From My Memoirs: 'The Woman on the Hill'

Moonlight in the Meadow. Photographic collage by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

IT WAS LATE fall, maybe two weeks before Hallowe'en, and the wind was full of leaves and the prophecy of winter. I was still living in Whatcom County on the Sumas River at the foot of Sumas Mountain, and I had driven into Bellingham to listen to some people I knew play live music -- mostly original stoner blues with acid-rock undertones -- at a place called Cal's: an improbable tavern peopled equally by gnarly commercial fishers of both genders and the more genuinely adventuresome younger bohemians -- nearly all of them female -- from Western Washington University and Fairhaven College. An interesting mix, both intellectually and visually: older men with heavy beards and pirate ear-rings and the weather-beaten faces of years at sea and somewhere decades back abandoned degrees in literature and philosophy, older women with the kind of untamed Rhiannon-long hair that has all but vanished since the '70s and the easy loose-limbed joy-in-their-bodies grace that comes from the delicious and uninterrupted flourishing of pagan shamelessness -- most of the men and women people who came here as back-to-the-landers and after their individual communes fell apart took up salmon fishing -- some as couples working gill-netters, others as crew members on seiners, one of the women ranked among the best boat engineers in the entire fleet, in any case everyone enjoying a permanent divorce from the bourgeois ratrace, and the young women from the college watching the men with distant and mostly unrequited lust and watching the older women with unabashed envy ("I wish I was free enough to arch my back and fling my arms and swirl my hair like that") and sometimes one of the younger women asking, and the older women actually saying to the younger women, “okay, honey, here let me show you how to do it,” and everybody despite the age differences united and snug in contented noise and smoky amber beerlight and most of all bound together in a vaguely coital mass of dancing bodies joined by throbbing chords and outrageously apt lyrics:

“Gotta find me a womin
with a chain saw
Cause winter is a-comin on...” 

My dogs Sadie and LeeRoy always enjoyed nighttime trips to town -- even if they had to spend three or four hours locked in my pickup or car -- partly because they loved the ride, partly because they knew it meant a two-mile run down the bay and back after the tavern closed, or maybe a walk of nearly the same distance on one of the paths that traversed the nearby wooded ridges: in either instance the means by which I regained pass-the-tests sobriety before the 25-mile drive home. So Sadie and LeeRoy were there in the cab of my yellow Datsun truck when last call moved the party from Cal's to various private residences -- I had been invited to one such gathering but was in a strangely hollow mood and chose to be alone with my dogs instead -- and because the moon was aging but still swollen and astonishingly gibbous and sailing through broken clouds and undeniably charged with the potential of magic, I chose not to walk along the bay past the tolling gong-buoy at Post Point but rather to climb the path through an abandoned apple orchard to a hilltop meadow that a century ago had held a farmhouse and there amidst the weeds and overgrown foundation rubble listen to the wind roar and bluster in the nearby evergreens and watch the shadows dance in the hide-and-seek light.

 

It felt very secure there, welcoming even. I let the dogs run free knowing they would soon return and after I had been there maybe 15 minutes they came back as expected and took positions to my left and right, darker sentinels invisible in the dappled darkness. Now absolved of any need for watchfulness I sprawled on my back amidst the seasonally crumpled bracken. I was delighted by the unusually large moon and the erratically alternating ice-dark/snow-bright light-show of the clouds, and suddenly I wished I dared undress to be closer to the earth and air and darkness, perhaps even to dance in the curiously wavering light, but I thought about the chill and about all the headline reasons I dast not yield to pagan whim (“old drunken pervo claims religion prompted nakedness on college hill”) and so begrudgingly I submitted to the weather and the tyranny of civilization.

 

I had lain thus for maybe another half hour when Sadie and LeeRoy suddenly stood and LeeRoy grumbled and Sadie muttered and chuffed, not the low infinitely menacing seismic rumble with which they warded off known threats but an almost interrogatory sound: "we are dogs and as you can tell by our voices we are very big dogs and we are here and we don't think you mean us any harm but we're not sure and its our job to find out so please tell us so we don't have to bite you." Mutter; chuff; then again the deeper Rottweilian grumble of LeeRoy; by the focused intensity of their ears and noses something directional, perhaps coming up the slope from the opposite side of the ridge. I now sat up and scanned the unstable darkness with peripheral vision -- the old military night-operations trick -- but saw nothing and could hear no other sound than the dogs and the omnipresent wind: perhaps it was another dog, perhaps I should put them back on their leashes. But -- very uncharacteristically -- I did nothing; I sat motionless waiting to see who or what might come out of the adjacent trees and cross the tangled meadow that had been the long-ago farmhouse lawn, now under this indecisive sky one moment all moon-bright shining autumnal cobwebs and phantom-white clumps of blown thistle and pearly everlasting, the next moment again one with the forest in undifferentiated darkness.

 

A long cloud covered the moon. The woman who came from the woods moved along the path so quietly I never heard her at all, and when the moon was again unveiled she was standing to my left no more than a car's length away, and while Sadie was holding back skeptically, LeeRoy was already stepping forward swinging his strong proud undocked tail, the fresh moonlight flaring gleefully in his eyes, momentary green fire, a normal canine phenomenon some nevertheless regard as Satanic, hence the fundamentalist Christian missionary housewife who rebuked me one evening in my own front yard: "I saw it. I saw it. Your dog showed me his demon eyes. You really are a witch." But of course there was nothing like that from this woman who emerged from the darkness: she saw LeeRoy's eyes and laughed, a warm sensual inviting laugh, and said "your bigger dog's eyes are really heavy they could be very upsetting to some people."

