead us down such dark pathways.  But it’s a journey you shouldn’t miss.

The bus was warm and I might have dozed, but then, off to my right, I saw a  building, all steel and glass, fifteen stories high, immaculately landscaped, basking in the morning sun.  Atop the building was the GSK logo, followed by the company name:  GlaxoSmithKline.  I sat up in my seat.

So that’s their headquarters, I thought.  I hadn’t realized GlaxoSmithKline was a British company.  Like BP is a British company, but at the time, I didn’t know that either.

What I knew was that GlazoSmithKline was the company that marketed Avandia, a blockbuster new diabetes drug that had been on the market since 1999.  By 2004, problems had begun to surface.  Studies showed that type 2 diabetics who took Avandia were 25 times more likely to suffer heart attacks.  The drug was suspected of causing other problems:  weight gain, brittle bones, strokes, and kidney failure.  There was even talk of cancer.

My husband’s doctor had put him on Avandia two years before.  Because the drug was relatively new and under patent protection, it cost a lot of money.  We were paying for it out of our pockets.  Our insurance, the best we could buy, was terrible.  It’s like that for people who are self-employed.

Because I didn’t like what I was reading about this very pricey drug, I set up a Google alert.  Anytime Avandia made the news, Google sent a link to my Gmail account.  I started getting those links several times a week.  They were alarming.  I printed some of the articles out, showed them to my husband, insisted he take them to his doctor.  Ultimatedly, his doctor prescribed an older, safer, and more effective drug.  We threw the Avandia in the trash.

I sat in the seat on that bus on my way into London, and there was that GlaxoSmithKline building, glaring at me, and my eyes were gritty from lack of sleep, and I wondered just how much of that building I’d paid for.  In the eighteen months my husband had taken the drug, we’d spent thousand of dollars.  The drug hadn’t helped his diabetes.  He’d experienced weight gain, erratic morning blood sugars, and other problems.  I wondered what other damage the drug might have done.  I could only guess.

I spent five days in London, and another five in the countryside.  When I came home I did some math:  eighteen months, $200 a month.  I wrote a letter to GSK asking them to send me a check for $3,600.

Several weeks later I got a letter  from one of their staff doctors.  They were very sorry my husband was diabetic.  Their drug had helped thousands of people.  Would I please tell them in detail what side effects my husband might have suffered.

My husband says I’m a suspicious person.  But he also says, if he’s ever in a foxhole, and he has a choice of someone he’d like to have fighting beside him, he’d choose me.

I never answered the letter from GlaxoSmithKline, and they never sent me my check.  Now, all these years later, the FDA has once again declined to take this nasty drug off the market.  One of the doctors on the FDA board said he’d have voted to remove it, but he was afraid he’d be the only one.  Another doctor has received over $6000 from GSK for speeches he’s given at medical conventions.

I’ve not been back to London, but I imagine gardeners are busy tending the flowers around that giant office building on the outskirts of the city.  The lights are on, and the “suits” who work there are smiling.  Avandia is still on the market.

Shame on you, FDA.

We’d rented a condo for the weekend on the Fort Morgan peninsula.  From our balcony on the 10th floor the water looked clean, but the marshland around the Beach Club condo complex did not.   Two weeks ago, Hurricane Alex sent six foot waves crashing over the land, fouling beaches from Louisiana to Florida with oil and tar balls.

The marshes and dunes around our condo were blackened with oil.  Some of the pools were so thick with oil, they looked almost solid.  Birds drank from the cleanest of the pools.

We sat on our balcony and counted the oil rigs out in the Gulf.  There were at least twenty dotting the horizon.  We saw a ship we thought might be a tanker, visiting the rigs, taking the oil into its belly.  When night fell, the rigs were lit, and we realized there were many more than we’d counted.  Altogether, there are about four thousand active wells in the Gulf.  Twenty-seven thousand more have been pumped out and abandoned.

Hotels along the beach were flying two red flags;  do not swim in the water.   We walked to the beach.  We saw dead fish that had washed up in the night.  There were tar balls in the sand and in the water.  Each wave brought in more tar balls, then took most of them out again.  I picked one up.  It was small, about the size of a quarter, partially covered with sand.  I squeezed.  It was soft, oily.  It left a brown stain on my fingers I could not wash off.  There are Dawn Cleaning stations at the end of the boardwalks.  Dawn is especially good at breaking up oil and grease, but not so good at removing oil from Crocs.  The BP oil seems to like plastic.  They are cousins, after all.

We saw hotel sifters move slowly up and down the beach, sifting the sand, removing the debris left by the retreating tides.  A boy brought out beach chairs and umbrellas and set them near the water.  At the end of the day only a few were occupied.

Between Fort Morgan and Orange Beach there are at least three BP staging areas:  tents, trailers, heavy equipment, makeshift buildings surrounded by high fences. In Gulf Shores we saw a BP Claims office.

Coming home from dinner in Orange Beach that first night we found ourselves behind two huge BP dump trucks, rented from Hertz.  Their top speed was 18 miles per hour.  It’s a dark, two-lane road, and there was no chance to pass.  When they finally pulled to the side, we went ‘round them, only to come up on three giant sand sifters.  It took us a half hour to get back to the condo.

