Glenn Greenwald, en fuego:

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs,including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shieldmortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Postjust dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality.

Read the whole thing.  Greenwald rips into his fellow progressives for ignoring the fact that Ron Paul is far, far better than Obama on issues progressives claim are central. Paul’s candidacy, as Greenwald points out, makes many progressives feel like frauds. As well they should. But it’s not just progressives. From the right, I am one of those people who is thrilled that Paul is in the race, because he is the only candidate of either party who is making important and correct points about US foreign policy and domestic policy (N.B., I am much more conventionally Republican on Israel and the drug war). The thing that makes me hesitate on Paul is primarily his association with conspiracy theorists, and what that says about his judgment. But Greenwald’s blistering critique of the left can be applied, in part, to people on the right like me, who agree with Paul on some very big issues, but who find the fringey stuff off-putting. Is Paul’s flakiness at the fringes really so important that it obviates the fact that he’s on the opposite side — and the right side — of some critical concerns, in ways that neither Obama nor any of the GOP candidates (save Paul) who seek to displace him are?

The must-read books keep coming. Roger Scruton makes the case for environmentalism conservation as a conservative act in his new book, “Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet.” Via Andrew Sullivan, here’s an excerpt from Bryan Appleyard’s discussion of Scruton’s book:

Here lies Scruton’s true theme. It’s the same as it has always been, but now he has invented a name for it — oikophilia. The ancient Greek word oikos means, roughly, household or home and it is love of home that, for Scruton, inspires both his conservatism and his environmentalism. Love of home, he says, is close to a sense of the sacred which is, or should be, honoured by both the religious and the non-religious and observed by respecting and caring for the environment around the home. In the modern world this love of nature is constantly being crushed or abandoned by excessive faith in the state or in any big, top-down scheme. Milton Keynes is one of Scruton’s examples. Once a vision of a bright new future, now it is an environmental catastrophe, eating up land on a vast scale and making everybody drive everywhere. “That they should take a plan conceived in California by an American loony and plonk it in the middle of England where there is no space . . .” he says in disbelief.

Scruton’s primary faith lies with the “little platoons”, the activists and volunteers who, in a free society, emerge either to curtail the plans of the top-downers or just to clean up the place themselves. Only if people own the problem of the environment, rather than having it taken out of their hands by big government, will there be general popular assent to the sacrifices that may be necessary.

Here’s a more critical review by Jonathan Ree.

Peter Lawler saw the film “Young Adults,” which has something to do with an unhappy small-town Minnesota woman unsuccessfully managing her re-entry into her small hometown, and says he agrees with John Presnall’s review of it. Writes Lawler:

The movie mocks the heck out of the pretension that “going home” can cure what’s being ailing you in the big city. And it turns out that small towns are pretty cruel and boring and not all that strong on love for the unfortunate and lonely. People there are satisfied with so little, in most cases, because they ARE so little. So the movie a good antidote to reading some touching article by Rod Dreher, although it goes without saying it exaggerates in the other direction.

Well, okay. But this remark, perhaps unintentionally, brings to mind something annoying that keeps coming up in online discussions of my return to my hometown. There seems to be among some readers an assumption that I have declared my hometown a Mayberry-like paradise, and that I am preaching homecoming to all small-town natives who left for the big city.

Er, no. And no.

What I learned over the past couple of years, watching my sister fight cancer with the help of the people of this town, is that there’s a lot more going on here than I thought — and a lot less going on in the big city than I thought, at least in terms of the life I lead. Let me unpack this.

The usual complaint about small towns is that they are cramped and confining, and everybody’s always in your business. They’re boring. They can be, yes, cruel. All of this is true. It is not the whole truth, not by a long shot, but it is a truth felt acutely by the kind of people who pick up and leave, looking for a bigger place, where they can thrive. These are the kinds of people who usually end up writing about their lives in small towns. In his book “The Lost City,” Alan Ehrenhalt observed that the kinds of people who actually love the close confines of community, and the ways of small towns (or close-knit neighborhoods) aren’t the kind of people who typically have a platform from which to proclaim their love of ordinary places. Our received opinion of small towns typically comes from those who left. For every Wendell Berry — a small-town writer who left, and returned, and became a champion of small towns — there must be 20 or more writers who hated it and wouldn’t move back if you put a gun to their heads. I get that. Small towns aren’t for everybody.

