Commentary

The Paris Bulls

In 1922, a dinner party was held in the Paris Ritz attended by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Serge Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky, and Pablo Picasso. Other than the guest list, no record of the event was thought to have survived. But on a recent trip to the antique bazaars of Idalou, I noticed a red leather folder monogrammed “JPS,” which contained several sheets of vellum covered with a heavy script in black ink. The writing was barely decipherable, but intrigued by the possibility of a revealed secret I bought the folder and its contents for five dollars. It took me a few days to get the hang of the handwriting, which to my surprise proved to be in French. Now even more fascinated, I sent a copy of it to my son who is fluent in that language. A few days later, he returned a translation which turned out to be an incomplete description of that momentous dinner written by its busboy. In so far as I know, this is the first time that this account has appeared in print.

The Lycee Henri IV reminds me of nothingness or thingness, I’m not sure which. But its cafeteria has cockroaches, which is why I took the job at the Ritz. I can have all the food I can steal from the bourgeois parasites. Last night, M. Diaghilev had a dinner in the private room to which I was assigned along with Andre the anarchist waiter.

Proust was the first to arrive at 20:30; he was under the misapprehension that he had been invited for lunch. He was wearing white tie and tails, a red woolen scarf, earmuffs, mittens, galoshes, a raincoat, and a very old fur coat—all of which he kept on through the dinner. His only words to me were, “Close the windows and turn up the heat.” There were no windows in the room and the outside temperature was 28 degrees Celsius. He sat down and pulled up the collar of his coat against his neck. He wheezed several times, put a very large white pill in his mouth, and closed his eyes.

Just then, Joyce entered. He was wearing a flannel shirt, flannel pants, a beret, and glasses as thick as beer steins. He sat down next to Proust.

Joyce.”

Proust opened his eyes. “Proust.”

For the next five minutes there was silence until Joyce said, “Whiskey.” Andre got some for him. “Leave the bottle.” Andre did.

Proust was seized by an avalanche of coughing. Joyce put a handkerchief to his mouth. “My eyes have been bothering me something fierce,” he said.

“That’s nothing. My tongue is brown,” said Proust.

“Really? Let me see it.” Proust stuck out his tongue, which indeed was a muddy brown. “Amazing – never seen anything like it.” Proust nodded with a slight smile.

Picasso then arrived, He was wearing knickers and a rugby shirt. A red bandanna was tied around his neck. He said nothing to either Proust or Joyce, rather he looked at me and said, “I want a waitress, a pretty one.” I looked at Andre who then left in search of a pretty waitress. Andre was remarkably compliant for an anarchist.

“You the painter?” said Joyce over his whiskey glass.

“Where did you get those glasses?” replied Picasso. “Can I see them?”

Joyce ignored the first question, but handed him the glasses. Picasso looked at them carefully and then put them on. He appeared to look closely at Joyce. I couldn’t tell for sure because the glasses were so thick. Just then Andre returned leading a pretty young girl by the hand. I had never seen her before.

“Your waitress, M. Picasso.”

Picasso turned his gaze towards her and looked at her for a long time. Finally, he said, “Amazing. Sit!” She sat. He took a piece of charcoal out of his pocket and began to draw on the white table cloth. He was sketching a portrait of the girl, but it was all screwed up. Her nose was where her ear should be. One eye was above the other. Her head was the shape of an ice cube. I’d never seen anything as ridiculous in my life. After a few minutes Picasso took the glasses off, looked at the girl, shook his head, put his hand on her thigh, put the glasses back on, and resumed drawing.

At this point, M. Diaghilev arrived, accompanied by Stravinsky. Diaghilev was also accompanied by two teen-aged boys with matching blond coiffures. He had an arm around each of their shoulders. He had the biggest and most luminous brown eyes ever seen outside of a pasture.

“Off you go, Carissimi.” He patted each boy on the rump and pushed them out of the room. “Igor, you sit there.” He motioned to the chair he had in mind for the composer. “Pablo, what are you doing?” He looked at his sketch. Picasso was hurriedly adding nostrils the size of the Louvre to the dislocated nose. “Why are you wearing those absurd things on your eyes?” Picasso ignored him, absorbed in his composition.

“Say, Paddy, can I have my glasses back?” said Joyce. “I can’t see anything when I’m not wearing them.”

After a long interval, Picasso looked up and said, “No.”

“Well, that’s alright. I can’t see anything with them on either.”

“You can bring the food now.” Diaghilev looked at Andre who bowed very low. “And bring the wine, too.” I have ordered a wonderful meal and a delicate Alsatian wine.”

“I can’t drink Alsatian wine,” said Proust. It gives me gas.”

“Same thing happens to me,” said Joyce. “And I get terrible headaches and constipation from red meat. Are we having red meat?”

“Remarkable, I can’t tolerate red meat either,” said Proust

Diaghilev didn’t answer. He looked at Stravinsky. “Igor you will eat the meat and drink the wine.”

“Yes, Serge.”

“Good.”

“I just had the Beethoven Opus 131 played in my living room,” said Proust to Stravinsky as an apology for his intolerance to Alsatian wine and red meat.

The beady-eyed musician looked at him with astonishment. The ends of his mustache curled. “The late quartets of Beethoven are an abomination to the senses and the intellect. The man was not only deaf, he was crazy. You had that stuff brought into your living room? You paid musicians to come to your home and play that noise?”

“You didn’t think the Rite of Spring a tad noisy?” said Joyce, but Stravinsky didn’t hear him, being too absorbed in his Beethovian funk.

“If you want to listen to string quartets stick to Haydn.” He folded his arms across his chest. His gaze than caught Picasso’s now almost completed portrait of a plastic surgeon’s nightmare. “Pablo, you need new eye glasses.”

Proust had started to furiously chew his nails in response to Stravinsky’s heretical attack on music’s sanctum sanctorum. He was so nervous that he blurted, “I heard Parsifal, or was it Tristan, at the Opera last week.”

“M. Proust, I had heard that you were a man of taste and discernment. The only evidence I can see in support of that view is your inability to distinguish between Parsifal and Tristan, both of which are pig manure, offal, crap, poison – do you understand me?”

