The Strange Case of Antonio Tovar

Did you ever meet someone whose real age was impossible to guess? A number of years ago, working for a construction outfit in Central America, I met a man who was, to say the least, of indeterminate age. If I remember correctly, his appearance was such that he ranged somewhere between a hard-bitten thirty and a nimble seventy.

He was short by American standards, slightly built, with an air of self-assurance about him that was out of the ordinary. He spoke easy-to-understand Spanish, and wore an expression on his face that can only be described as a cross between saintly humility and extreme amusement. His clothes were simple. He might have been any one of the many refugees from the wars in El Salvador of Guatemala who were growing corn and beans on small patches of land they had cleared in the woods around the job site.

“My name is Antonio Tovar. I’m here to see about the chain link fence,” he said. Part of the building under construction was going to get a chain link fence around it, but I hadn’t seen any details about it. Most of the previous crew had been cashiered for going “wild west” on the job. There’s a certain type of American who, when taken out of the country, feels that he’s beyond the law and goes bonkers. A lower level on Kohlberg’s moral chart, perhaps, or as someone said, “Travel makes a wise man wiser, but a fool worse.” For the first couple of months we were finding out indirectly about deals and arrangements that the ancien regime had made with various locals, some of which were legitimate and some of which were not.I referred him to one of the engineers on the job who would know something about the fence. That weekend I saw Antonio Tovar and a group of similar-looking men working behind the building, and shortly thereafter a chain link fence appeared. At the end of the week Antonio came back into the office with a bill. It seemed completely reasonable, so low that I was able to pay him out of our petty cash fund without bothering the boss with it. Off he went with the same inscrutable smile on his face.

About two months later I heard a radio broadcast about a missing person. Friends and neighbors were concerned about the disappearance of one Antonio Tovar. “If anyone has any information on the whereabouts of Antonio Tovar, please contact your local police or this radio station. His friends are very anxious to find him.”
That spring I made the acquaintance of some of the refugees who were living out in the woods. I asked if they knew him. They told the following story. He appeared one day on foot out of nowhere. No one knew exactly where he was from, except that the spoke a Spanish they could understand but not recognize as coming from any particular place. He wouldn’t tell them his age, except to say that he was very old.

When he arrived, he was carrying many seeds in a leather bag. He worked among the people clearing land and planting beans, corn, and vegetables. When the people spoke of lacking certain things, he found work that paid them money. He took very little for himself, but spread most of what they earned around where it was needed most. Then one day, saying he was going to a city, he simply disappeared. When he didn’t return, they made inquiries, first to the police and then later to the radio station. He’d been a big hit with all the people in their community. He brought money in. The women, the children, even the men all loved him. They were worried about what happened to him. He’d now been gone a long time.

So I asked them who they thought he was. The answers ranged from a Communist organizer, a Lakota “road man,” a guerilla agent, one of the Three Nephites of Mormon legend, a Cuban spy, a devilishly clever man from Scotland Yard, a brujo, a saint, to just a nice guy who disappeared in the jungle. A snakebite victim, perhaps.

I asked the engineer who he said had hired him, and he told me, “I thought you did.” Nope.

The ABC’s of Medical Care

The Horror of “Obamacare.”

The Great Unwashed clog free clinics with their endless needs. Aunt Gabby, insured through her job, but who’s never been happy unless she has the latest ailment, burdens the system with imagined complaints. Richie Rich goes to a private cash-for-care facility, which, if necessary to avoid government interference, may be located offshore. “Death Panels” decide whether you or your loved one merits the expense of life-saving medical treatment.

The real horror is that such a system already exists, right here in Hometown, USA. There are three tiers of medical care, not to say there aren’t levels within each tier or that there isn’t a degree of overlap among them, but basically here’s how it appears:

Level C is where you end up if you don’t have insurance or money. You might have a low-paying job without insurance, or you were laid off and lost your insurance. You could be chronically unemployed or homeless. Maybe you’ve just arrived in this country, knowing that you can have your baby in one of our hospitals for free, or that if you need an operation or treatment, you’re much more likely to get it here, eventually, than you are back home in your Third World country. You’ll have to wait in long lines at free clinics and county health departments. You’ll be at the mercy of slow-moving, non-caring bureaucrats. If you’re really sick or hurt, you can go to a hospital emergency room. You’ll wait a long time there, too. But they eventually somebody will take a look at you. And with a little luck they may actually help you out.

At level B you’re a working stiff lucky enough to have some sort of insurance. If something serious happens to you, you won’t lose your shirt, and they’ll take reasonably good care of you. You’ll probably be in a shared room, if hospitalized, but you’ll move down the medical assembly line with relative ease. You may have to wait for elective surgery and for non-emergency tests and procedures, but in an emergency situation, they’ll take care of you before things get out of hand, and you’ll be OK. Still, it’s a good idea to have an intelligent advocate available to help make decisions in case you are incapacitated, or in case they start treating you like a number on a chart.

