Ten minutes later, the American economy imploded, and apparently a decision was made to deal with the enormous shortfall that ensued by, in all sorts of ways, bilking patients and Medicare.

A UM med school executive blew the whistle, and last year UM had to pay the government millions and millions of dollars, and Shalala, of course, fired the naughty whistle blower.

Now the whistle blower has filed a wrongful termination suit for millions of dollars, which he’ll probably get.

When you add the Nevin Shapiro scandal to this one, Donna Shalala certainly has a lot to answer for.

Mona Eltahawy’s crucial cover essay for Foreign Policy (2012) needs rereading as an important corrective to the wishful thinking we’re starting to hear about prospects for women in Taliban Afghanistan.

“Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating ‘virginity tests’ merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness…

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet’s rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women…

Attempts to control by such regimes often stem from the suspicion that without it, a woman is just a few degrees short of sexual insatiability…

[W]omen are silenced by a deadly combination of men who hate them while also claiming to have God firmly on their side… The Islamist hatred of women burns brightly across the region — now more than ever…

The hatred of women goes deep in Egyptian society. Those of us who have marched and protested have had to navigate a minefield of sexual assaults by both the regime and its lackeys, and, sadly, at times by our fellow revolutionaries…”

And that was the Arab Spring, baby! Fasten your seat belt for the Ice Age.

I think it un-Christian to smirk

At the virulent Cardinal Burke.

But it wouldn’t be wrong

To quote Zappa’s old song:

“Jesus thinks you’re a jerk.”

A school that lionizes national conflict of interest icon Charles Nemeroff also thinks nothing of lionizing seedy nursing home mogul Morris Esformes…

Morris’s overwhelming preoccupation for many years has been keeping his son, Philip, out of prison for having run with the whole seedy nursing home thing and turned it into the largest health care fraud in American history.

Philip, when not taking all of the federal government’s money, was himself long preoccupied with bribing the head basketball coach at the University of Pennsylvania to put Philip’s son – named Morris after Family Crook #1 – on the team, and thereby grant his admission to that Ivy League institution.

Head-spinning, ain’t it? Flamboyantly pious religious people, too — all of them. But maintain your focus! I’m trying to update you on all of this.

So Philip got twenty years but because of a ton of flamboyantly pious friends he got DJT to pardon him! Largest health care fraud ever MEH.

But not so fast! For some reason the feds would prefer that its expensive, protracted, extremely difficult fight to put Philip in prison NOT be blithely overturned by rich corrupt people. Athough Philip has indeed been released, the Justice Department “will pursue unresolved charges from Esformes’ healthcare fraud trial in 2019.” And since there were like three million original charges against the guy, the feds have a full plate of leftovers from which to choose. He will soon go to trial again, and because the man of God is guilty as hell, he’ll soon be back in prison, and it’ll be Arrested Development all over again.

The other University of Miami medical school story? Ne quittez pas.

“All of our European sisters rallying in support of veiling are right!” exulted one young woman eyeing the onward march of the Taliban. “I can’t wait for total covering — modesty’s the ticket! Allah’s gonna love it!”

************

UD devoutly hopes that watching vibrant living beings die under the vile shroud that is the burqa will strengthen Europe’s (most of Europe’s) determination to ban it among its citizens. Together, footage from ISIS prisoner camps and from pious perverted Afghanistan should be more than enough to silence the fools defending the invisibility cloak.

************

Today’s [American] college students are too young to remember the utter shock of seeing a country of women wearing burqas, head-to-toe coverings with small patches of mesh in the eye area. Women who looked all the same, women who were completely hidden, women unable to see except barely and straight ahead.

It was a nightmare.

Tsk. How judgmental. How culturally non-relativist. USA Today’s opinion writer just comes right out with her Islamophobia, and this must be because she has failed to read the right books and attend the right rallies. A nightmare? Oh no. No, you can’t say that. The burqa is a beautiful expression of the piety of Muslim women. Now all Afghan women will be beautiful in the sight of God.

… of the earth. Its impossible constellations, its terrifying caves… I mean, without wanting to be a wimp about it, there’s something overwhelming about massive chambers of dripping stalactites beneath, and infinite dripping stars above; and Les UDs got that particular double helping quite intensely on their little trip.

It was deliciously cold both above and below, but now we’re back at surface heat, waiting for summer to give way.

On the winding road up Skyline Drive, I insisted we talk about this article on Lebanon in The Economist because the country it evoked seemed as impossible to me as the constellations. On the one year anniversary of the port explosion, the country the writer evoked is disgustingly corrupt, corrupt beyond belief, absolutely corrupt, and, because of that corruption, seemingly dead beyond repair. How did that happen, and how is Lebanon to survive its own death?

Certes, UD knows that corruption is part of political life, and a very significant part of political (and social) life in many countries (note Lebanon’s location on the corruption index to which I just linked). But the Economist writer seems to be announcing the protracted lurid extinction of a country because its governing and business elite is totally happy to dine on the corpse of the Lebanese people until there’s nothing left but bones … at which point they’ll all move to Monaco.