I did not learn that all the things I disliked about life in a small town were untruths. The bad part of what I experienced here growing up is still here. In meeting all kinds of new people, and becoming reacquainted with old friends after many years away, I’m hearing the same complaints I always did, the same complaints I made myself. It’s still here, and it’s still real. Once, in the taxi back to our place in Brooklyn after flying in from a holiday visit to St. Francisville, Julie and I laughed over all the scandalous stories we’d heard on that trip about who’s sleeping with whom, who had turned into a dipsomaniac, etc. “Sure are glad to be home in Brooklyn, where that stuff never happens,” I wisecracked, the point being that all this stuff happens around us all the time, but city life had enabled us to live in a bubble where we didn’t have to confront it. In a small town, you have to be living in a bubble to avoid seeing it.

Anyway, what I learned from Ruthie’s death is that you cannot have the incredibly beautiful and life-giving goodness that surrounded my sister during her sickness and in the aftermath of her death without accepting all the limitations and frustrations that come with small-town life. It is certainly true that you have more freedom, social and otherwise, in a big city, where you are at far more liberty to choose your friends, and to construct the kind of life that suits you. But that freedom comes with a price — and it’s a price you may not find much of a bargain, over time.

In my case, it wasn’t that I was unhappy with city life. Not at all! I’ve always enjoyed the life I’ve been able to build in the various cities in which I’ve lived. I found life to be friendly, pleasant, and enjoyable in most respects. Ruthie’s suffering and death changed my vision. It cast the things I rejected, and the things I’d come to love, in a new light — a light that made it possible for me to see my way home. By no means was it the case that I exchanged a fairly jaundiced view of small-town life for one minted by the Chamber of Commerce. (For example, I’ve already had my ears singed by stories of nasty local politics.) It’s only that the events surrounding the death of my sister compelled me to reconsider my own life, and my choices, in the light of what Eliot called the Permanent Things. And in so doing, I saw possibilities here that I wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

Not only possibilities for living, but possibilities for writing. The other night, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen since childhood. He works as a prison guard at Angola. Somehow we talked briefly about how strange it was not long ago for him and another childhood friend also working there to pat down the serial killer Derrick Todd Lee in his cell. Lee was another classmate of theirs. He also murdered at least eight women. He banged on the door of my sister’s place one night during his killing spree; the only reason he didn’t come through that door was because she had a gun, and she yelled that she was prepared to use it (when people make that threat around here, you’re wise to believe them). Once my young cousin heard a commotion downstairs at her family house, and came down to find Lee standing in their living room. Nobody knew he was a serial killer then. He was just a weirdo. Ruthie told me that had he shown up in daylight and asked to come in, she would have let him, because he was a nice guy she knew from school. Anyway, after that brief bar conversation, I’ve not been able to stop thinking about what it must be like to serve as the guards of a classmate who became a notorious serial killer. This is just one story from here, and a vivid one, to be sure. But there are so many human dramas playing out around here. I used to have impatient eyes. I used to think life was elsewhere. In fact, life is all around us, for those with eyes to see.

In my case, I had to leave, and leave for a long time, to have my eyes opened to what is here for me and my family, and what always was. It won’t do to replace one flawed vision with another. This is one reason I find Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories so interesting is that he manages to write with affection about the people in his fictional small town without sentimentalizing them (well, without overly sentimentalizing them), or ignoring their flaws and foibles. I find that people who denounce the “Mayberry” view of small towns (charming, folksy, etc.) tend to do so with some sort of agenda. Of course Mayberry is a lie! But who actually believes in Mayberry? Nobody who actually lives in a small town, unless they’re some sort of kook. If you read the comments under David Brooks’s NYT column about my return here, you’ll see a number of people trying to debunk the favorable portrait David painted of life in St. Francisville, often, it seems to me, to make a political point. Someone, either on that comments thread or on another blog entry, said David ignored the shocking truth in this story, which is the scandal that the townspeople felt compelled to hold a fundraiser to pay Ruthie’s medical expenses, and that this is why we need universal healthcare.