It was a chilly night and the woman wore a long thick shawl, dark, probably wool, over her head and shoulders, and the wind tugged constantly at its fringes. Beneath that was a dark sweater and a heavy dark dress, probably also wool; the dress came nearly to her ankles, which I could see were booted in high soft leather moccasins, the lighter beads in their beadwork reflecting warm little pinpoints of the ambient light: in such footwear a woods-person can cover ground with absolute silence; no wonder I had not heard her approach. She had some kind of shoulder bag too, like a large purse on a diagonal strap, its bulk apparent beneath her shawl. I briefly wondered if maybe she was one of the local homeless.

 

Now she spoke with the dogs, her voice a musical murmur, her words carried away by the wind. After she had at last persuaded Sadie to kiss her outstretched hand she turned her full attention to me. Her face remained in shadow beneath the shawl, though I could see she had dark hair, decades uncut like the older women at Cal's, and I wondered if perhaps she had been among them.

 

"Okay if I hang around?" she asked.

 

"Certainly," I said.

 

She sat perhaps eight feet away on a natural chair I had not noticed, its cushion a slight elevation that might have been an abandoned gopher mound overgrown with bracken already crushed, the chair's back a dark lump, perhaps a section cut from the trunk of a big maple, a round of firewood lost years before when the path was still a road into deeper forests and finally into the mountains themselves.

 

"I usually come here at night to think," she said. "I've been coming here for a couple of years and this is the first time there's been anybody else."

 

"I just came up here to run the dogs and mellow out a little before the long drive home -- I live out in the county but I came in tonight for the live music at Cal's. I hope I didn't frighten you."

 

"No I actually watched you for quite a while before I let you know I was here. But I saw your dogs right away and as soon as I saw them I knew you were fine. Besides I'd seen you earlier at Cal's. We know some of the same people. But I had work to do tonight and you got there just as I was leaving.”

 

LeeRoy was by this time lying beside her, his great black bulk as close to her as he could get, his chin resting on one of her feet.

 

We talked about dogs for a while -- a dog she had raised from puppyhood had recently died of old age, and she was hoping another dog would soon find her. We talked about what we each did for a living -- she said she was a painter and a sometimes college student and she worked freelance for several Bellingham printers doing commercial art, and I knew at least the painter part was true because I was downwind and intermingled with her subtle perfume -- a hint of sandalwood and perhaps some musk I could not name -- I had caught the tell-tale scent of turpentine, and when I asked if she worked in oils, she said yes not many people do anymore, how did you know?, and I told her. A little later she asked me if I had a wife or a lover waiting at home and I said no I had been alone for ten years and she said she had broken up in June with someone she had been with for a long time and thought it would be a long time before she allowed herself such vulnerability again. "It's lonely," she said, "but lonely is less painful than misunderstood and mistrusted." Shielded by the variable night we began sharing parts of ourselves we normally would not have disclosed without the prerequisite of weeks and months of familiarity.

 

Then she said she had brought cookies and wine for herself because the moon was so huge and low and strangely shaped and she wanted to consume the cookies and wine as a kind of offering and would I join her? Yes of course I said and she apologized that she had only one glass and did I mind sharing it and I said not at all that just makes it more sacramental which is how it has felt ever since you got here. You must be pagan she said and I said yes I am and she said "then you will understand what I am doing" and fumbled in her beaded shoulder bag and brought out a dark bottle of wine and a wine glass and a cork-screw. She uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full and re-corked the bottle and set the bottle beside her on the grass and stood and LeeRoy grumbled that he had to move. She switched the glass to her left hand and made an invoking pentagram over it and lifted the glass to the moon and flicked the wine onto the grass around us and turned to me and said "blessed be." Then she said "you'll have to come closer if we're going to share this glass -- here there's actually room for two of us against this log." We sat; it was as she had said and as comfortable as any sofa. Sadie and LeeRoy moved close to us: I pictured stone age people gathered with their canine companions at the edge of some primeval forest, then remembered the ruined foundation nearby and thought of some apocalyptic aftermath: Knossos, Albion, the Death of Electric Man, humankind driven back into the forest and rediscovering the Goddess. Meanwhile she poured the glass full again. She drank and I drank; it was a good wine, probably a valpolicella, seemingly black as ink even in brightest moments of moonlight, and she drank and I drank and we both ate her cookies which were round and thick and tasty and made of oatmeal and raisins and peanut butter and perhaps other more elemental nutrients and she drank and I drank and then drinking and eating we drifted into a long conversation that gradually became more molecular than verbal and then expanded beyond physical limits into a dialogue I am still convinced was pure telepathy: I remember it not as an impassioned sharing of words but rather as a mutually eloquent transmission of images so nakedly honest I was astounded -- and yet it was so dreamlike that the next day I could remember only the vaguest details of its content. In fact I discovered to my profound sadness I could not even remember her name.

 

I never truly saw her face, only the glimpses allowed by the peek-a-boo moon and the ever-changing veil of clouds. Nor, beyond holding hands as we talked, and embracing one another when we parted, did we physically touch -- of this I am absolutely certain -- yet it was as if we had been intimate to a mutual depth few humans ever imagine, much less achieve. I do not even clearly remember our parting: only that it was somehow both fulfilled and empty, as if each of us had passed some pivotal milestone, some turning point, absolutely vital yet forever unattainable without this strange encounter on a windblown October hilltop, an end and a beginning sealed in a passionate hug that is my only vivid recollection of the entire finale: my face briefly buried in her hair, my arms around the rough wool in which she was clad, the combined scents of sandalwood and musk and turpentine and even a trace of wood smoke that told me how she heated her dwelling; and most of all the shawl falling away to reveal the great dark sweet cloud of her hair itself. Yet I remember nothing whatsoever of my farewell words to her, and I have only the vaguest memory of her farewell words to me. I am certain they were powerfully positive, nurturing, strengthening, healing: I can feel their potency even now, 13 years after the fact, and I would love to be able to write them down and add them to this narrative, but they are beyond my reach, seemingly gone forever.