At A level, you’re likely to have a super-duper insurance policy (the kind they’re talking about taxing to pay for the Level C’s), or you’re extremely wealthy, or you’re relatively prominent in your community. It may help to be a doctor, or be related to a doctor, but it helps even more to be an attorney, or related to an attorney. (A doctor knows the limits of health care; an attorney does not.) At this level you’ll get a private hospital room. You won’t have to wait very long for anything; it’ll seem as if all the procedures are streamlined. You’ll wonder why anyone has any problem with American health care, and you’ll be sure that “we have the best health care in the world.”

“Death Panels”? At level C you may have something to worry about. At the higher levels, the problem is more likely to be that they’ll use extreme measures to keep your body alive past the point where your quality of life has disappeared, just because somebody, whether insurance or government, is paying for those measures.

What It Was Ain't What It Is

Bearsville Store
Originally uploaded by waywuwei

And what it is ain't what it will be. --Old New England Saying



This historical marker, next to a Bearsville, NY, store, is actually the project of a local artist featuring scathing social commentary.

Someone else commented, "...and where you throw away your hard-earned money, (which is really pieces of time, your life, converted into paper) to buy "stuff" you really don't need anyway--"

Yes, those big box operations do tend to run the "Mom and Pop" stores out of business. And some small towns have been left with no commercial activity in their center except for the funeral parlor and maybe a Christian bookstore.

But they sure do sell stuff cheap!

Health Care Reforn: Letting It All Hang Out

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, signed by President Obama on February 17, 2009, includes billions in provisions for healthcare information technology (health IT).
The idea is to have one unified, computerized system with everyone's complete health care records on it, in one place, accessible by medical professionals. The "up" side is that our records will be available to doctors and/or medical people in case of emergency. We will no longer have to fill out paperwork every time we see a new doctor; everything will be available to him or her with a few clicks of a mouse. And in theory our insurance information should be there as well.
The "down" side is that whoever has access to the system will be able to know virtually all our medical history, including treatment for depression, venereal diseases, drug or alcohol problems, sexual preferences and problems, and anything else that might appeal to a snoop's prurient interests.
"Oh," you say. "That doesn't bother me. I have nothing to hide." And perhaps you don't right now. I can't help remembering that one of the early jobs for the Watergate burglars was to get Daniel Ellsberg's medical records from his psychiatrist's office. Obviously any astute political person would take steps to make sure that his/her personal records stay off this proposed system.
And what about everyday people? I was in a doctor's office recently where I could hear someone on staff blurt out, "He's got AIDS," about a patient who had just left. No, I never went back to that office.
But over the years I have heard stories of Mr. X who has an artificial, well, thing. (Snicker.) I wonder if he has any idea that's public knowledge. Or politician Y whose chart indicates his life expectancy is, well...."He's got one foot in the grave, and the other is on a banana peel." Wouldn't the other guys like to know about that? Or nice young lady Z who came in for testing, because "her former boyfriend developed syphilis lesions." Hmmm...and she applied for a teaching job? And these are the sort things one catches in passing without really wanting to know.
Yes, there are some things that are desirable about a huge, grand database. But wise is he who has a physician he can trust, who will on request keep certain information off the system. No matter what safeguards or sanctions they put in place to protect our medical information, human nature being what it is, there is absolutely no way anyone can guarantee that it will remain confidential.

Health Care and the Hypochondriacal Dilemma

One time, a number of years ago, I was almost flat broke and had to take a job where I worked in a cubicle. I'd known about such things for years, of course, and always had a totally abhorrent picture of them in my mind, sort of a giant nursery school for adults caught in a futuristic 1984-like hell. But I needed money, and was temporarily disabled with a ruptured Achilles tendon (a story for another time), so I went to work in an office lined with cubicles.

As it turned out, my premonition was 100% accurate. Some authorities maintain that fully half the cubicle type offices in our country are environmentally unhealthy. They're kept too cold in the summer and too warm in the winter. The first thing I noticed was that my new place of employment was no exception. Everybody seemed to be sick. I hadn't had a cold for fifteen years, it seemed, but soon after getting into that environment I had one cold after another. (Eventually I had to quit because of chronic sinus trouble.) Another thing I noticed was that everybody seemed to be taking antibiotics all the time, as if it were as natural as having a morning coffee.
Of course the tab for the pharmaceuticals and the doctor's visits was picked up by the employer's insurance policy. (In this case it was the government, i.e. the taxpayer, i.e. YOU) Once one of these office bimbos saw another one getting something on the insurance "dole," they would have to have the same thing: special braces to ward off carpal tunnel syndrome, antibiotics, antihistamines, antidepressants, you name it.

I've also heard that 70% of the patients seen in an average family practice are there for psychosomatic maladies. We all know people who are running to doctors with what seems like unbelievably minor complaints. And all too many doctors are happy to hand out an aspirin or placebo and bill the system for whatever it will bear. So whether the country were to go to a "single payer system," or simply muddle things through like they are now, the question remains: what to do about hypochondriacs and freeloaders clogging the system?
It seems to me that a hefty co-payment would cut down on a lot of this nonsense. It may be the only answer.