This is deeply annoying. Ruthie’s medical expenses were paid, entirely or mostly (I’m not sure which), by her health insurance. Doctors and hospitals aren’t the only entities that need paying, though. There was the matter of the maid Ruthie had to hire to clean her house, because she was too sick to do it on her own. After her diagnosis, Ruthie was too sick to work. She had retirement, but money was still tight. The cash raised by the townspeople gave her family a cushion, which relieved a huge emotional and psychological burden. Besides, people who loved her and her family just wanted to do something practical for them. It was a grace. They’ve done it for other very sick people around here. They’re doing it now for a young cancer patient. It is frustrating when people cannot observe and be grateful for an act of communal solidarity and kindness without imposing a political agenda on it. Private charity could never have paid Ruthie’s massive medical bills, and nobody is, or should be, claiming that it could. But even if Ruthie had had the finest medical insurance in the world, it still would have been important, on a moral level, for people to have done what they did for her and her family. Being there at the concert was one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever participated in, because I saw what love is. When Ruthie, whose head was bald and whose beautiful face was badly swollen from the chemotherapy, walked into the barn where the concert was about to get underway, and everybody — half the town was there — let up a full-throated cheer, I thought that this is how life is supposed to be. They loved her, and they were honoring her for her service to them, and for her friendship.

That night didn’t take away all the bad things about life here, any more than the heroism of firefighters and others in New York City on 9/11 — to use an extreme example — turned Gotham into the New Jerusalem. No one deed makes us saints forevermore, but deeds, especially in times of crisis, reveal character. The deeds of the townspeople here in response to Ruthie’s crisis revealed things I had forgotten, or never before seen. This changed me, and changed my life. It’s not too much to say it converted me. To use religious language, it didn’t make me an evangelizer for small-town life. But it did give me a perspective along the lines of what I read last night in “Anna Karenina,” in a luminous two chapters (26 and 27) describing the rejected suitor Levin’s return to his country house, and life, from Moscow. In those two short chapters, Tolstoy constructs an entire world. He brings to life the world of home that Levin had been given out in the country, and for which he was grateful. As Levin is riding the sledge back to his place, his disappointment in Moscow (Kitty had rejected his marriage proposal) mellowed in the light of home: “He felt that he was himself and did not wish to be anyone else. He only wished now to be better than he had been formerly.”

Just so. I want the same for myself. Besides, let me paraphrase Walker Percy: where would you prefer to be as a writer, stumbling around Greenwich Village, or sitting on your front porch in St. Francisville? There are saints and sinners in both places, and human dramas all around. It’s only a matter of what the writer can see in front of him, and what he can learn to love. Can you, as Auden says we must, learn to “love your crooked neighbor/With your crooked heart”?

It seems to me that we need fewer writers and storytellers who pick out the faults of small towns and small places, and more who can identify and explore the life-giving aspects of these places. But that’s just me. The reasons people leave are still there, and always will be. The reasons people like me come back are there as well. There is also a reason so many city friends, when they learned what I was going to do, said with sometimes-raw emotion that they wish they had a place like this to come back to. Not that they would necessarily do so, but that they wish it were an option. That option had been foreclosed on by the choices their peripatetic parents had made, or that they had made. There’s a story in that. It’s the story of our time, actually.

UPDATE: I just rediscovered this entry from October 24 on this blog. Excerpt:

One pal in another part of the US did say, “Aren’t you going to be lonely for someone to talk to?” — the idea being that in a town of 2,000 people, I would be a loner when it came to the sort of things he and I like to talk about. No, I told him, and gave him an answer that was better articulated whenWendell Berry explained it to an interviewer:

HB: Many people grow up in small towns and find great comfort in their natural and familial surroundings, but their thinking and ambitions aren’t rewarded there either by lack of jobs or lack of embracement of ideas—certainly, a misuse of the community’s resources. How can youngsters and young adults be encouraged to stay home and still be fulfilled?