 

The night does not come back into clear focus until I was at the foot of the long hill. I was unlocking my truck and my dogs were waiting for me to open the door and I was again wondering if I was sober enough to dare attempt the lengthy drive home. It was very late. The sky had blown clear and the moon though noticeably more aged was now even larger and more yellow and westering toward the mountains far across the bay. Orion was already high in the southeast. I pulled the door open. Sadie climbed into the cab and claimed the seat under the passenger window. LeeRoy grinned, wagged his tail and flared his daemon eyes like some James Harris in quadruped. In my mind I heard again the hilltop woman’s laughter, and just for the tiniest instant it seemed there was a trace of sandalwood on the pre-dawn wind.

 

LB/ posted 4 April 2013 (Copyright 9 December 2005 reproduction without permission prohibited.)

-30-

On the Conflict between Photography and Writing

One of my innumerable grab-shots of Adrienne in our East 5th Street apartment, summer 1967. The negative, part of the film salvaged from the rubble a year after the 1983 fire, was wormed and pinholed by water damage, but Gimp photo software's combination of spotting, contrast adjustment and sepia toning enabled me to heal most of those wounds. I don't remember the lens-and-camera combination, but it was most likely one of my VT Canons, probably at 1/30th of a second with the 35mm f/2 screw-mount Summicron wide open; the light was late afternoon sun reflected into the windows from the backs of buildings on First Avenue. The film was Tri-X, given the year, no doubt in Diafine at 1200. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

THOUGH I WOULD realize it only now, two days before my 73rd birthday – and my epiphany the result of watching a young single mother cuddle her tiny infant daughter on a crowded bus as I cursed myself for not having a camera with which to record this potent visual haiku of universal femaleness – the defining conflict of my adult life has always been a who-am-I struggle between the two hemispheres of my brain.

 

Sometimes my right brain prevails, as in my passion for the poetry-as-a-verb Zen of making photographs, or in how I relish the exquisite sensuality of seeing, or in my fondness for visual art in general and for music of nearly any unhackneyed form, or in my compulsion toward the agnostic but nevertheless faithfully pagan spirituality summarized in the phrase She Who (maybe) Is, and – perhaps most of all – in my powerfully emotional, sometimes desperate need for the sanctity and sanity of true country, for any modern equivalent of northern Lower Michigan's pre-electrification Au Sable region, specifically the South Branch, the river and the adjacent woods east of where, in the time of which I speak, 1944 through 1955, the two-lane M72 blacktop turned abruptly to gravel. Maybe two miles later the road crossed Smith Bridge. North – downstream – was the blessed realm of troutly water and sweet-fern scented air that was the only sanctuary my disjointed childhood ever allowed.

 

At other times my left brain dominates, as in my equally desperate need to live in The City, New York, not so much where I was born, Brooklyn,  but in the borough of Manhattan, the one place my intellect has ever been accepted and honestly critiqued and thus encouraged, nurtured, expanded, not only by the bohemian women who were my friends and/or lovers or by the bohemian men who were my friends and colleagues but even by a few well-placed representatives of the powers that be. It is my left brain from which I write, a mode of expression that never rises above intellectual exercise because it is always dragged down to (mere) rationality by the imperative but nevertheless cripplingly self-conscious battle against dyslexia thrust on me by bad genes. Formerly, during my years as an investigative reporter, it was my left brain at work in the always calculated, often clandestine process of exposing outrage or scandal, or in far more apparently benign reportorial quests that included extensive research into the psychological and psychic wellsprings of the old Counterculture – the forever lost text that supplemented the also-lost thousands of frames of Tri-X and High Speed Ektachrome “Glimpses of a Pale Dancer” – or the never-named book-in-progress about the anomalous archaeological evidence of a prehistoric Minoan/proto-Celtic/North African presence in what is now the United States, data that abounds throughout North America including here in the Pacific Northwest, but is nevertheless aggressively suppressed by USian scholars.

 

Ultimately my struggle had but two focal points. One was whether would I live my life amidst the intellectual safety and comfort of Manhattan (which, exactly as James Baldwin labeled it in 1962, truly was Another Country), or whether, in the name of my spirit quest and its need for wilderness, I would instead endure the manifest cruelties and sometimes-wrenching loneliness that define the intellectual barrens of The Lands Beyond the Hudson. The other was figuring out who I am: photographer or writer.

 

For a long while, it was easier for me to label myself a writer. For one thing it was cheaper to be a writer – I needed no cameras, which were always prohibitively expensive, in fact I required nothing more than a typewriter, this lack of mandatory prerequisite expenditures a major consideration, as there was never a time in my life I was not financially poor, often desperately so. For another, writing was a field in which it was infinitely easier to find work: even in the 1950s, ours was a nation so illiterate, the basic skills of grammar were alien to the vast USian majority; the educational system was already hell-bent on hammering the nation's children into submissive, reflexively conformist drones, which among other atrocities demanded the deliberate suppression of natural human curiosity. But the very wounding inflicted on me by my savagely dysfunctional family bred in me the cynicism and determination that enabled me to escape the wounds of ignorance and apathy that dumbed down the masses. The result – or so it seemed to prospective employers – left me ideally qualified to be a reporter. Hence I had my first daily newspaper job at age 16: half a copy-boy, half a stringer writing stories for the sports department and the Sunday youth section. It was November 1956. I turned 17 the following March. Within two months, May 1957, I had landed a summer job as full-time sportswriter.

