Wendell Potter and the chamber of secrets
‘I saw hundreds of people lined up... waiting to get care, in animal stalls. Animal stalls.’
Wendell Potter, then head of Public Relations for CIGNA, struggled with what he’d seen at a Wise County health care expedition in his home state of Virginia.
'I mean, there was no privacy... people being treated on gurneys, on rain-soaked pavement... It was like being hit by lightning... what country am I in? It just didn't seem to be a possibility that I was in the United States.'
Wendell Potter was bound for Hogwarts, unbeknownst to him.
A few weeks later, on a CIGNA jet with leather seats and golden food served to him on gilded plates with golden cutlery, the corporate empire’s shimmering spell was weakened by empirical fact:
'And then I remembered the people that I had seen in Wise County. Undoubtedly, they had no idea that this went on, at the corporate levels of health insurance companies.'
He finally consulted a book of potions...
'President Kennedy's Profiles in Courage. And in the forward... was a Dante quote... "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of moral crisis, maintain a neutrality." And when I read that, I said, "Oh, jeez, I-- you know. I'm headed for that hottest place in hell, unless I say something."'
Wendell Potter speaks volumes now, in high places, having quit his job and headed straight to Washington. He tells of the charm offensive brought to bear on citizens by denizens of our wealthy class.
Kimberly 123
Kimberly Grace, having sucked her belly button deep into the unmapped vortex of her solar plexus, zipped up her blue gray jeans and tried to sit.
That’s when she decided she could not afford another pair.
Not that Kimberly was poor, in the monetary sense. Her good job at a well oiled girl’s school down the street from her steely condo had scored her the sapphire BMW with topaz seats she rode around in. Her bank account was flush as her thighs.
Kimberly hooked her jeans to the back wall of her walk in closet, with a solitary vow. ‘Next time I pull these out, they will slide on like velvet foals in the new dawn and I, the Queen of Sheba, shall reclaim whatsoever throne I deign to sit upon.’
So it was that a new convert to the Society of Slender Sisters was born. Kimberly fixed her gaze on the burgeoning sign of her ‘success,’ reached for the moleskin pad to guide her dangerous thought, and wrote one line.
'Kimberly slimberly 1-2-3.'
Effortless as black ink on the blank slate, Kimberly’s mantra girded her loins in bold rebuke of the vast culinary industrial complex of her day. With corporate profit looming large, the woman willed her mind to reunite with the 123 pounds she’d left behind one spring day when jamoca almond fudge beguiled her with a cruel flash in the rear view mirror. Ever since her fall, Kimberly had bowed to the smarmy jowls of high fructose corn syrup lacing the nation’s foodstuffs.
Have fun and play hard
This was the wise grandma blessing Rita Conway gave to grandchild Katie on her maiden college voyage. 'Have fun and play hard!'
By all accounts, mine included, Mrs. Conway was a remarkable, infatigably genuine woman who couldn't keep herself from loving you, you who stands before her at this moment, even had she tried. And why would she try?
We buried Rita yesterday. In her memory, I hold up some creative souls I've noticed lately, hard at play. As with Rita's life, their potent love inspires me.
Sour, a band from Japan, makes a music video out of geometrically choreographed fan clips. The music is good, the editing tight, the effect - a kaleidoscope of community. YouTube excels at this. This is what people choosing to pool their strengths for the sake of a worthy project looks like.
Love with legs. That's what Serene Jones, president of Union Theological Seminary, calls justice. She and her cohorts shepherd would-be pastors to pastures of plenty. Plenty of need. Plenty of problem solving. And the need is fairly divided between the poor who need opportunity and the elite who need meaning richer than accumulated wealth.
Justice is nothing but love with legs. Justice is what love looks like when it takes social form.
Serene Jones, Bill Moyers Journal
Prosperity - posterity - depend on this version of hard play.
And what exactly is posterity? Bill Moyers asks double Pulitzer Prize winning poet (accolades never fail to impress, no?) W. S. Merwin if he's more concerned with posterity now, in his 80s, than in his youth.
The poet, like good poets everywhere, specializes in love with legs. The legs of his poems become those of his listeners. When he reads Yesterday, hearers rush from the reading to call their fathers.
So when asked about posterity, Merwin has a simple answer.
- Susan Weber's blog
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Top of pearl bridge
I’m exploring Spiritual Emergency as a counterbalance to David Halberstam’s exhaustive exploration of how media giants have influenced modern life.
Mr. Halberstam hammers home outer world realities in words like this:
'He exercised awesome power over four decades, he was the voice of the Los Angeles Times; Harry Chandler had begun it, he had created Kyle Palmer, and in time Kyle Palmer and the Los Angeles Times created Richard Nixon... [Palmer] made careers and he broke them, sometimes the same career. He chose the candidates for the Republicans, dictated policies, floor-managed legislation in the California legislature, told governors which bills to sign. He was a journalist and a political writer, but in a real sense he was a kingmaker.'
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be
Apparently, Kyle Palmer spent zero time engaged in the pursuit of his inner world. Spiritual emergency was not his concern. But curiously, it seems to be mine. Some quotes from a book about this:
What both Freud and Jung called ‘the unconscious’ is simply what we, in our historically conditioned estrangement, are unconscious of. It is not necessarily or essentially unconscious... We need not be unaware of the inner world.
One enters the other world by breaking a shell: or through a door: through a partition: the curtains part or rise: a veil is lifted... Our time has been distinguished, more than by anything else, by a mastery, a control, of the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world.
- Susan Weber's blog
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