It’s pure Ubu: “I”ll make my fortune, kill the whole world, and bugger off.”

Ubu is a way over the top, hilarious, moral monster. How did Lebanon, where religious faith is the reason it looks the way it does, get an entire political class of moral monsters? Forget hypocritical; these people are evil. To paraphrase another UD favorite: They are monsters without being a myth.

***************

Consider the language of the Economist piece: Lebanon is an “abyss,” there is “no bottom” in its “bottomless collapse.” Its “shambolic politicians cannot agree on a new government.” The police, grossly underpaid “agents of a bankrupt state,” cannot be expected to cooperate with the authorities forever. A year after the blast, “things are indeed worse, almost immeasurably so.”

The blast was not a nadir, just another twist on Lebanon’s long downward spiral. There has been no accountability for the disaster. Nor is there a government empowered to tackle an economic crisis that, according to the World Bank, may rank as the third worst anywhere in the world since the 1850’s...

[The country] tipped into economic crisis in 2019, the result of a years-long Ponzi scheme overseen by the central bank, which borrowed billions from an outsized banking industry to sustain a currency peg. The scheme unraveled when banks no longer took in enough fresh deposits to keep it going. [An observer] estimates that there was an $83bn hole in their balance-sheets last year.

Half the country now lives below the poverty line. [There are] only a few hours of electricity each day… A young girl died from a scorpion sting that could not be treated for lack of antivenom in depleted hospitals and pharmacies… Beirutis wander the streets glassy-eyed: no one is sleeping well, without even a fan to cut the heat and humidity. Everyone seems to have caught a stomach bug this summer from food spoiled by power cuts… [T]he… days are a brew of rage and despair.

The World Bank calls this a “deliberate depression,” a man-made crisis – and the men who made it are still in power, with no plan to fix it.

Lebanon is not a failed state; it’s a zombie state. In order to have a free hand to steal all the country’s money, its governing elite has reduced the population to automata unable to act on their own behalf. The closest analogy UD can think of is North Korea.

******************

So, nu, Mr UD, what to do?

Here are some of his comments.

1.) The Economist writer exaggerates, focuses only on the very worst aspects of the situation. “Spoken like a Pole,” replied UD. “Not every country conjures Solidarność, you know.”

2.) One solution might be The Appointment of the Respected, Legitimate Person/People. Here, as in Italy calling the non-corrupt, brilliant technocrat Mario Draghi out of private life at an advanced age in order to deal with Italy’s ridiculous economy, Lebanon would search for a small group of morally serious people with relevant expertise, people respected by all because of their above-the-fray gravitas, and ask them to save the country. Even better – bring together organizations that have independent legitimacy, have them constitute themselves as, say, The National Salvation Congress, and wait while their moral and intellectual legitimacy endows them with meaningful power.

3.) If/when things deteriorate into actual civil war, call in the UN.

***********************

UPDATE: A personal view of the end of the world.

Not a huge number, but you had to be there. The bowl of the heavens, at Big Meadow, shone everywhere – not just in white clusters overhead, but along the tree and hill line. An eerie little breeze deepened the darkness as UD groped the ground for her binoculars and – when it grew chilly – her sweater.

Chilly – she thought of hellish, thunderish, DC while she lay back, somewhat shivering, in her beach chair.

The barred owls hoot all night here, a cosmic chorale. Last evening a distant storm made bright flashes across the field. We talked about lightyears of distance (one lightyear = about six trillion miles) and parsecs and made obvious remarks about our incapacity to grasp astronomical realities. Also, though, about how remarkably much we know (Mr UD reads a lot of astronomy/physics) about the massive black canvas. Galactic Hubble images came to me as I scanned the stars.

The Denial of Death in Shenandoah National Park

Cold air, barred owls, and the smell of smoke:

Only a little data here, to evoke

The August woods off the balcony.

Woods that always prompt philosophy.

As when I read, in Becker, a phrase like

“Immunity bath,’ meaning cultic rites

That cleanse the cultist of the dread of death

(Page 12) and sometimes even of its sight.

Or anti-vaxers who, with dying breath,

Admit they thought their breath would never end.

“Consciousness of death is the primary

Repression, not sexuality.” Mend

Your dread by bacchanal, or by fairy

Story, and you’ll still get badly scarred.

A death-accepter, say Kierkegaard,

Knows this is merely where the fun begins:

The wisest owls unbarred spin and spin

Out of smoke mythic immortality.

Take, among those I love, N., P., and D.

N. strode in to save Detroit, then broke down

At the vastness of it. P. circles round

The earth’s atrocities, repairing souls.

D., who must perceive the very world, stole

His life through abstraction. Hard led

By dread, N. is struggling, D. dead.

From the balcony again the smell of smoke —

Of our own ashy end an easy token.

… for UD‘s part of Maryland, so, if nothing else, she and Mr UD will avoid them in the Virginia mountains, where temperatures will be moderate during the day, and downright cold (cold!) at night. Their main tasks – they leave today – are two: To see the Perseid meteor shower at its absolute peak, and to celebrate UD‘s birthday at a restaurant in nearby Luray, where they’ll also go to Luray Caverns. I’ve been visiting those kitschy caves since I was a toddler.