 

Meanwhile I instinctively began to downplay my skill with a camera: the linear/logical abstraction required of the writer is the diametrical opposite of the Zen immediacy demanded of the photographer, which as I had already learned is a ruinously crippling conflict when one is trying to adequately cover a story. To succeed as a reporter is to fail as a photographer; to succeed as a photographer is to fail as a reporter; to attempt both simultaneously is usually to fail at both. Nevertheless I had begun to earn a reputation as a competent photographer too. My father had given me my first camera, a Kodak Brownie Reflex, as a 12th birthday present, then a fully adjustable f-stop/shutter-speed Polaroid on my 14th birthday and an Agfa Press Miniature two years after that. It was with the two latter machines I shot most of the unposed pictures for my 1957-58 high school yearbook and made some action pictures that caught the attention of the Knoxville Track Club. But my early searches for jobs in professional photography invariably failed; it had no common standards, no equivalents of grammatical rules, hence was mainly a game of personalities, a contest I always lost. Writing, I convinced myself, was therefore my primary medium, never mind the difficulties – transposed letters, misspelled words, awkward sentences, mis-remembered names – inflicted by dyslexia. When my editors assured me I was a “damn good reporter,” that “everybody makes mistakes on deadline,” my subconscious told me I was nothing but a phony, that my writing ability, crippled as it was (and is) by dyslexia, was nothing more than a sham, perhaps even a scam.

 

That proverbial chicken, actually a vulture, came home to roost in a 1965 conversation with a woman named Roberta Tyson, an editor at Viking Press who was then married to my friend Chris Rawlings. Tyson – a southerner, she had adopted the curious preference of so many southern women for being called by their last names – had been a friend of mine for about a year before I met Chris, and our friendship continued during and after their marriage. In a lengthy discussion with Tyson about the angst suffered by great writers, I thought of my own then-unspoken visual-versus-verbal dilemma and said yes, I understood, but Tyson suddenly bristled and said “no you do not,” adding that I had no basis for understanding such anxieties because I myself was nothing more than a mediocre writer. I was a good reporter, she said, even (given my eye for pivotal facts), an exceptionally skilled reporter, but I was no “great writer” under any circumstances, nor would I ever be. Tyson's words were deeply hurtful, but they were also rewardingly honest and profoundly clarifying, a poignant example of how one of the most important functions of a competent editor is articulation of a writer's – or, yes, a photographer's – subconscious.

 

Reason thus suggested I should content myself with being “just a journalist” and nothing more. My left brain, it seemed, had won.

 

But that is of course a lie, just as my presentation of this entire clash as the triumph of one hemisphere over the other is also a lie, both lies forced upon me by the inability of language to deal with the very ambiguity that is the underlying theme of so many of my photographs. Beyond the confusion and contradictions and disclaimers and acts of denial, even beyond the associated disasters like the ruinous fire of 1983 or the termination of my journalistic career by the odium of the subsequent clinical depression, it was invariably my right brain, paradoxically and by the sublime process of knowing via what we label “gut feelings” or “intuition,” that provided the clues and directional guidance to unriddle whatever riddles I dared take on. In this sense my right brain always manages to win the struggle – though in another far more important sense it is less a victory than a rapprochement, an abandonment of differences in the name of cooperation, yet it took that young mother on the bus to bring this reality into sharp focus. As I emailed a friend after I returned home that day: “Just had, thanks to Pierce Transit and a rather fetching young mother with a truly beautiful infant, a stunning epiphany about the difference between thinking as a photographer (the resurrection of instinct the scene on the bus demanded) and thinking like a writer (as the lack of a camera on the bus forced me to do). Bottom line, the visual is concrete, real, immediate, sensual, impassioned; the verbal is abstract, a (mere) construct, second-hand, devoid of physicality, definitively dispassionate. In that instant I perhaps understood more about myself and my own internal conflicts than in any comparable moment ever.  Let's hope the Muse grants me the clarity to write about it for OAN.”

 

So now two days before my 73rd birthday I think about my writing that won me a dozen local journalistic awards and commendations but ultimately as Tyson implicitly predicted went nowhere and my now-mostly lost-in-the-fire pictures for which the publication credits start with Paris-Match and Newsweek yet were still insufficient to rescue me from poverty. I think of what Tyson said to me in 1965 and what she said to me in 1969 about my photographs – that they were “so far out,” so cutting edge, they were “beyond (her) ability to describe.” I think of the discontents that nagged me as a reporter and the deep almost physical gratification that was mine as the social documentarian for New York's Beth Israel Hospital or as the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun and I think of all the people who helped me learn photography and/or critiqued my pictures and/or were emotionally supportive of my camera work but remained mostly politely silent about my words – my father and my Aunt Alecia and Jim Newby and Karen Rowland and Mary Payne and Chris Rawlings and John Shuttleworth and Emilio Murillo and Joan Condolino and Grace Strub and Cicely Nichols and Stephanie Wilson and Kathryn Habbestad and Dick Clever and Melinda Mohn and Tawna Pickens and Rebecca Valrejean and Jim and Mary Plante and Melanie St. Ours and of course Adrienne and so many more to whom I owe debts of gratitude – and I think of how back trouble and arthritis had finally harried me into abandoning the camera (hence the need for “resurrection of instinct”), but mostly now as I write this I think of the young woman with her baby on the bus who by their presence alone at last forced me to unequivocally answer the lifelong question: yes, damnit, I really am a photographer – that before anything else.