WB: This question depends on what you mean by intellectual stimulation and whether or not you can get it from the available resources. It’s perfectly possible to live happily in a rural community with people who aren’t intellectual at all (as we use the term). It is possible to subscribe to newspapers and magazines that are intellectually challenging, to read books, to correspond with like-minded people in other places, to visit and be visited by people you admire for their intellectual and artistic attainments. It’s possible to be married to a spouse whose thoughts interest you. It’s possible to have intellectually stimulating conversations with your children. But I’ve had in my own life a lot of friends who were not literary or intellectual at all who were nevertheless intelligent, mentally alive and alert, full of wonderful stories, and whose company and conversation have been indispensable to me. I’ve spent many days in tobacco barns where I did not yearn for the conversation of the college faculty.

[Rod here:] I’ve spent many days in tobacco barns where I did not yearn for the conversation of the college faculty. Preach it, brother. A prejudice professional class urbanites and suburbanites have about small places: that because people aren’t interested in the same things they are, that they aren’t interesting, and have nothing to teach.

Anyway, I said to my interlocutor concerned about my putative lack of conversation with like-minded folks: when do I ever see my friends here? It’s like moving heaven and earth, just trying to get together for a simple meal. I live in a beautiful neighborhood, have wonderful friends, and yet, for some reason, I rarely see them. I’m not sure why this is, but it … is. I mentioned this frustration to a friend in DC, who said that this was his life as well — that he had to schedule simple get-togethers with friends far in advance.

I can’t believe anybody actually enjoys living this way. But I think if it were easy to change it, we would have done so by now. Right? Anyway, nobody lives this way back home. I had a good e-mail exchange the other day with a reader of this blog who trashed his Washington career and membership in the Ambitious Professional Class to move back to his hometown, and live poorer but happier. What he wrote was so smart and true that I forwarded it (with his permission) to an editor I know, saying that this sort of wisdom ought to be more widely disseminated. His basic point, though, was that so many professional types have it within their power to solve the problems of loneliness and atomization and displacement by moving back home – but the thought of abandoning all the consumer comforts of the big city (Thai restaurants, indie movie houses, etc.) and professional advancement is too frightening. So they slog along, homesick to death, but unable to take the cure.

(If that cure is open to them, I mean. We’ve had a surprising number of our friends say that they wish they had the chance to consider moving Home, but that their parents moved so many times that they have no place like St. Francisville to return to.)

UPDATE.2: Jeremy Beer, in a 2006 speech about the Brandywine Conservancy, a Pennsylvania preservationist group:

The conservers, preservers, savers, and protectors—conservatism once stood for such folks, and such folks were at one time conservatives. But they make bad apparatchiks. They aren’t ideologically motivated and aren’t “thinking big.” They are simply concerned, if often locally prominent, citizens. They may also be sentimental saps, but that’s understandable. As normally functioning human beings, they have formed dear attachments to their social and physical worlds. They like their communities, want to see them thrive and prosper, want to see them made or kept beautiful, want to preserve (or reinvigorate) their sense of their places as unique, and prefer to interact daily with people they know and love—or even hate.

Here is where Russell Kirk was truly exemplary. He ought to be remembered not as “the principal architect of the postwar conservative movement,” as the quasi-official adulation has it, but because he went home. There he restored an old house, planted trees, and became a justice of the peace; took a wife (and kept her) and had four children; wrote ghost stories about census-takers and other bureaucrats getting it in the neck; took in boat people and bums; and denounced every war in which the U.S. became involved—especially the first Gulf War, which he detested. And he also denounced abstractions because he knew they were drugs deployed to distract us from the infinitely more important work of the Brandywine Conservancies of the world.

If there is ever to be truth in our political labeling, we need conservatives who will go home, or at least make homes somewhere, conservatives who will abjure Washington and New York and pick up the struggle in their own burgs to help (re-)build real communities, work to conserve the land and its resources, and ally with their naturally like-minded brethren in order to revive—locally—the religious and historic traditions that might sustain us. In fact, those are the only conservatives we need.