Picasso, who had been paying no attention to Stravinsky’s tirades, finished his drawing. He looked at it intently, both with and without his purloined glasses on, and then satisfied, he signed it “Picasso” and pulled the tablecloth off of the table without even rippling the water in the Ritz’s best crystal glasses. He handed the cloth to the girl.

“This is for you, my dear.” Before she could look at it, he took her in his arms and kissed her with even more warmth than Stravinsky had mustered against Beethoven and Wagner. She did not resist him. After what seemed to Proust and Diaghilev at least a fortnight, he let her go. It took her a moment or two to collect herself, then she looked at her picture.

The smile that had been on her face vanished like virtue in a boy’s school. She seemed about to scream, but didn’t. She dropped the cloth and ran from the room as though afraid that she might become what she was on Picasso’s decadent sketch.

“M. Proust, if you want real music, listen to Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov. Rimsky, the dear man, wasn’t too bright but he could orchestrate like Apollo.”

“The two greatest writers in the world,” said Joyce as he finished the last of the whiskey, “and all we can talk about is lumbago.”

“I was 10 when I first got asthma, as my mother was leaving my bedroom without kissing me as she had always done every day of my life – my memories of which go back to a glass of green tea she gave me on the day after my second birthday, a day of poignant memory because the mystery tree in our arbor bloomed for the first time in a century, worried that a mild catarrh she had noticed while I was eating my birthday cake might develop into a bronchial affliction, which she knew to be a family weakness – wheezes followed her departure from the room, though she did not hear them, the rustling of the leaves of the mystery tree obscured them, though I felt she should have heard them anyway since I certainly was aware of this terrible new manifestation, terrible as the green tea was delicious, invoking some primal memory of fear and delight which I still carry like a cross of diamonds driving me at once to both poles though I…”

Proust continued this sentence for at least another hour. Joyce had passed out at its beginning, done in by the whiskey and the green tea. Diaghilev ate both Joyce’s and Proust’s meat; he tried to get Stravinsky’s, but the composer had sufficiently recovered from his gray study to ward him off. Picasso was too busy inspecting everything in the room with his new glasses to eat or drink anything. I tried desperately to escape from this dinner of decline, but could find no exit, so I… The manuscript breaks off at this point leaving us to speculate how the affair ended and what its significance in art might be.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: The Paris Bulls. Lubbock Magazine (June):32-33, 1997.

Funding For The Arts

It is revealed wisdom among the enlightened that government (especially federal government) funding of the arts is a public good and that only the worst Philistines oppose it. It is also generally accepted that government sponsorship of the arts in the United States is so low that it ranks below that of San Marino.

I hold it to be true (though proving so is harder than might be imagined) that art serves the public good, and that one cannot be educated without knowledge of all the arts, and that the quality of life is immeasurably bettered when the arts thrive. Because the United States often does not seem to value its great artists as much as most other countries in the Western tradition, it does not follow that the overall good will be helped by the establishment of a federal arts bureaucracy dedicated to overcoming a supposed lack of support from an indifferent populace. In fact, I think such an establishment degrades the arts.

Supporters of the National Endowment for the Arts often argue that without its meager budget there would be no federal support for the arts. You will hear this argument echoed by our symphony orchestras and opera companies until their next fund raiser when they recall that contributions to them are tax-deductible. Charitable contributions of all kinds in this country amount to close to 200-billion dollars. This represents about an 80-billion-dollar subsidy on the part of the government to charity. It is difficult to know how much of these tax-subsidized gifts go to the arts, but if it’s only five percent, then the indirect federal subsidy to the arts in the form of tax forgiveness is more than ten times the budget of the N.E.A. Furthermore, most of the income of our charitable organizations escapes taxation not only from the federal government, but from state and local governments as well. This untaxed income is additional billions of subsidies. Some of the downtown areas of our major cities are largely off the tax rolls because they are owned by tax-exempt organizations. Thus, it is meaningless to compare funding of the arts in this country to funding in all other developed nations. Our system is unique. No other country has our charitable tradition. It is one of our most admirable traits. Of course, our system of indirect subsidy through tax forgiveness doesn’t preclude direct subsidy by a federal arts commission. What should preclude it is an understanding of the uneasy and necessarily adversarial relationship between the government and the artist. Great art tends to be subversive. The government’s reaction to the subversive requires no elaboration.

Define art. It’s not so easy. If you’re going to hand out taxpayer’s money for the arts, someone will have to do it. Are you comfortable with Senator X or Congressman Y making that decision? If you support the N.E.A., you’ll have to live with congressional arbiters of art. What about decency? Are we going to fund “indecent” art? Who will define “indecent?” If we deny “indecent” and “degenerative” art federal funding, we’ll probably miss some of the greatest stuff that will come our way while funding “junk food” art. Remember that the work of the greatest writer of English prose in this century was widely held to be indecent, was denied entry to the U.S. for years, and was burned by the Post Office. It is impossible to have a national arts agency without some form of censorship, no matter how disguised.

Many of our art museums, symphonies, and opera companies-alas-are little more than artistic graveyards, devoted mainly to warehousing old art. The Metropolitan Opera, for example, endlessly repeats Aida and La Boheme to full houses charging up to $150 or more a ticket while occasionally mounting a new opera that nobody wants to hear.There’s nothing wrong with Aida and Boheme, but I don’t see why performances of them should be directly subsidized by the government, though the Met obviously thinks they should. It’s enough that when I make a contribution to the Met, which I annually have done for more than 30 years, that the government pays for a portion of it.

Most of our museums of fine arts have the charm of a sepulcher. I get terminally depressed on touring an art museum and seeing embalmed art, no matter how grand. Museums remove art from the world; they rarely if ever contribute towards its creation, but they all want N.E.A. money. Do you think that Van Gogh, who never sold a painting in his life (well, perhaps one), would get N.E.A. funding were he alive today? (Of course, at age145, he might not be as productive as he was when he was younger.)

The government generously supports scientific research; why shouldn’t it do the same for the arts? Scientific research potentially benefits all and therefore deserves direct public support. These benefits are tangible and require no serpentine justification as does arguing that supporting an experimental ballet company potentially benefits all, which it clearly does not. Whether the Metropolitan Opera mounts a new production of anything is a matter of indifference to the vast body of mankind; curing cancer is not. Furthermore, modem science is so expensive that it is impossible without massive governmental underwriting.