 

I thought I had given up photography nearly a year ago but for some strange reason – fate, astrology, the proximity of the Muse – I saw and continue to see the woman on the bus with her infant as I would have seen them had I been photographing them. I see the visual geometry of their forms in concert with the implicitly softened form of their new perambulator, its bulk too filled with baby-care items to be folded under a bus seat, all this in the context of the hard-edged delineations provided by the bus itself. I see the ancient choreography of mother and child. I who think almost exclusively in images of black and white see the associated colors of this scene with an intensity that is almost breathtaking. Furious with myself for not having a camera – never mind I had forsworn photography, never mind I was grocery shopping and could hardly carry a camera in the ancient olive-drab canvas 1942-issue ski-trooper rucksack I use to lug food from supermarket to apartment – I try to describe the mother and her child in words, but nothing, not then, not now, conveys the iconic and mysteriously comforting power of their presence. The mother is paradoxically compelling but scarcely notable. As many young women do, she wears her hair longish, shoulder-length; she has dyed it a bright color – red, nearly crimson – and she dresses to match: a revealingly low-cut purple blouse, form-fitting red skirt, purple leotard, silver and white tennis shoes with a red and purple motif, all this topped by a red and purple headband. Her eyebrows and eyelashes say she was originally a brunette. Something in her face, perhaps a hint of sullenness and defiance, gives me the sense she might be what my 1950s teen self would have joyfully recognized as a fellow “hood.” She has lost nearly all her pregnancy fat, is attractive, a bit busty but nevertheless well proportioned, already tanned enough to suggest time under ultraviolet lamps or a recent trip to some warmer climate. Her daughter is tiny, no more than three months old – as another passenger said, “hardly bigger than a pekingese pup.” The soft yellow blanket that wraps the baby girl is spotlessly clean, and when the infant awakens, we all see she is truly beautiful – and beautifully content. As the bus rumbles its herky-jerky passage toward my destination, this transit-system Madonna-and-child are softly highlighted through the windows by alternating bands of over-building sunshine, wan with late afternoon Pacific Northwest latitude and its thin but seasonally omnipresent clouds, first illuminating the mother's face, then the infant's, repeatedly, as if Gaia or the Sky Gods could not decide who was to be haloed. I cannot forget this strangely dappled light nor how the mother and her daughter glowed in its embrace, how they moved, how by merely being there they soothed a busload of weary and potentially antagonistic strangers.

 

Hence my new resolution for whatever remains of this old lifetime: I will do as I did in most of the years after my 1965 conversation with Tyson and before the clinical depression that followed the 1983 fire; to the best of my ability, I will again carry a camera everywhere I go, the physical discomfort be damned. Perhaps I will thus fulfill the initial promise of this blog, to be – above all else – about photography. In any case I will strive once more to sooth the craving implicit in what my parents always said was the first word I ever spoke, “light,” as if the rest of the sentence were to be the summation of all my yearnings: “Light. Give me light...so that I may truly know completion.”

 

LB/28 March 2013

-30-

Obama's Affordable Care Act: a Law with No Spirit

Self-portrait, 2013. Photograph by Franetta McMillian copyright 2013.

 

By Franetta McMillian

 

(Franetta McMillian describes herself as  “a full-time writer, sometime artist and part-time retail drone living between Newark, Deleware and Avondale, Pennsylvania.” Most recently her stories and poems have appeared in Broadside Review and Possum Garage Press. This report, significant for its personalization of the real-world impact of what has come to be known as Obamacare, shows she's also a talented journalist. It is her first formal contribution to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

IT WAS MY employer's annual benefits enrollment period that put the Affordable Care Act of 2010 back on my mental radar again, not that it had ever really left.

Many large companies (though most are not as graceless about it as Wal-Mart, Applebee's and Papa John's) are looking for creative ways to "control costs" and "empower" their employees to "take charge" of their health. What this usually means is saddling employees with higher premiums and co-pays or slashing labor hours so these companies are no longer obligated to provide health coverage at all. They will do the bare minimum to follow the letter of the law — which in this case is all they can follow because the Affordable Care Act has no spirit.

 

Though the law was trumpeted as a way to expand coverage to many who do not have it, as it is currently written it will not even come close to accomplishing that lofty goal. Obama's intentions may have been noble, but the law serves too many and the wrong masters, resulting in "reform" so diluted, it's barely reform at all. Like I said: no spirit.

If you really want an idea of how big a nightmare the Affordable Care Act will be in the real world, read  Obmamacare: A Deception.  It's not exactly a quick read; it's technical and often tedious, but then again, the Affordable Care Act itself is some 2000 pages long. I doubt even members of Congress read the whole thing.

The Affordable Care Act requires every American who can afford it to buy health insurance. If you can't afford insurance, the government will provide you with a tax credit to help you do so. The poor and the near-poor (those whose income falls within 138% of the federal poverty level) will be part of the new expanded Medicaid. Sounds reasonable, doesn't it?

 

But take a closer look. The amount you are required to pay for insurance is determined by your modified adjusted gross income, which is a different beastie than the more familiar adjusted gross income you use to determine your federal and state tax obligations. For many the modified adjusted gross income is higher, which means you may not be as poor as you think.

 

My modified adjusted gross income fluctuates from 200% to 300% of FPL, which means the government says I can afford to spend 4% to 9.5% of that income on health insurance. That's approximately the amount of a car payment. Good thing I don't have a car payment now, but that's not saying I won't have one in the future. Oh well. If I do, I can live on beans and rice; I've done it before.

 

Okay, let's go buy insurance!

 

The new health care exchanges will offer four levels of coverage. The platinum and gold levels are way out of my league and our government will do little to help me with the cost of those even though they provide the most comprehensive coverage. So I'm stuck at the silver and bronze levels. Silver only offers 70/30 coverage with a $2050 deductible. Bronze is worse with 60/40 coverage and a deductible nearly twice as high. All plans cover up to $250 for preventative care — the annual physical with basic labs — and my pre-existing hypertension won't lock me out of purchasing a plan. However, since there is no cap on what the insurance companies can charge for a policy, there's no telling how costly that plan will be. Oh yeah, and I'm in my early 50's, the age when things slowly begin to unravel even for the healthiest of us. That's going to add some cost, too.

 

The government's help, the so-called advance tax credit, is based on the cost of a silver level plan in my state and my modified adjusted gross income. Since there is no way I can precisely know what my income for 2014 will be, that credit will be based on my income for this year (2013). If, by chance, 2014 brings me loads of freelance work and a couple of especially lucrative short story sales, thereby increasing my income significantly, I will have to pay back all or part of that credit when I file taxes in 2015. And on and on. It could get messy. Uncle Sam may giveth, but if he thinks he's giveth too much, he will certainly taketh away.