My friend Doug LeBlanc points out to some generous words our pal Ed Cullen, the Baton Rouge writer and sometime “All Things Considered” commentator, had the other day about my sister Ruthie Leming, who died this year. Ed was on The Jim Engster Show, a local public radio talk show last week, and the topic of “Most Admired People” came up. Here’s a link to the show. Ed starts talking about it at the 16:00 mark. Ed talks about how he and his wife went to Ruthie’s funeral,

I went to Ruthie’s funeral. It was a rainy day, a rainy fall day, in St. Francisville. The line went down the sidewalk and around the corner, people standing under umbrellas. And my wife and I talked about it later. It was such a peaceful gathering of people to celebrate Ruthie’s life. Ruthie’s life and death had a tremendous impact on that town. … That’s the kind of [person] that I think we should hold up.

I appreciate Ed’s kind words about Ruthie, and, of course, I agree with him. But I would, wouldn’t I? It seems we never hear enough about people like her. I can never be grateful enough to David Brooks for writing about Ruthie, and about the good people of this town, in his column on Friday. Thanks to David’s gift, I heard on Friday from major publishers, inviting a proposal to write a book about Ruthie’s life and the meaning of community in contemporary America. I would give anything never to have written a word about my sister, and to still be living in Philadelphia, if only she were still alive and healthy. But that was not to be. How good, though, that the way she lived, and the way she faced her death, inspired so much compassion from others that, thanks to the media amplifying her story, many more people will get to hear what she, and what her friends and neighbors, did — and perhaps be moved to do the same in their own lives and places.

My wife loves the George Eliot novel “Middlemarch,” and has remarked before on how what was said of the character Dorothea in the book could be said of Ruthie:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The other day I was re-reading some of the blogging I’d done in the week after her death, and read again about the things people said to our family in the days after her death. For example:

Today, in the aftermath of Ruthie’s death and burial, this counsel seems even more sound than it did then. Along with my family, I’ve spent the last few days hearing from hundreds of people who have told us what a difference Ruthie’s goodness made in their lives. Going back through my writing from early in Ruthie’s cancer fight, I found an anecdote Ruthie told me back then. Her husband Mike had run into a man in the post office in town. The man told Mike how sorry he was for Ruthie’s cancer, but that reading about her heroic response to the news, he did something he hadn’t been able to do in years.

He prayed.

And:

My mother received a phone call yesterday from a young man in Houston. “You don’t know me, Mrs. Dreher, but Ruthie was my sixth grade teacher,” he began. As Mama related the story, I remembered well this child. Ten or 15 years ago, Ruthie told me she had a brilliant little boy in her class, but he was picked on all the time for this and that thing. She could tell he was hurting, and she was determined to help him. She asked me for some advice. I never did hear how it turned out.

Now I know. This young man told my mother that he’s doing very well for himself. “Everything I am today, I owe it all to Mrs. Leming,” he said.

Yesterday my mom’s friend took her out for a ride, to get away from the hubbub around here. They stopped at the Sonic Drive-In for a Coke. The girl who brought their drinks to the car said, “Are you Mrs. Leming’s mom?” — and then started talking about how Ruthie had been her teacher, and all the wonderful things Ruthie had done for her. A man sitting in his car next to theirs, eating his burger, overheard this and said, “You’re Ruthie Leming’s mother? She taught my children.” And off he went, talking about what a difference Ruthie made in his children’s lives.

This keeps happening. This morning, I was talking on Mike and Ruthie’s front porch with one of our Texas family members. We were talking about how Ruthie had this uncanny ability to be patient with people. J. said that once he was talking with Ruthie about a problem he was having with a difficult person, and she counseled him to be kind. “She said, ‘You just don’t know the circumstances they’re in,’” said J.

Judge not, lest ye be judged. I believe I’ve heard that somewhere before.