On both Friday and Saturday we saw BP workers in their lime green vests a half mile down the beach. There were about 8 vehicles and 20 workers.  They kept their motors running, but the vehicles never moved and the people never seemed to actually do anything.  We walked down.

One man had a shovel.  Another held a black plastic bag.  The man with the shovel was scooping up tar balls and putting them in the bag.  A third man stood close by, watching.  The other 17 sat in their vehicles.  Doing nothing.  Waiting for time to pass.

On Sunday the vehicles and the workers were gone.  Back to the staging area, we guessed, to park their vehicles, collect their paychecks, and go home to their families.

We went to Lulu’s to eat that night.  Her open-air restaurant on the inter-coastal waterway in Gulf Shores is famous.  Last week Jimmy Buffet performed there.  He’s Lulu’s brother, and he loves the Gulf.

There are lots of reasons for putting up two red flags:  rip tides, oil in the water, dispersants of unknown chemical composition.  Still, I swam in the Gulf.  There was a sand bar out in the water that was irresistible.  On our last day the waves were kicking up high, and again I went for a swim in the Gulf.  I might never be able to do it again.  But maybe, in a month or six, I’ll go back to that place, and that sandbar will beckon me, and I will swim out to it.

If there’s a term for losing feeling in three of the extremities rather than four, I haven’t found it.  The doctors have settled on “quadriplegic.”  When my brother first heard the word, he was shocked.  It didn’t fit his situation at all.  He had numbness in his extremities, a burning in his hands.  That does not equal quadriplegia, he argued.  The doctor only looked at him.

Well, put any name on it you want, my brother said.  I’ll prove you’re wrong.  I’ll beat this thing.

What has happened to Bob is not the result of a terrible accident or a fall or a wound of some kind.  It began when he was in his mid-fifties, and it came on slowly.  At first it was more an irritation than anything else – the numbness, the burning, the pain.  His right hand was the worst.  He took to wearing a glove, and for a time it helped.  But it progressed.

My brother has been, at various times in his 70 years, a farmer, mechanic, welder, soldier, fisherman, shrimper, maker of crab traps, and other things.  When he was in his twenties he had a milk route.  At six foot four and weighing over 200 pounds, he could lift two cans of milk, one in each hand.  The cans contained 10 gallons of milk.  They weighed between 80 and 85 pounds each.   My brother drove to the dairy farms on his route, pulled the cans up out of the cooler, loaded them onto the truck, drove to the milk plant, unloaded them, took the empty cans off the scrubber, and hauled them them back to the farmer.

Years of that kind of lifting have taken a toll.

Doctors, in my experience, like to be helpful.  They’ve gone into the medical profession because they want to alleviate suffering.  They do the best they can for their patients.  Like all of us, they want positive results.

Sometimes their best efforts fail.  When they have a patient they cannot help, and that patient comes back again and again, and it’s clear they can do no more, they get discouraged.  It’s a natural thing.

That quadriplegic out there again?  What does he expect me to do?  His back is shot.  He’s been cut on so many times you can’t get through the scar tissue.  There’s nothing I can do to help him.  Send me a patient who has problems that are fixable.  His are not fixable.

My brother’s problems are not fixable.  Much as I hate to admit it, I’m afraid it’s true.

In my brother’s case, the doctors, with the best of intentions,  have done more harm than good.  None of the multiple surgeries has made his situation any better.  Some have made it worse.  Yet when Bob finds some new doctor  who says he can help, he’s found the source of the problem, my brother’s hopes soar.

The surgery done, there is no improvement, his hopes and his yearnings give way to an acceptance of either status quo or a step backwards.

The steroids they prescribe for the pain – he is in excruciating pain – have caused him to become diabetic.  It’s called steroid-induced diabetes.  If he could get off the steroids, the diabetes might go away.  But he can’t.  The doctors have nothing to offer him, other than pain medicine:  loricet, hydrocodone, vicodin.  And steroids.

My brother’s last surgery was almost a drive-by.  He was admitted to the hospital at noon on a Monday, and discharged less than 24 hours later.  During that time they cut a hole in his throat, went through to the spine, took a look, and closed.

Statistics are not on my brother’s side.  Most spinal surgeries fail to accomplish their goals.

Sometimes I remind my brother what good genes we have.  The Weltys are known for their longevity, I tell him.  When John Thomas Scharf was writing the history of Western Maryland (two volume set, published in 1882), he used the John Welty family to attest to the “salubriousness” of the climate of the Taneytown District where they lived.  “The aggregate ages (of seven members of the Welty family) amounted to six hundred and fifty-seven years, giving an average of ninety-four years to each member of the family, probably the most remarkable instance of longevity since the days of the patriarchs.”

If Scharf were writing today, he would see a very different family dynamic.  The Welty genes have not protected my brother.  He’s disabled.  He’s diabetic.  He’s had so many surgeries on his back he’s lost count.  He is in constant, unrelenting, racking pain.

His doctor writes yet another prescription for yet another vial of prednisone, knowing it will make the diabetes worse, but knowing too that it just might make his life worth living, for yet another day, another week, month, year.