 

Let's say 2014 brings me worse fortune than the current year, enough to get me bounced into Medicaid. Well, that's not exactly unconditional love either. I may get some semblance of care, but should I die of whatever ails me, the state will be allowed to recover the costs of my medical treatment from my heirs, who aren't exactly rolling in dough either.

 

I don't want to sound like a total hater here. The law does bring some significant improvements. Everyone with insurance is covered for a yearly physical. Insurance companies must spend at least 80% of premiums on actual healthcare. Children can stay on their parents' plan until age 26. People with preexisting conditions can no longer be turned down and there is no longer a lifetime cap on benefits.

 

However, there are no established legal limits on how much those now mandatory insurance plans can cost and no price controls on the actual cost of treatment itself. (For an especially frightening — and utterly exasperating — examination of healthcare pricing check out Steven Brill's piece, Why Medical Bills are Killing Us.) There isn't even a guarantee a doctor or hospital will accept your insurance for non-emergency care once you've mortgaged your arms and legs to buy it. This especially holds true for bronze level plans and Medicaid.

 

Even if your bronze level plan is accepted, the bills can pile up very quickly. A few years ago I was unlucky enough to have an illness that required several surgeries. Fortunately, I had decent insurance for most of the course of my treatment, but even then, I racked up thousands of dollars in incidental costs due to deductibles and co-pays, not to mention several thick manila folders of paperwork. (Which, incidentally, I still keep just in case I get a surprise bill. No kidding. I once got a bill for injections nearly two years after the fact.) If I'd had a bronze level health plan, those nickel and dime charges could have easily ballooned to the high tens of thousands, and I would still be paying those bills today and for several years to come.

 

As it stands, the Affordable Care Act barely lives up to its name. It is an expensive and needlessly clumsy piece of legislation that will give private insurers lots of bang with your bucks. Hopefully it won't be so expensive and clumsy that it will sour Americans on the ideal of universal healthcare or erode our dwindling faith in government past the point of no return.

 

Thing is: it didn't have to be this way. Obama could have just said, "Medicare for everyone!", and I bet the majority of Americans would have understood. Yes, that would have been expensive too, but at least we wouldn't have been throwing our money in the street because Medicare works. And if it's one thing I've learned during my short time on this earth, it's that it's always cheaper in the long run to do the right thing. And safeguarding the health of your citizens is the right thing to do. I believe it dovetails nicely with the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution.

 

I suppose you could argue that with the Affordable Care Act Obama managed to legislate the idea of expanded coverage and greater access to care where others had failed. Though the legislation is flawed, this line of thinking goes, we can always go back and patch the holes later. But I fear an idea so poorly executed from the start may prove worse than no idea at all.

 

(Original reporting by Franetta McMillian copyright 2013, reproduction rights conditional upon crediting author and linking to Outside Agitator's Notebook.)

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How Sequestration Savages People on Medicare

Tacoma woman, 2011: recording the strength of character and depth of feeling so magnificently evident in her face was its own reward as, at the time, I had no other reason to make her portrait. Pentax MX, 135mm f/2.5 Takumar, Fujucolor 800 (desaturated). Though these bayonet-mount Takumars are frequently damned for having low-end, inferior glass, I have to differ: this was wide open at 1/125th of a second.  (I bought the Takumar after the retirement of the last  Leica-trained repair person in the United States forced me to sell my beloved M cameras and make Pentax my sole 35mm system.)  Photograph by Loren Bliss,  copyright 2013.  

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ANOTHER EXPOSÉ DETAILING how sequestration threatens lower-income people with death by abandonment and neglect – the One Percent's favorite 21st Century modality of genocide – surfaced last Friday via Medicare Watch, the on-line weekly of the watchdog Medicare Rights Center.

 

The MW report summarizes detailed analyses from two unimpeachable sources, the National Council on Aging and the federal Office of Management and Budget. It itemizes $292 million the sequester is gouging from Medicare funding, and describes how “(t)hese devastating cuts will no doubt have a major impact on the economic security of middle- and low-income Medicare beneficiaries, who will have to spend more out–of-pocket on basic necessities, thus making it more difficult to afford health care.”

 

“Half of all people with Medicare,” the report continues, “live on annual incomes of $22,000 or less and spend one-third of their household incomes on health care costs. Due to sequestration, already overburdened seniors will need to make difficult choices, such as whether to pay their heating bills or fill their prescriptions.”

 

MW also provides convenient links to the original documents.

 

The underlying premise, based on MRC's 24 years as a primary advocacy group for Medicare beneficiaries, is that all cuts in government payments to hospitals, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, doctors and other Medicare providers will be passed onto patients as increased costs or reduced services. Even if such trickle-down measures are presumably illegal, the lawyers who serve the insurers and other such health-care profiteers invariably find loopholes by which to maintain their margins.

 

Supported as it is by the historical record, this conclusion adds yet another credible rebuttal  to the Obama Administration's increasingly unbelievable claim the much larger cuts to Medicare provider payments already imposed by the Affordable Care Act will somehow not increase the already burdensome medical bills paid by elderly and disabled people.

 

Hence there's a growing fear – and not just amongst seniors – an ugly post-electoral surprise is lurking in Obamacare. Skeptics are already damning it as another example of “change we can believe in”: the absolute certainty that life in the United States – at least for the 99 Percent – will get much, much worse.

 

***** 

EDITORIAL NOTE: here's my explanatory response to a couple of colleagues who thought I buried my lead in “How Sequester's Sword Slashes Vital Programs for Lower Income People,” one of two stories that ran last week under the “Economics Below the Salt” headline.