Do not think that government’s support of science does not impose a heavy burden on those it supports. The government uses the money it distributes to universities and institutes as a club to induce behavior that our academies would otherwise not permit and which would otherwise be illegal. For example, the School of Music can be forced to modify its behavior at the behest of the government because the Medical School has federal grants. The government says to the University, do as you wish, but if you don’t comply with our regulations (even if they apply only to a part of the university not receiving federal money), you are not eligible for federal support at any of your components. The School of Music, of course, is forced to capitulate. The obverse of this is that a recalcitrant group of musicians can cost the chemists their research money. Despite all the social engineering layered on federal support for the sciences, most would conclude that the good outweighs the bad.

But government support for science and the public’s abysmal understanding of science presents politicians with endless opportunities for grandstanding before the voters. President Clinton’s ban on federally supported research into human cloning is a fine example of mindless opportunism at the expense of science. There was no discussion of the issues involved, no definition of the science included in such a ban, just a blanket interdict on any kind of scientific research that some bureaucrat might think was related to whatever the president had in mind. The ban would have stopped work on some of the most important problems in medical research. Most scientists don’t want to clone Adolf Hitler, but they might like to clone Mr. Gonzalez’ kidney so he can get a transplant he can’t reject and thus get off dialysis, or better yet repair his own diseased kidney. Clinton’s ban would apply to this work as well as that by the boys from Brazil.

Scientists have been bought by the government and have to put up with intrusions like this. On balance, the public good prevails over the nonsense, but the unseemliness of the business is disturbing. Every year, each disease group (e.g., the American Heart Association, the National Kidney Foundation, etc.) lobbies Congress for more money for their favorite projects the same way that every other special interest group petitions Congress for more pork, ultimately at the expense of someone else. Artists who go on the federal dole will also be subject to this kind of intervention and pork barreling; there is no way to avoid it. One can picture the poets descending on Congress, arguing that the playwrights are getting too much money. I can also see a sympathetic senator from an enlightened state promising the poets more money if only they will be a little more comprehensible.

The arts in this country are in remarkably good shape. They are well-supported by our unique combination of private and indirect public funding. The N.E.A.’s budget-never large- has been diminished for all the wrong reasons by the Congress which, in the main, is incapable of understanding art and which in any case, has a function unrelated and inherently adversarial to art. Even if they do so for the wrong reasons, Congress would do well to abolish the agency and the arts would accordingly be better off.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: Funding For The Arts. Lubbock Magazine (June):26-27, 1996

Giacomo Meyerbeer Lives

Recently, when in London I went to see An­drew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. While I had, of course, heard some of his music on the radio and was well aware of his astounding popularity and fame, I had never previously attended a performance of any of his works. His two-act musical is based on Billy Wilder’s celebrated movie of the same name. For some time after the performance ended I triedto figure out the secret of its (and its author’s) success. Finally, it came to me. Andrew Lloyd Webber is really Giacomo Meyerbeer.

But first Sunset Bou­levard, we’ll get to Meyerbeer in a bit. It was brilliant in every aspect save content. The sets were daz­zling. They went up and down, backwards and for­wards; they were more responsive than an ardent lover. There was a silent movie star’s mansion that Mary Pickford would have loved. The Paramount studio set was big enough to really film De Mille’s Samson and Delilah which was what was supposed to be going on there. There was on old car that must have cost more than one day of Michael Jordan’s salary. The acting and singing were first rate, if you ignored what was being sung. The dic­tion from the 100% British cast was more American than lox and bagels. The light­ing was as subtle as a presidential press conference. The director even figured out how to depict on stage Wilder’s famous shot of Joe Gillis’s dead body floating face down in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool. The audience loved every bit of the thing and gave it a standing ovation after the final curtain. Apparently, a seated ovation is no longer allowed in any part of the civilized world. My position on this practice is that after all the money I paid for my seat, I won’t leave it any sooner than necessary.

Anyway, the crowd thought Sun­set Boulevard was great, even though there was not a tune in it that would stay in your head for longer than a yawn or an emotion that hadn’t been crafted to appeal to a heart of saccharin. Musical and theatrical cliches fell like dandruff in a Head and Shoulders ad. So why do so many people like Webber’s cantilevered confections and their cousins like Les Miserables? I know I saw Les Miz (as the cognoscenti call it) on Broadway because I recently found a ticket stub with its name on it in the jacket pocket of my one and only grey flannel suit, but its memory has fled my mind like that of a dental appoint­ment. Are these creaking musicals popu­lar because you can fool some of the people all of the time? The second part of Lincoln’s famous syllogism seems to work in politics and advertising, but I don’t think it explains tastes in art. If you believe as I do, Verdi’s admonition to an aspiring com­poser that one should pay no attention to the critics, but rather should look to the box office because the theater was meant to be full, you’ll be tempted to skip this piece to a more thoughtful part of the magazine, like the wine column or the society page if I don’t promptly explain.

Here’s where Meyerbeer comes in. He was born Jacob Liebmann Beer in 1791 in Berlin. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish banker. He took the name Meyerbeer after receiving a legacy from a wealthy relative named Meyer. In this, he seems to be ahead of even our time. We name buildings and professorships after donors, people keep their names after they take the money. Fund raisers among you take heed of a fertile field begging for cul­tivation. Meyerbeer showed musical tal­ent at an early age and received a rigor­ous musical education under the tutelage of a number of prominent pedagogues. His skill as a pianist was so formidable that he performed Mozart’s D minor pi­ano concerto in public at the age of seven. But he wanted to be a composer, not a vir­tuoso, so he wrote operas.

After several of his operas had been produced with­out much success, Salieri (you remember him from the movie about Mozart) advised him to go to Italy where he could learn how to write for the voice. In 1815, he went to Venice where­upon he decided to become Rossini. Surprisingly, since the job was already taken, he achieved some success. This success did not make him happy, as is success’s wont. Back in Germany, he was viewed as a changeling by those whose opinions he valued (foremost among these was his boyhood friend, Carl Maria von Weber) because he wasn’t writing German opera. He decided to change musical direction, but he didn’t know which way to go.