Mr UD finally found our (dusty, discolored) copy of Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, which I love; and this will be my light reading (rereading) for our trip. We’re not good at organizing our books, but eventually we do find the ones we’re looking for.

So the formal title of my trip will be The Denial of Death at Shenandoah National Park, and I will be offering you, my reader, snippets of nature description/life wisdom/Kierkegaardian dread/astronomical observations.

The whole thing, to quote Roger De Bris, will be drenched with goodies.

‘In mid-2019, Madoff began applying for an early release from his 150-year sentence, given that he was terminally ill…

The records showed that Madoff’s application was blocked more than once by the prison warden and general counsel, on the grounds that Madoff’s offense had been so great and that he had declined to undergo dialysis as recommended by staff.

Medical personnel eventually stated that Madoff met the criteria for compassionate release and the warden agreed to submit the request to the judge in Madoff’s case, even though he recommended against it. In June 2020, Judge Denny Chin denied Madoff’s request, stating that he believed, “Mr. Madoff was never truly remorseful, and that he was only sorry that his life as he knew it was collapsing around him.”’ 

There’s exclusivity, mes petites, and there’s BRUTE exclusivity, which, in close proximity to Pur Sang (“denounce him as a fascist pur sang” – Thomas Mann) makes Scathing Online Schoolmarm wonder just what futurist, vitalist Thing Bugatti’s trying to evoke in the ad copy (there’s exactly one of these vehicles, it’s track-only, and it costs over ten million dollars, so I think ‘ad copy’ isn’t correct) for the new Bolide.

And why is UD, who hasn’t driven a car in thirty years, deep into sixteen cylinder engines?

Simply because, on the verge of leaving for yet another perseid meteor shower viewing/birthday celebration, she has been studying up on the little buggers – learning phrases like Zenithal (stress on first syllable) Hourly Rate, and words like Bolide. Bolides (again, stress is on first syllable) are brilliant meteor fireballs; hence, in the words of Bugatti’s nasty, brutish copywriter, “Driving the Bolide is like riding on a cannonball.” I mean, when you Google “bolide,” you get to one page of definitions, and then immediately you land on Bugatti’s pure bloodlines.

**************

In a much more UD way, I’m also preparing for our trip by reading poems about meteors. Wallace Stevens, in a set of notes about poetry, wrote “A poem is a meteor,” so I guess brief brilliant powerful fireballs that light up existence could be understood literally (the Bugatti) as well as figuratively (a poem), as in

… the strange huge meteor procession, dazzling and
clear, shooting over our heads,(A moment, a moment long, it sail’d its balls of unearth-
ly light over our heads,Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)—Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from
them would I gleam and patch these chants; Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good!
year of forebodings! year of the youth I love! Year of comets and meteors transient and strange!—lo!
even here, one equally transient and strange! As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone,
what is this book,

What am I myself but one of your meteors?

So poems are meteors and we are meteors as we burn brightly and quickly through our lives. Specks in the firmaments, we are nonetheless capable of ever-renewed self-creation:

And when we turned off lanterns to look skyward

for the Perseids (it was meteor season)

a comet rode queenly across the sky

before it arced and fell. Seeing myself

a speck in the firmament, I remembered

that rock may burn suddenly, blaze into flame,

and spin for centuries before it shines

wanting to be remade. Gray rock. The same

that sparkles with mica flecks by day

when breakers slap it clean.

Nothing is new. Nothing alive cannot be altered.

Where there’s light there’s hope, says the poet; we can always want to be remade, to flame up in some new clean self. We are not mere specks in the firmament.

Same idea, different poem: Viewing the perseids, “we are at once unnerved and somehow restored.”

Same, yet another one:

we waited, with nerves
and hearts as much as eyes,
as if we were waiting for new lives
to open up miraculously
or some spark to jolt us
into different ways of thinking.

I think we’re beginning to see a pattern:

Who said, out of nothing,
nothing can come? We do not lie

in a meadow to view the Perseids
but discover, behind a motel,
a vineyard, and gather wherever we go.

And another poet, in this same vein, is wakened/renewed by the meteoric jolt:

This vastness, this vertiginous awareness
mocking gravity on our speck of now,
wakes us with a recalibrating jolt.

But of course there’s the burning out part, too:

— I am like a slip of comet,
Scarce worth discovery, in some corner seen
Bridging the slender difference of two stars,
Come out of space, or suddenly engender’d
By heady elements…

… [The comet] goes out into the cavernous dark.
So I go out: my little sweet is done:
I have drawn heat from this contagious sun:
To not ungentle death now forth I run.

*******************

As for Les UDs – to Shenandoah National Park’s Big Meadows they run, to lie back in beach chairs on a big dark field and see what they can see.

But come now. This is hardly peak criticism. Religious fanaticism can take you much farther. They haven’t even started in on the kool-aid yet.