I’m sorry to be going on about this. You’ve all read this before from me. Still, Ed Cullen’s words about how we never do seem to consider the value people like Ruthie — the quiet, modest  servants, upon whom we all depend to keep things going — got me to thinking back about what I’ve learned about humanity this past 19 months, especially on the days after her death. I wish you could have been standing with me at Ruthie’s wake, or with me in that week after she passed, hearing from people telling us in detail how she had made a difference in their lives, or in the lives of their children, who had been in her class. You might wonder: will they say things like that about me at my funeral? If not … well, why not? As Leon Bloy put it, the only tragedy in life is not to have been a saint. I well know that my sister was not perfect, but boy, did she ever do far more than her share of good in this world, by easing the burdens of others, and helping them have better lives than they otherwise would have done.

I could do this too, if I wanted to. You could as well.

I hope I can spend much of this year talking to people who knew Ruthie well, and who know this town well, and find out more about how she did what she did, and why — and how and why they did what they did for her. If this little river town of 1,700 people can do so much good for a sick friend and her family, so can your town, or city. That’s the thing that knocks me flat about all this: it’s all so close, so attainable. We think things like this only happen in the movies, or happened in the past. It’s not true. It’s right here among us. I bet you know a Ruthie Leming in your life, in your family, in your town. Find her, or him. Cherish her. Learn from her, while you can. In my case, I will probably spend a good part of the rest of my life learning how to live and to love others from the woman who was my sister. I hope to tell you somehow, some day, the things I discover.

Many of you are familiar with the writing of Theodore Dalrymple, the pen name of Dr. Anthony Daniels, the retired British physician who writes with unsparing directness about social dysfunction and pathology among the poor and working classes, whom he served during his medical career, especially as a prison doctor. I met a doctor this weekend who treats the same population in Baton Rouge, and who has very similar views (this I’m guessing based on our fairly brief but unforgettable conversation). I gave him my e-mail address, and hope to reconnect with him for an on-the-record interview, and to do a TAC piece on health care and social realities.

What sparked our conversation was my hearing this doctor — let’s call him Dr. Smith — say that the big public hospital in Baton Rouge, Earl K. Long, is closing for good next year, and that because the state of Louisiana is broke, there are no plans to build a replacement.

“Good Lord, where will the poor be treated, then?” I asked.

“Well, the other hospitals in town will absorb them,” Dr. Smith said, adding that he questioned that kind of well-meaning statement: “Where will the poor be treated?” He said that many of the patients he sees “are people who are poor because they just don’t want to work. They’ve never had a job and they never will have a job. They’re fine with that.”

He said that the general public has no idea how much money is wasted on medical fraud and abuse by members of the underclass, and on treating people who have no intention of being anything other than dependents on the state, and who will demand treatment “if they as much as stub their toe” because they don’t have to pay for it. He said that if the health care system here in Louisiana had the money it threw away on fraud by and unnecessary treatments for the poor, “we could build a brand-new hospital to replace Earl K. Long.”

I told Dr. Smith that one of my first feature stories as a professional journalist back in the late 1980s involved my spending a night in the emergency room at EKL, to see what it was like. I told him I remembered the ER doctors complaining about how the waiting room on the weekend would be filled with people who really needed to see a doctor soon — some with broken bones — but who had no choice but to wait for hours because doctors were busy treating patients who had been brought in via ambulance. It was state law then (and may still be) that anyone who calls 911 and demands an ambulance goes to the head of the line in the ER. The doctors back then complained that quite a few unscrupulous patients used 911 for everyday treatment — even things as trivial as having prescriptions refilled — because they knew the hospital had no choice but to give them preferential treatment.

Dr. Smith said that story sounds very familiar to him from his own experiences. He said that most people in society never have to spend any time in the world of the American underclass, so it’s easy to sentimentalize them. That can go both ways of course, and it can be easy to think of all the poor as brutish, etc. But Dr. Smith’s Dalrympian view is that our discussion of health care in this country, especially for the poor, is uninformed by a realistic understanding of the lives many of the poor lead, and the lack of moral scruple and sense of responsibility to themselves and to the wider community.

I mentioned to Dr. Smith that over the years I’d gotten to know some of the city’s firefighters through a firefighter relative. Listening to those men who serve in the city’s poorest neighborhoods — the same population that Dr. Smith serves — talking about the things they see every day in those areas made me think they worked on another planet. The observable common behavior is so strange, irresponsible, and wholly dysfunctional that it’s hard to relate it to any norms we recognize as healthy, or even sane. But one is not permitted to say things like this out loud, or one will be accused of heartlessness, and worse.