The decisive event in his career was his move to Paris (he spent most of the rest of his life there) after the 1826 French premiere of his most popular Ital­ian opera, Il crociatto in Egitto. Over the next five years, he wrote no operas as he metamorphosed from an Italian caterpil­lar into a Parisian butterfly. He must have been as adaptable as a floppy disk. His great discovery was that there was a bull market for bloated five-act operas that re­quired incredible vocal virtuosity, made use of exotic historical plots, had elaborate ballets which didn’t have much relationship to the story, and which occasionally con­tained interesting and good music. He raised eclecticism to the level of an art form, or at least to that of a corporate colossus. Even his name is eclectic. He was like a musical Bill Gates, or better, a nineteenth-century Andrew Lloyd Webber. In short, he invented Grand Opera. He also devel­oped a foolproof scheme for dealing with the press – he bribed them.

His operas were longer than any­one else’s. They had a bigger chorus, big­ger sets, more principal singers who had to be brilliant technicians to negotiate his bravura vocal line, more dancers, and most importantly, more customers. Other composers paid him the most sincere form of flattery – they hated him. By all ac­counts, Meyerbeer was a very nice man. He went way out of his way to help Wagner who after accepting his aid attacked him viciously making him the target of anti-Semitic abuse. One expects that from Wagner, but even Verdi said bad things about him.

Meyerbeer influenced the work of all the great operatic composers who came after him. Berlioz, Wagner, Verdi, and Puccini all produced works modeled after Meyerbeer. Verdi eventually became much better at the style than its founder. Two of his greatest works, Don Carlo and Aida, are stock Meyerbeer transformed into giant works of art by a genius who was deter­mined to out Meyerbeer Meyerbeer.

Meyerbeer was not without musi­cal ability, but the machinery of his productions often got in the way of his talent or even made good music secondary. He could, on occasion, rise to considerable heights. The fourth act of Les Huguenots is masterful. The tenor aria O Paradis from his last opera L’Africaine is worthy of Verdi. But in general, he was too busy inventing himself to be a real musical force. First a German, then an Italian, then a Frenchman, again a German (he did some work in Berlin after moving to Paris), and once more a Frenchman this musical chameleon suffered a predictable fate. After his death, performances of his works gradually diminished until by the first third of the twentieth century, they had virtually ceased. What had once seemed so novel and exciting, became bor­ing with repetition. More recently, there have been a few revivals of his operas, but they remain curiosities. There are only two commercial recordings of his operas available—one of Les Huguenots recorded in 1969 and one of Le Prophete recorded in 1976. Otherwise all is silence.

Verdi was right when he said the box office was the only critic that counted. But it’s a longitudinal box office. The votes take generations to be tallied. At any one moment in time, the box office may mislead. But its verdict is self-cor­recting. The public always undeceives itself given time. Meyerbeer is a spec­tacular example of a great flash-in-the-pan (perhaps a time exposure is a better metaphor). Meyerbeer’s fate, I suspect, awaits Andrew Lloyd Webber’s oeuvre. But better a has been than a never was.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: Giacomo Meyerbeer Lives.Lubbock Magazine (Nov):32-33, 1996.

ET Don’t Phone Home (Cheap cell phones have made this much worse – NK 2008)

Contrary to widely held belief, the purpose of language is not communication. Whatever part of the academy that is responsible for this sort of thing estimates that 85% of all conversations are about nothing at all; they seem to serve some inner human need to babble incessantly. That still leaves a respectable 15% for content. But if the phone is used, information exchange ceases entirely.

About 20 years ago, I made the only good investment in my lifelong battle with THE MARKET. I bought two life memberships in the United and American Airlines airport clubs. They cost around $250 each including a card for my wife. Today they run about $4500. These lounges offered a refuge from the chaos of the rest of the airport, but no longer. Because the main function of these clubs is to provide a place to wait for delayed flights (which means virtually every flight) telephones are strategically placed in them making it hard not to be forced to listen to your fellow travelers’ phone calls.

To use these phones, you need a credit card. Two decades of involuntary eavesdropping has proven that nobody makes a call from an airline club on his own dime or quarter or whatever. The boss always pays, or if the boss is making the call, it’s tax deductible as a business expense. Furthermore, the call has nothing to do with business, or life in general for that matter.

A typical conversation goes like this,“Hello, Mommy. This is Johnny.” Johnny is 50 years old and has a Ph.D. in Cosmology from Columbia. He’s using the Department of Physics’ credit card. “I’m in the airport, Mommy.” Of course he’s in the airport; he called her 30 minutes earlier just before he left home. “No, nothing’s wrong. My plane is late.” She knew that before he called. “Where am I going? Let me check.” He’s already told her five times, but she wasn’t listening. “Portland. Maine or Oregon? Wait let me check.” She really doesn’t care which Portland he’s going to, but can’t think of anything else to say. “How’s the weather? Same as where you are.” They live in the same town, which he won’t leave for another three hours because the second officer on the 727 he’s flying (who’s only on board because the union has successfully feather-bedded the plane) is stuck in the Portland he’s not going to. The conversation continues for another 90 minutes, afflicting everyone in earshot with breath-holding and urinary retention. But at least he doesn’t shout.

The captain of industry, on the other hand, wants everybody in the club to hear everything he says, so he bellows like a tobacco auctioneer.

“Hello, Wilma. Get me Peggy. Peggy, this is me. Did you check the hotel reservation? Four times. Is that enough for the Ritz? The Ritz, you know that’s where I always stay in Paris.” She knows that, of course. “Did you make the reservation for Friday at Tour D’Argent?” He’ll cancel it when he gets to Paris. “Did we get the crystal pitchers for the board meeting?” The meeting is not for two months, by which time he will have forgotten about the water delivery system. Everybody in the south end of the club is now bleeding from the ears. “Did Sulka send my ties? Did the laundry get the gravy off my cuffs? Did you get the tickets for the Bulls’ game?” He hates basketball. “Did you tell the White House I couldn’t make it?” Und so weiter. The only question he didn’t ask was whether Bayreuth wants him to sing Wotan in the next Ring cycle.