The body always wants to heal itself, I tell my brother.  Ninety-five percent of illnesses cure themselves.  If given half a chance, we get better on our own.

He likes to hear that.  When he’s had a good day, he tells me what he’s been able to accomplish.  With the aid of his walker, he made it from the house out to his shop.  He wouldn’t dare try it without his walker.  He drove to WalMart, got on one of their motorized wheelchairs, and did his grocery shopping.

When I called the other day, I knew he was in trouble.  His pain meds weren’t working.  He couldn’t take another until evening.

I wanted to find something positive to say to him, but I was tapped out.

You can always rely on my brother.  After that moment of self pity, he was his usual confident self.  “You can get used to anything,” he said.  “I guess you can get used to hanging, if you hang long enough.”

My brother often says things that are shocking.  But this was worrisome.  They used to hang horse thieves in the west.  You can find hanging trees in nearly every state.  Saddam Hussein was hung at Camp Justice, an Iraqi army base, three years ago.  His neck snapped when he dropped through the trap door.  He was lucky.  It doesn’t always happen that way.

When we were children, there was a climbing tree in our back yard.  If you climbed too high, higher than you’d ever climbed before, there came a moment when you realized how far away was the ground.  You had a moment of panic.  You hung onto that tree, terrified.  Then, if you were like my brother, you summoned the courage to begin to inch your way down.

What I think he meant was that he would survive.  Within him is the courage to persevere, to keep trying, to bear what has to be borne,  and to go on.  Had John Thomas Scharf dug deeper, he might have encountered those features in the Welty clan.

The story, carried in our local newspaper a few days ago, is not an unusual one.  This kind of thing is happening every day, all over America.

It was Ronald Reagan who said drugs “were menacing our society,” and that we needed more “militant policies” to deal with this “threat.”   He signed a bill in 1986 that budgeted $1.7 billion to fund his “War on Drugs.”  The bill called for mandatory sentences for drug offenses.  It filled our prisons with blacks who were an easy target for the new “militants” patrolling our streets, yet it did little to reduce the availability of drugs.

Twenty-four years and billions of dollars later, I ask the question:  Did we really need a “war” on drugs.  To call it a “war” is to give police the right to act like they’re soldiers in enemy territory.  They can kick down doors, aim guns at innocent civilians, kill dogs while the owners stand helplessly by.  To call it a “war” gives them license to seize property, to assume guilt where none may exist, to abuse law-abiding citizens, to shoot first and ask questions later.  The role of the policeman moves from being protector to that of enforcer.

If you want to smoke some marijuana or do whatever you do with cocaine, is that so bad?  Should we declare war on these people?   Should we bring out the big guns, the tanks, the predator drones?  Should we devote all these resources to fight this “war?”  And should we trample on peoples’ rights along the way?  Kill their dogs?  Terrorize their children?

Isn’t it a bit like prohibition where we turned millions of people into law-breakers, just because they wanted to have a few drinks at the end of the day?

There was a time in this country when cocaine was available at any drugstore.  If a person  became addicted, it was a family matter, something the family had to deal with.  No one went to jail for selling or for taking cocaine.  Except for the odd person who become addicted, and for his family who cared for him, it just wasn’t a problem.

Is the possession and/or use of recreational drugs such a serious thing?  So serious that we have to declare “war” in order to eliminate it?  Clearly, it must be more serious than rape, murder, armed robbery, environmental crimes, Wall Street thievery, extortion.

We’ve declared war on none of these things.  I wonder why.

It takes a while to realize the movie is really about Lisbeth Salander, played by Noomi Repace.  Lisbeth is a 24 year old punk computer hacker with a photographic memory.  She wears shiny black boots, a black leather jacket, and enough metal to set off airport alarms.  The thing you love about her is that she fights against injustice, she never stops, and she never gives up.  This incredibly complex character brings a new definition to the word justice, not to mention revenge and retribution.

If there are women out there who think they have to wear the burkas and do what they’re told, they should see this movie.  When Lisbeth Salander is mistreated, she fights back.  If her behavior crosses the line into illegality, her antagonists are so evil, their crimes so heinous, we applaud her no matter what she does.  The bad guys in this movie are so bad they deserve whatever happens to them.

On its deepest level, this movie is about patriarchy and power, and how these things are used against women.  If you’re a sleaze lawyer like the one who controls Lisbeth’s money, and you use your power to have your way with her, don’t expect to go unpunished.

I love this wonderful punk of a girl who gives as good as she gets.  I’ll give you fair warning:  the movie has its share of sex and violence.  Yet I think it’s an honest representation of what is happening to women all over the world.  What is different here is that Lisbeth answers in kind, and she never stops until the bad guys are punished, old testament style:  an eye for an eye.

When she falls in love, she loves with such a ferocity and faithfulness she is willing to sacrifice everything.

I loved this movie.  I can’t wait for the next one.

Lucky for us, Steig Larsson wrote two more books in this Millennium series before his untimely death in 2004.  His second book, The Girls Who Played with Fire, is being made into a movie.  The third book, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, has just been published.   I plan to read all three.