 

If this were a local-news blog – if the majority of its readership were local instead of national and international – the two critics would be right. But readers who are unfamiliar with the intricacies of U.S. governance need background information if they are to understand the sequester's magnitude – why it could prove to be the most maliciously deadly atrocity in the nation's political history.

 

It is also the most diabolically clever political ploy I have yet encountered, an unabashedly vicious bit of legislative sleight-of-hand by which both parties give the One Percent the budget cuts they demand while simultaneously worming out from under responsibility for the ruin so inflicted.

 

(Yes, I believe sequestration is permanent – why the present Republican/Democrat infighting is merely another Big Lie to conceal the grim reality we are governed by One Party of Two Names, a political machine that serves only the One Percent, the rest of us be damned.)

 

In any case, rather than begin the sequester story with quotes from Tacoma Housing Authority Executive Director Michael Mirra, as I would have done had I been writing only for locals, I prefaced his remarks with many details that were presumably familiar to readers in the U.S. but possibly unknown to those elsewhere.

 

I took this route not just to facilitate maximum comprehension, but to contribute my own tiny part in what – if there is any justice left in this world – will surely become a global journalistic campaign to inflict maximum embarrassment on the treacherous and cowardly politicians who perpetrated the potentially murderous fraud of sequestration.

 

Which, of course, assumes such conscienceless politicians can still be mortified – that they have not given themselves completely over to the moral imbecility advocated by Ayn Rand in her capitalist sequels to Nazism's Mein Kampf. Obviously we shall see.

 

LB/12 March 2013

 

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Economics Below the Salt: Bad News, Better News

The two reports below warn of the ongoing destruction of essential government services. This information is especially relevant to those of us who live “below the salt,” a late medieval term for the 99 Percent. The first report describes the sequester's impacts on several vital programs. The second tells how a local transit authority – forced by anti-transit voters to radically downsize its operations – nevertheless managed to save a fraction of its weekend and nighttime bus service. Those who fear they might be potential victims are urged to contact the appropriate local agencies for more information.

 

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How Sequester's Sword Slashes Programs for Lower-Income People 

 

ASKING THE POLITICIANS who perpetrated the sequester to acknowledge the devastating wounds they've inflicted on the people of the United States is like investigating a murder in a bad neighborhood: nobody knows nuttin' – and what's more, nobody seems to give a damn.

The best you'll get out of the elected officials who wielded the sword of sequestration – the Congressmen and the president who collaborated to put the service-slashing scheme together and impose it on the nation – is a spin-doctored variant of what street cops and prosecutors used to call the “SODDI” defense: “some other dude did it.” The Democrats blame the Republicans who are busy blaming the Democrats, each trying to hide the fact both parties are equally guilty.

But the politicians' game of hot potato and its accompaniment of journalistic jeering is no help to the millions of lower-and-middle-income people who now wait in fear to learn how badly they'll be hurt.

 

So here's a summary of just a few of the sequester's real-world consequences.

 

The sequester sword inflicts a $3.7 billion gash  on the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to one estimate,  at least 145,900 people are thus condemned to permanent homelessness. The members of least 417, 400 households will suffer other negative effects.

 

Part of the sequester-lacerated HUD budget is the housing-choice program more commonly known as Section Eight. It is a remnant of the many federal New Deal and Great Society programs that have been on bipartisan target lists since the Clinton Administration years, 1993-2001. (That's when the Democrats abandoned their longtime role as advocates for lower income people and joined with the Republicans in an ongoing campaign to shrink or eliminate social service expenditures.)

 

The money now routinely taken from all such services is typically diverted into various forms of so-called “corporate welfare” – taxpayer dollars doled out mostly to raise executive salaries and stockholder dividends at profit-making enterprises. Corporations that serve the world's largest and most expensive military establishment are especially favored by this upward redistribution of the nation's wealth.

 

But Section Eight – probably because of support from the powerful real estate industry – has somehow remained marginally functional despite decades of efforts to shut it down. Its vouchers provide access to privately owned, open-market housing. The associated subsidies ensure recipients' out-of-pocket expenditures for rent don't exceed 30 percent of their income.

 

Most of the applicants' needs are urgent. Many are disabled. Some are homeless or in danger of becoming so. But the sequester, by indiscriminately shrinking the Section Eight budget, imposes additional limits on the number of people it can serve.

 

Like other HUD programs, Section Eight is administered by local housing authorities. Sequestration's impact on the Tacoma Housing Authority, which serves a seaport city of about 200,000 persons, is typical.

 

Michael Mirra, THA's executive director, said the sequester downsized the group's $45 million annual budget by $2 million or 4 percent. It is, he acknowledged, a painful blow. But he and his colleagues, always attentive to political circumstances, had anticipated the cuts. Thus they reduced Section Eight expenditures accordingly, applying a policy Mirra describes as “thinning the soup, so we did not have to take any chairs away from the dinner table.”

 

Even so, the waiting list for Section Eight housing in Tacoma, already four or five years from application to approval, now becomes much longer.

 

Other local casualties of sequestration, Mirra said, include homeless college students and lower income people who were awaiting aid for first-time home purchases. The students were to have been participants in a new program that would have found them housing but was shut down by sequester's denial of funds.

 

Another cutback imposed by the sequester, this of $6.3 million,  has forced the nearby King County Housing Authority to suspend some of its Section Eight operations.

King County includes Seattle, which has its own housing authority. Excluding the people in Seattle, the county's population – that is, the number of persons potentially served by KCHA – is 1.3 million.

 

The sequester also slashes a number of education-related programs. These include work-study jobs and other forms of aid for college students as well as well as Head Start programs for pre-school children.

 

Though elderly and disabled people had been reassured Medicare was protected from sequestration, the reassurance may prove to have been misleading. Reimbursements to doctors, hospitals, health-insurance plans and drug companies are to be downsized by $2 billion over the next ten years. Whether these costs will be passed on to recipients is unknown at present, but the history of the health insurance business suggests they probably will be. An Associated Press analysis out of Washington D.C. says Medicare Advantage enrollees will be especially hard hit if the providers thus raise premiums, fees and prices.