Until recently, however, it was possible to find a nook or corner in the club that was a few feet from a phone, but technology has sealed that escape route I refer to the cellular phone. Because everybody’s got a credit card and because a cell phone is more expensive to use than the conventional variety, every au courant traveler has to have one. Thus, one cannot escape from the telephone unless you succeed in getting yourself arrested, whereupon you’ll be limited to one call. The airline clubs now have members speaking with excitement and volubility in every square foot of the place. The men’s room sounds like Fafner’s rumblings in his cave because of the conversations emanating from the stalls, which bounce off the tiles like acoustic pinballs. Adding to the pinball effects are the digital beeps coming from the Motorolas and Nokias which have become the new solitary sin.

When the airplane finally does decide to leave, you will be surrounded by phone-wielding passengers who are calling for the weather report or the time as they board the plane. When the aircraft takes off, cell phones are banned for the duration of the trip. But blessed relief is not at hand because the first thing you see as you sit down is a telephone, embedded in the back of the seat in front of you like a smirk. If you’re flying coach, there may be only one phone for three seats. This rationing often starts a food fight as passengers reach for the smarmy instrument, each intent on being the first to call his travel agent to find out how late the plane is likely to be. The airlines purposely provided only one phone for three passengers so that two would always have to listen to the third’s conversation. That the cost of making a call from an airplane is even more expensive than using a cell phone has made their use as irresistible as chocolate fudge to a dieter.

But when it comes to conspicuous cell phone consumption, no one can touch the masters of the seemingly useless, the Italians. A sweater tied around his neck by its sleeves, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Marcello purrs into the smallest cell phone yet constructed as the ferry leaves the pier in Naples at the start of its 45-minute trip to Capri. I haven’t a hint of what he and every other male on the boat is saying (cell phones seem to be a predominantly male preoccupation in voluptuous Italy), but it sounds wonderful. La lingua degli angeli.

Standing on the Piazza San Marco, surrounded by pigeons and tourists, the Grand Canal at my back, I can tell the Italians from the visitors by their multicolored telephones. I convince myself that they are all making assignations for the afternoon, giving meaning to their three-hour lunch breaks. What drives me mad in the U.S. sounds like a Rossini opera on the Latin peninsula. No one pays much attention to the words, one listens to the music. Since Americans will not give up their fatuous phones, life can only be made tolerable by teaching them Italian, as long as I don’t have to learn it.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: ET Don’t Phone Home. Lubbock Magazine (Mar):30-31, 1997.

Everything’s Got a Reason, If Only You Can Find It

For a decade I’ve been a chairman. Last month I got a new ID card that declared I was now a chairperson. Since I believe in the inexorable march of progress I’m sure that this appellationary alteration will serve a noble end even if I’m clueless as to what it might be. So, like a true academic, I’ve decided to help purge the language of bad words although I don’t why I’m doing so or why the words are bad. While I’ve researched many sources, I am especially indebted to The American Journal of Bowdlerization for much of what follows and which I hope can be expanded into a sabbatical proposal.

Let’s start with the obnoxious chairman. No alternatives are offered by the AJB, chair and chairperson. Neither is good enough. A chair is an inanimate, a piece of furniture. Now I readily admit that a lot of chairmen resemble inanimate objects, but it’s not nice to rub our faces in it. That leaves chairperson – person? – SON? No way Jose. That’s as bad as chairman. Persit, that’s the only solution. It will offend no one not given to foolish introspection. Thus instead of being inanimate or gender specific one can be the chairpersit of the department.

Now for some tough ones. What are we going to do with man and woman? The AJB proscribes man, but is mute about woman. Are they mad? Don’t they know that woman means ‘of man’? Besides being linguistically offensive, woman is anatomically incorrect. With the exception of the first couple (I refer to Adam and Eve, not the Clintons), men are of women not the other way around.

Consider woman. The second syllable is obviously outre. If we can’t have policeman or fireman or salesman, we can’t have woman. What to put in its place? Wopersit though inoffensive seems charmless. Wo— admits to lack of imagination. I think we must eliminate all vestige of the hated three letters and use wo – one wo, two wos.

Man, thus, is a snap, duck soup, a cinch. Wowo for man, meaning of woman-oops, of wo. The AJB has good intentions but keeps slipping up. They recommend huMANity for mankind and perSONpower for manpower; these changes are, of course no changes at all. The correct words should by now be obvious. Girl and boy are problems to many thoughtful persits. Just think how offensively these words are sometimes used. Some would replace girl with prewoman, which of course should be prewo and eliminate boy altogether. While I sympathize with this view, I would retain girl and boy provided the persit in question has a medical certificate documenting that puberty has not commenced. We should avoid even the appearance of unreasonableness.

The AJB advises Happy Holidays for Merry Christmas. This is the ‘Put the X back in Xmas’ approach. Sober persit I am, I would allow Merry Christmas provided that a baptismal certificate is available from the persit to whom the salutation is addressed. In addition, I would limit the expression solely to the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Holiday should be avoided since it means ‘holy day’ and might offend atheists.

The third person singular is another thorny issue. He/she and he or she are recherche as is mixing singular and plural pronouns; eg: “Whenever a person (sic) says they are innocent.” We need a new word, a gender neutral third person singular pronoun.

Having come up with persit, I am reluctant to try for a home run again. I suggest a federally funded task force to supply the lacking word. In general, however, I find myself in agreement with the AJB’s guidelines for revised speech. Thinking-impaired for stupid, sex worker for call girl, land-of-one’s birth for fatherland or motherland (naturalized citizens will have to tough it out), height-deprived obstructor for shortstop, etc.

Now there are those who say that all this mucking around with language has to lead to some demonstrable good to be justified and that no one has provided any such evidence. To which I reply balderdash. The search for the mot juste is a justifiable end in itself. On a more practicable level, policing the language provides work opportunities for ability-impaired academics who might otherwise be employably-challenged.

We must not give offense. Therefore the safest course is never to say or write anything. Humming and doodling are okay. Reading should be closely regulated, for obvious reasons.