Dr. Smith smiled and nodded in recognition, as if to say, yes, this is my experience as well. This is the world of Theodore Dalrymple. It also seems to be the world of Dr. Smith.

This bears following up on. I hope he writes me back. I’d like to go more deeply into it with other physicians, nurses, and health care providers who work among the underclass. Maybe it’s time to go spend another night in the ER at EKL. I definitely want to know more about how physicians like Dr. Smith see the current state of public health, and what health care reform can do, and cannot do, given the norms and standards of the populations who make the most use of public health services. (“Remember,” he told me, “the AMA only represents 10 percent of doctors.”) In all the journalism I’ve read about American health care in the past couple of years, I can’t recall reading anything from the perspective of a health care provider like Dr. Smith. Here is a man who obviously wouldn’t be serving the poor if he didn’t care for them, but who is also palpably angry over what he sees as the sentimentalized dishonesty around the discussion of morality, poverty, and public health.

Have you ever heard of the color “Barbara Walters Beige”? You have now. I’m told by a friend who works at Angola State Penitentiary, which is in the northern part of West Feliciana Parish, that a few years ago, Barbara Walters did a show from the lethal injection room at the prison. In doing pre-production prep work, she decided that the color of the paint on the wall did not flatter her skin tone. So she had her own people come in and repaint the walls of the death chamber to go better with her skin. At the prison, the new death chamber color is informally referred to as “Barbara Walters Beige.”

Ross Douthat says that those who consider Ron Paul a madman and those who think of him as a prophet are probably both right. Excerpt:

There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet. Perhaps Paul has emerged as a teller of some important truths precisely because in many ways he’s still as far out there as ever.

The United States is living through an era of unprecedented elite failure, in which America’s public institutions are understandably distrusted and our leadership class is justifiably despised. Yet politicians of both parties are required, by the demands of partisanship, to embrace the convenient lie that our problem can be pinned exclusively on the other side’s elites — as though both liberals and conservatives hadn’t participated in the decisions that dug our current hole.

In this climate, it sometimes takes a fearless crank to expose realities that neither Republicans nor Democrats are particularly eager to acknowledge

I bet a surprising number of people who plan to vote for Ron Paul in the caucuses and primaries are not so much casting a vote for Paul as they are casting a vote of no confidence in the elites of the GOP (and of both parties).

So, the last day of the year. If you had asked me at this time last year, “Hey, what are the chances you will welcome in 2012 from your new home in downtown St. Francisville?”, I would have reported you to the principal for smoking crack. And yet, here I am, on a cool, rainy day, writing you from just that place. That happy place.

This was a crappy year. My sister died. I said goodbye to some wonderful friends in Philadelphia. But I gained a new appreciation for my hometown, for my family, for my cultural heritage, and for the wonderful people of this town. I’m making new friends. And, as my dad said to me the other day when I came over to pick up the grandkids, “It’s so great that when y’all leave now, you aren’t leaving for the airport.”

That’s pretty great.

You know what else is great? It’s raining outside, one of those slow Louisiana rains, and I can open my kitchen door right now and put my bare feet on wet red brick. That’s what south Louisiana feels like to me. And I love it. Hey, you never know what the new year will bring, good and bad both.

Happy New Year, y’all. Tell us what your 2011 was like.

UPDATE: Holy crap. My cousin Daniel, a professionally trained chef (as is his wife Amy), is in my kitchen now. They’re our dinner guests. He’s making dessert.

“What are you making?” I asked.

Said he, “A little something inspired by my hero, Joel Robuchon.”

Those words have never been spoken in any kitchen of mine. I think I might pass out — and I’ve only just started drinking wine.

Went to the grocery story for milk this morning, and what did I see?:

You don’t want to get the baby, baby.

What are you doing for New Year’s Eve? Us, cooking something shrimpy and spicy, drinking $10 prosecco, and cocooning.