 

Statewide, the sequester is hacking $1.05 million from nutrition assistance that provides meals for Washington seniors – some of whom would otherwise starve. It is the sort of cutback Rep. Alan Grayson says will kill people. Grayson, a Florida Democrat who is one of sequestration's few Congressional critics, calls it “a self-immolation,” adding it “will cause a lot of pain, a lot of hunger, a lot of disease, a lot of death.”

 

How severely will the shrunken funding wound Tacoma seniors? As of Friday, the relevant local officials didn't seem to know.

 

Nevertheless there's no doubt cuts similar to all those described above now afflict anyone who depends on federally funded programs. As is often the case, the circumstances in Washington state are a microcosm of what's happening throughout the nation.

Meanwhile Grayson is not the sequester's only outspoken adversary. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the feisty Democrat from Massachusetts, has denounced it as “irresponsible” and “just plain stupid.”

But it remains to be seen whether Grayson, Warren and their few like-minded colleagues can convince the bipartisan House and Senate majorities to sheath their metaphorical swords and undo the real-world damage they've already done. 

*****

Transit Board Backs Down on (Some) Service Reductions 

 

PERHAPS IN RESPONSE to increasingly bitter criticism by advocacy groups for lower-income people, the Pierce Transit Board of Commissioners has effectively defied its anti-transit constituents and discarded an already approved plan to abolish all weekend and nighttime bus service. 

Or perhaps – as an inside source implied last week – it was just too embarrassing to too many powerful people to think of a city as big and economically significant as Tacoma without any weekend or night-time buses.

In any case, the service reduction that goes into effect in September will be on the order of 25 percent rather than the 34 percent mandated by the board in January. Revoking its January decision, the besieged agency now says it will retain minimal night and weekend service. 

Even in their new and slightly revised form, the cutbacks will further shrink already radically-diminished bus service for the approximately 600,000 people who live in Pierce Transit's 292-square-mile service district. The area includes the seaport city of Tacoma, population about 200,000, which plays a significant role in the global economy.

Pierce Transit's downsizing, by nearly 70 percent since 2009, is mandated by local voters who damn public transport as welfare, denounce its users as bums and condemn its unionized employees as parasites.

But for once the “human decency” meme that emerged in reaction to last November's vote against transit and transit-users seems to have been paramount amongst the commissioners' considerations. The agency thus reshuffled its budgetary tarot cards and came up with an additional $6.2 million – $5.5 million from maintenance funds – to maintain (very limited) weekend and night-time bus operations.

“The risk,” said Pierce Transit's Lars Erickson, “is that we may have (unforeseen) maintenance problems.” The board is willing to gamble, the publicist says, “because we understand the effects of cutting weekend and nighttime service.” 

Nevertheless, Tacoma and its surrounding suburbs will still suffer from what – for a municipality of its size and economic importance – is probably most inadequate public transport in the industrial world.

At least one board member, Derek Young, says he fears Pierce Transit is “in a death spiral,” with the ongoing service reductions resulting in revenue losses and enough additional political antagonism to eventually terminate the agency's operations. Some transit opponents have already admitted this is precisely their intent.

In this context, the Polly Anna spin Pierce Transit attempts to put on the cutbacks – “extensive system redesign project, robust public outreach since 2009” – seems especially ironic.

The initial downsizing of the agency's operations, in 2009, was due to Washington state's notoriously regressive tax structure.

As a consequence, the state's transit authorities are funded almost entirely by sales tax revenue, which slumped radically during the Bush-Obama recession and has remained low ever since. In response, Pierce Transit reduced service by eight percent. It re-routed several bus lines and shortened operating hours but otherwise preserved pre-recession schedules.

In 2011, hoping to restore these cuts and expand existing service to accommodate growing ridership, the commissioners asked voters to approve a sales-tax increase of .03 percent, three cents on a $10 purchase.

But the far-right majority that dominates the suburbs, energized as they were by the success of the Tea Party, launched a nasty campaign based on spurious claims that transit is not a civil necessity but rather a means of placating lower-income people, pampering minorities and funding the Democratic Party via the Amalgamated Transit Union.

The transit opponents also tried to portray the agency as an exceptionally glaring example of government spending run amok – a bureaucracy that squandered taxpayer dollars at every opportunity.

Efforts at rebuttal – for example telling the story of how insightful planning gave Pierce Transit the first natural-gas-powered buses on the planet and locked in fuel prices that in today's market are equivalent to buying diesel at 71 cents per gallon – were either ignored or shouted down.

Thus the agency's 2011 special-election ballot measure, though narrowly approved in Tacoma proper, was overwhelming defeated in the suburbs, which contain about two-thirds of the population of the Pierce Transit service area.

The directors resubmitted the three-cents-on-$10 tax-hike to the voters in 2012, hoping the progressive majority expected to turn out for the November general election would at last rescue the system.

As expected, the transit opponents' responded with the same hateful rhetoric they had employed the previous year. But they became even more stridently anti-union after the agency's bus drivers and other workers represented by ATU Local 587 voted to give up their 2011-2014 raises and cost-of-living increases in a last-ditch effort to help save bus service.

The second vote thus went the same way as the first.

While the voters within the Tacoma city limits again approved the tax hike, an overwhelming number of suburbanites again voted against it. And even the Tacoma outcome was gravely disappointing to transit supporters. An unprecedented two-percent under-vote – about 15,400 ballots cast by people who declined to vote on the transit measure – suggests the presence of a decisive anti-transit plurality even inside the city limits.

Hence the Pierce Transit board's unannounced but obvious decision to abandon – at least for the foreseeable future – any further ventures in electoral politics.

LB/4 March 2013

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