Aristophanes, Swift, and lesser satirists should be expunged from the curriculum since the purpose of satire is to offend and that’s not nice.

By the way, my editor has just informed me that the last syllable of my last name has got to go and so do I.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: Everything’s Got a Reason, If Only You Can Find It. Lubbock Magazine

(Dec):27, 1995.

Seminars in Nephrology

VOL. III, NO. 2 JUNE 1983

The Ultimate Problem

Mr. Lincoln (not his name) was a 54-year-old man with metastatic prostatic can­cer and chronic renal failure. He had been on dialysis for a number of years and, for a while, had done well. When the diagnosis of metastatic prostatic carcinoma was made, he underwent a bi­lateral orchiectomy. He refused chemotherapy, however. For a while, he continued to do well de­spite the obvious presence of cancer. Another hos­pitalization was required to treat congestive heart failure. During this time the patient lost 30 lb of edema as a result of vigorous dialysis therapy. He had some pain from his tumor, but in general was reasonably comfortable.

Two weeks after his discharge he was readmitted because of abdominal pain. His tumor mass had obviously enlarged. In addition, he had developed an abdominal wound which appeared to be drain­ing feces. Further evaluation demonstrated a fis­tula between the rectum, the bladder, and the skin. Medical oncology was consulted but felt there was no effective treatment they could offer this man. The patient, who was highly intelligent and in complete possession of all his faculties at all times, was apprised of his situation. He understood that he had an untreatable cancer and that all we could offer was relief of pain. We asked if he would be happier if he were discharged from the hospital with an appropriate prescription for pain relief. He stated that he would prefer to remain in the hospi­tal. We readily agreed to this and then discussed the matter of continuing his dialysis treatment. We told him that, if he wished, we would continue to dialyze him as vigorously as we had in the past, but that if he felt such treatment would only allow him to die a painful death (with the passage of each day his pain became progressively severe) we would stop dialyzing him. We further explained to him that he could take as much time as he wished in making a decision and that regardless of the de­cision he made he could change his mind. He in­quired as to how long we thought he would live and in what condition if we continued dialysis and asked the same information if we were to discon­tinue this treatment. We gave him our best estimate while explaining that it contained a considerable margin of error.

He thought about his options for about five days, and then told us on rounds that he thought he would prefer to stop dialysis. We told him again that if at any time he changed his mind we would restart his artificial kidney treatment. He said he understood this and thanked us for our concern.

Mr. Lincoln, who was a very proud man, had three children who were very fond of him. Despite this he had avoided them during this terminal phase of his illness. While never expressed, we felt that it was his desire not to be a burden on his family. From talking to his children, it was quite obvious that they did not consider him a burden and wished to spend more time with him. We asked him if he would mind if we called them and informed them of his decision to stop dialysis. He said he had no objection. We called his children and they immediately came to the hospital.

During the last few weeks of his life, Mr. Lin­coln had formed an especially close relationship with one of the medical students on my service. He told the student that he would like to have a beer with him. He also expressed a wish to have a bowl of coconut ice cream. The student obtained the ice cream and two cans of beer and they spent part of a Saturday afternoon together drinking the beer, eat­ing the ice cream, and talking. Mr. Lincoln’s daughter was in the hospital that day and asked if she could spend the night with her father. This was arranged and she slept in his room that night. During the evening, the house staff asked Mr. Lin­coln if there was anything that he would like to have. He said that he would really enjoy a glass of orange juice. This was obtained and he drank it with relish. Shortly thereafter, he went to sleep with his daughter in the room. At 6:00 in the morning the nurses noted that he was dead. It had been three days since his last dialysis. On Saturday morning, his serum potassium was 6.7 mEq/L. While we can’t be certain, it seems highly likely that Mr. Lincoln died from the cardiac effects of hyperkalemia. The source of the excess potas­sium, of course, was dietary.

In thinking about Mr. Lincoln, a number of questions keep recurring. I have the answers to none of them, but they are important questions nonetheless. Did Mr. Lincoln die as the result of euthanasia? Did he commit suicide? Did he die from natural causes? Clearly, if he had not stopped dialysis and had not consumed foods high in potas­sium he would not have died when he did. As I have said, he was highly intelligent, and while we did not discuss this, I have no doubt that he was aware that orange juice is high in potassium. I know we were also aware, though we were not thinking about that when we gave him the juice. If we had given him potassium intravenously, that clearly would have been euthanasia. How different is it to give him food and drink high in potassium when he had no renal function and was not receiv­ing dialysis treatment? Giving him cyanide by mouth would have been legally and morally wrong, but giving him dietary potassium seems to be all right.

Last, given that Mr. Lincoln had untreatable cancer, he was in a sense fortunate to have chronic renal failure. He had the option to stop dialysis and die peacefully and at a time of his choosing. If he had had metastatic carcinoma without chronic renal failure, his death would have taken a considerably longer time and been associated with much more pain than he experienced. Regardless of his wishes, we would have only been able to treat his pain while waiting for his disease to kill him. The problems I am raising are as obvious as their solu­tions are elusive. We can relieve pain and suf­fering, but only to a point. The patient can, in es­sence, take his own life when he has widespread cancer if he is fortunate enough to have a disease like chronic renal failure. He cannot take it by a more active course. I cannot even begin to compe­tently discuss a problem which has troubled theologians and philosophers for centuries. But the distinctions between what is permissible and what is not sometimes appear precious. All I do know with certainty is that we helped Mr. Lincoln and that he knew we were helping him and was grate­ful for our efforts. I feel good about the way things worked out.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: The Ultimate Problem. Sem Nephrol 3:75, 1983.

We Lose Money on Every Car We Sell But Make It Up In Volume or The Accountant Ascendant

Losing money on every car but making it up with volume was the marketing strategy mockingly attributed to General Motors a generation ago. Surprisingly it turns out to contain the key to the closest universal truth yet promulgated by our fallible species; i.e. if you control the numbers you control the world. You can make people retroactively happy. You can do anything.

Consider Social Security. It appears to be growing broke. The realities of American life seem to preclude discussion of this problem by anyone in authority; so federal commissions are threatened. Whenever the government sets up a commission to deal with something important they are embracing the white feather. Yet the accountants are quietly rushing to the rescue with a fix breathtaking in its simplicity and implications.