Odds & Ends: There, But for the Grace of God go....

(CNN) -- Newspaper, magazines, Web sites and a few book publishers are tapping into a curious American fascination: mug shots.
You don't have to commit a violent crime; you don't have to be convicted; you don't even have to be a celebrity (though for some publications, it helps).
Just get arrested -- no charge is too small -- and your mug could grace the pages of a local magazine or Web site

Some people say there's even a word for mug shot cruising now. I don't know what it is, but I admit that for a long time, when I was bored at work (which was every day on that job), I would check out the local mugshots.
What surprised me was not the number of people I knew (it wasn't a huge town), but the number of people I knew who seemed to be arrested for vagrancy, trespassing, or for varying degrees of public intoxication again and again. Not just one time, but repeatedly, every few months or so. Each time their pictures looked a little rougher.

I knew all these guys when they were young. At that time they seemed like average, run-of-the-mill people. They definitely fell into the "normal" range of intelligence. A couple of them, when I knew them, even had their own businesses. I worked with two of them and had friends who worked with the others. Altogether unremarkable it seemed.

One of them did tell me, however, "I'm not like you. You shouldn't really be talking to me." I remember being somewhat taken aback, but when someone says something like that, what can you say or do? I said, "OK," and moved on. The real meaning of his words escaped me, until I started seeing him in the Sheriff's log twenty years later.

You sort of wonder, if he didn't have sort of a predestinarian vision of where he was headed.
If there's any common thread through these lives, you can be pretty sure that it's substance abuse. Whether it's booze or drugs, you might say that a physiological propensity coupled with relative ease of availability led to these fellows' downfall.
As far a crime goes, it appears that the victim (aside from the Sense of Public Order) is the individual himself.

"Who steals my purse steals trash.
'Twas something, 'tis nothing,
'Twas mine, 'tis his,
And hath been slave to thousands.
But he who filches from me my good name,
Steal that which cannot enrich him,
But leaves me very poor indeed."
--Shakespeare in Othello

In these cases the damage has been self-inflicted. For them it might simply have been better to heed Nancy Reagan's "Just say NO to drugs."
Not to condemn, for there, but for the Grace of God, go we all....

Invasion of the Bow Bugs

I telephoned a Friend of My Youth of a Saturday morning. "What's up?" Stan was not the world's brightest kid, but there was usually something to do around his house. He lived in a middle-class neighborhood at the edge of the city, where development had ended with the housing boom of the 1920's. Behind his house was a glorious stretch of undeveloped farmland, all the way to the new interstate highway. It was a great place to run and explore. In the spring it flooded with a mosaic of small seasonal ponds, brimming with tadpoles, frogs and other critters, a perfect getaway place for a young kid.
"There's something new out back," he said. "Bow bugs." I had no idea what he was talking about, but managed to contrive a ride over there. There were several other neighborhood kids around. In his garage he'd set up numerous bowls and jars with "specimens" of this new creature they'd found in the ponds out back.
We walked out through the flooded fields, and sure enough, most of them held two or three of these primitive-looking organisms. Only the ponds nearest the house, where the first collecting had begun were devoid of this form of life. The neighbor kids claimed that they had somehow appeared overnight.
Stan explained that they called them "Bow Bugs," because they looked like a bow tie. Although, as I mentioned, Stan was far from an intellectual, he had managed to produce a dissecting kit from somwhere and was in the process of demonstrating his scientific acumen to the other kids.

The "Bow Bugs" consisted of two lobes of jellyfish-like membrane, separated by something that looked suspiciously like a rubber band. We all noticed that when "dissected," they gave off a chemical, formaldehyde-like smell. I pointed this out to Stan, who didn't want to hear my theory. He was too busy poking the "Bow Bug" with a needle, causing it to give up more of the formaldehyde smell and bringing small droplets of oil to the surface of the water in the dish.
By now every kid in the neighborhood had been into the garage and had seen the strange phenomenon, and a group of adults was beginning to form.
One guy came into the garage and grabbed his son, a blond-haired kid named Terry who had been in on the discovery from the beginning, by the arm and dragged him home. "I don't know what the hell these things are, but until we find out you're goin' home and staying inside. And no lookin' out either!" The whole thing was starting to remind me of a Twilight Zone episode. When I left a short time later, I noticed Terry's house was all shut up, and all the blinds were drawn.
In a day or two someone found out that the local health department had placed the "Bow Bugs" in the ponds as part of a mosquito control experiment. They weren't "bugs" at all. They were an envelope of semi-permeable membrane filled with DDT (or something similar) and cinched in the middle with a tiny rubber band.
As far as I know, none of us had any ill effects from handling the things. That neighborhood did produce its fair share of juvenile delinquents, but that might be a matter of coincidence. Someone said Stan went on to become a bartender.