They propose, as you may have heard, that the government which annually adjusts Social Security payments for inflation has been systematically overestimating the inflation rate and thus the cost of living increases given Social Security recipients for decades. Reducing the annual cost of living increase by 1.1%, which is what the accountants believe the inflationary overestimate to be (actually they picked 1.1 arbitrarily from a range of 0.6 to 1.8%), eliminates three quarters of the Social Security shortfall projected to occur when the baby boomers retire (baby boomers has the same resonance as a murmuration of marsupials). No pain, lots of gain. But think about the implications of this adjustment.

Readjusting inflation downwards over the past few decades requires rewriting a lot of history. If inflation has been less than stated by more than 1% a year, the wages of American workers have gained ground over the past 20 years, rather than the reverse. In other words, their real wages have been much more than they thought. All those workers who have been unhappy with their economic lot will have to become retrospectively happy. Alternatively, they could sue someone for making them unhappy when they should have been delirious with delight. No wonder Bob Dole lost; he was telling us we should feel worse than we do when the truth is that we really should feel better. Bill Clinton will have to renounce the pain he felt four years ago even though it got him elected.

Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve will also have to redo the past. They have been fixated on the inflationary effects of too rapid economic growth. They threaten to raise interest rates any time the gross domestic product seems to be growing faster than a coral reef. Well it turns out that the economy has been speeding along like a runaway race horse without any impact on inflation and without the Fed knowing what was happening ever since Jimmy Carter decided to make being an ex-president his life’s work. The truth seems that we can safely lower interest rates without penalty until the banks are almost paying us to take their money.

Having shown that the accountant is omnipotent, I will now use the magic and romance of double entry bookkeeping to show how we can spend ourselves rich, which is the so far unrealized goal of every liberal democracy. Not too long ago Time or Newsweek, they’re indistinguishable to me, was carrying on about depression at such length that I was getting depressed until a dollar sign caught my eye. Depression (the disease not the economy) was said to be costing the country around 100 billion dollars. I was very impressed; that amount is more than 10% of the national medical care bill. I decided to see what other diseases were costing us. Of course I couldn’t consider diseases as obscure as acute intermittent porphyria, but I did tally the cost of every disorder that had at least one special interest group devoted to it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the direct and indirect costs of disease in America come to three times the gross domestic product, (GDP is currently about 7.5 trillion dollars). Here was a real investment opportunity. Most experts have been worried about the high cost of American medicine, about 15% of GDP. They want us to spend less. It should be obvious that we should spend much more. If we triple or quadruple what we spend on medical research and health care we should eliminate human disease, or at least vastly reduce it. Let’s think positively and assume we’ll cure or prevent everything. This would raise our national income from about seven and a half trillion dollars to about 30 trillion. All this for a measly cost of three to four trillion.

Medical care is, of course, just the start. Everything we do costs something. I’m sure that when these costs are calculated they will also exceed what we spend on them, though I admit some of them might not exceed GDP. Biggies like pollution and occupational injury will likely amount to a multiplier of national income, however. Thus, we must increase spending on the environment until we are blue from cleanliness and eliminate every hazard from life until accidents are impossible. Another gigantic economic benefit that also needs to be factored in is that this spending on medical care, pollution, occupational safety, etc will create new businesses and jobs. More entrepreneurs will become billionaires, most of us can become as rich as Bill Gates. Unemployment will be a mystic memory.

I hope you see how the conservatives have gotten everything backwards. Rather than reducing spending and taxes we should increase them. Taxing and spending can only make us rich because the more we spend the more we make, just like GM.

By spending more and more we can only increase our net income. Accurate accounting holds the solution to everything; the more something costs the more profit there is in it if only we will invest in America. Dr Pangloss didn’t quite get it right. I envision a future that is better than the best of all possible worlds. Future columns will discuss investment opportunities in the Brooklyn Bridge, the Philosopher’s Stone, and perpetual motion.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: We Lose Money on Every Car We Sell But Make It Up in Volume or The Accountant Ascendant. Lubbock Magazine (February): 22-23, 1997.

The Ghost in the Machine – A Cautionary Tale

It all started a couple of years ago on a Saturday afternoon. I turned on the radio to listen to the weekly Metropolitan Opera broadcast, forgetting that Parsifal was scheduled. Being comfortably settled in a stuffed reclining chair, I was too lazy to turn the radio off. Besides, nothing can put you to sleep faster than Wagner. No sooner had the music started than I conked out. A couple of hours later, I woke up with a terrible toothache. The first act of Parsifal was still oozing from my speakers. I called my dentist who agreed to see me immediately; the weather was too bad for golf, which explained his availability. A few minutes later, I was in his chair after having had enough X-rays to cure two cancers.

“Root canal,” he said after looking at the films.

“You always say that,” I opined. He ignored my comment and proceeded to fill a syringe with enough anesthetic to make me numb to the waist.

“Wait,” I said, unwilling to be narcotized for a week. “Turn on the radio.” He did. The first act of Parsifal was still on. “God never made a pain that could stand up to that,” I said pointing to the radio.

The dental work took an hour. I felt nothing. Wagner’s slow, slower, and slowest tempos had turned my brain to Jell-O. I wondered if I shouldn’t have opted for the anesthetic after all. When I left the dentist’s office, the first act of Parsifal was still coming from my car radio which I always leave on.

After entering my house, my jaw started to ache. I turned on my stereo, set the volume as loud as my three amplifiers (1200 watts) and six speakers would reach allowing me to get the maximum anesthetic effect that the first act of Parsifal could deliver. It worked. I was immediately numb. Three hours later, the first act of Parsifal still not concluded, I figured could handle any residual pain sans Wagner. I turned off the stereo and went about my usual Saturday night activities.

On Sunday, I stayed home. Monday morning, I got into my car to drive to work. The radio started up as usual. The first act of Parsifal was still on. Strange, I thought, I don’t remember it being this long. But I really had never paid much attention to the opera, so maybe it was just a little bit longer than the rest of Wagner’s oeuvre. That evening as I drove home, the first act of Parsifal was still coming from my radio. Now I was sure something untoward was afoot. I turned the radio off to allow my brain to clear sufficiently to analyze what had happened. No explanation came to mind.

When I entered my house, I was afraid to turn on the radio for fear that the first act of Parsifal might still be on. But eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I turned the thing on. You can imagine my relief when not a trace of Wagner emanated from my speakers. KOHM was in the middle of a Frank Bridge festival. Thus, the problem seemed solved even if I could not explain it.

I was halfway to work the next morning when I turned the car radio back on, hoping to miss the end of whatever NPR was playing when to my amazement I encountered the first act of Parsifal. It now hit me that my car radio had contracted a persistent infection. I had heard about people being infected by Wagner, but never a machine. What might the cure be? The only thing I could think of was to put the radio at prolonged rest. So I turned it off, planning to keep it inactive for at least a month. Again I was amazed; it wouldn’t go off. Not only would it not quit, but the first act of Parsifal was now coming from every position on the dial. The infection had spread. The only way I could make the thing shut up was to turn off the ignition. That was not a long-term solution, however. In fact, it proved not to be a short-term fix either. When I turned off the ignition upon returning home that night, the first act of Parsifal continued to drone from the car’s speakers. What was I to do now? You could hear lugubrious leitmotifs all over the house. If I moved the car out of the garage onto the street, the neighbors would probably call the police. After a while, my dogs started to howl, the cat ran away, the parrot went permanently mute, and all my tropical fish died. I had to get rid of the car, but who would buy a car that was chronically infected with the first act of Parsifal?

After the worst night of my life, I called the National Kidney Foundation. They have a program that accepts used cars as donations. They were really interested when I described my almost new car, until I got to the Parsifal problem.

“This type of disease is outside the purview of the NKF,” said the foundation’s spokesman. He then hung up the phone before I could beg him to take the car.

The only course was euthanasia. I took the car to my vet and had him put it to sleep. It was a total loss. I immediately bought a new car, but only after trying out its radio. To my relief, the Frank Bridge festival was still being broadcast by KOHM.

When I got home, I turned on the TV to watch Sesame Sweet, but the picture tube was dark while the first act of Parsifal snaked from the set’s speaker. The first act of Parsifal was also on every radio and TV in the house. It was even on the house’s intercom. I had destroyed the car too late to prevent contagion. I turned off every device in the house attached to a speaker and darkened the house. The place was quiet for a few days. I felt comfortable enough to turn the lights on. The calm persisted. At six the next morning, my alarm clock went off as usual, but instead of the electronic beep, I was roused by the first act of Parsifal. Like a string of firecrackers, every speaker in the house took up the first act of Parsifal in a sequence of belching tubas and guttural barks masquerading as singing. I dressed as fast as I could and fled my contaminated house.

What was I to do? Burning down your own home is illegal – I think. Before I could ponder my predicament further, the first act of Parsifal came unbidden from the speakers of my new car’s stereo system like quicksand at a Tupperware party. The revelation of Oedipus’s descent was a mere bagatelle compared to the emotion that this sound provoked in my breast. My old car had infected my house, which in turn had infected my new car. I was in an abyss of despair. I abandoned the car in the middle of the road and walked to work.

The rest of the day passed like the final recollections of a drowning man. I couldn’t go home knowing what was waiting for me there, so I checked into the cheapest motel I could find hoping that it would not have a radio or a TV in it. Even at $12 a night there was a television set in the room. Of course, I didn’t turn it on. In fact, I unplugged it and left it in the parking lot.

I finally fell into a frenzied sleep, seething with primal fear. Then I awoke with a shudder. A sound filled the inside of my head; it was the first act of Parsifal. It was coming from the fillings in my teeth. They were acting like a crystal radio. I had become Parsifal positive. Despite the hour, I called my dentist. He was quite huffy about being disturbed at such a premature time until I told him that Wagner was coming out of my teeth – and not just any Wagner, but the first act of Parsifal.

“I’ve heard about cases like yours,” he said, “but I never thought I’d see one.”

“You haven’t seen it yet,” I said, hoping to encourage him to prompt action.

“Okay,” he said, “meet me at my office in 20 minutes.”

I was there in five.

“I’m afraid there’s only one thing that can be done for you.” The dentist was gowned and gloved; he wore a lead apron and protective headgear and leggings. He breathed through a portable oxygen apparatus. His office music system played Rossini overtures which he felt would protect the place from the infection. “All your teeth have to

come out.

“Will that cure me?”

“Who knows,” he shrugged, “but it’s all science has to offer.”

Two years or so have passed since I last showed signs of the first act of Parsifal.

I’m toothless, homeless, carless, and on permanent leave from my job. I won’t be allowed back until I’m symptom-free for at least five years. My health insurance has been canceled. My friends and family have abandoned me. I am a shell of a man.

Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be Wagnerians.

Originally published:

Kurtzman NA: The Ghost in the Machine – A Cautionary Tale. Lubbock Magazine (August):34-35, 1997.

The Law and Lewis Carroll

The advent of medical malpractice litigation as a growth industry has spawned many reactions. Physicians, not unexpectedly, respond with outrage. They adduce that most of the increase in malpractice claims and awards is the result of a faulty legal system coupled with the usual amount of greed commonly expressed by the planet’s most avaricious species. Spokesmen for tort lawyers aver that the medical profession is mainly responsible and that it should put its own house in order and stop blaming the legal profession for what is, in fact, a medical problem. Granting that malpractice does occur far more often than it should and that putting somebody else’s house in order is always preferable to attending your own, it seems unlikely that malpractice occurs any more frequently than it did in the past. While there are many reasons that can be invoked to explain why the problem has become so acute, a brief critical look at the law might prove illuminating in the context of this issue. It is certain that lawyers will not examine themselves with the same pecuniary glee they scrutinize us.

The proliferation of gigadollar malpractice awards is no isolated event. We are in close proximity to the big bang of torts. The dramatic change in this litigation has been put in place piecemeal by state courts over the past twenty years. When looked at collectively, this change depicts a legal system gone mad. Courts make law on complicated issues about which they have no competence. Since each judgment is made individually, but has a cumulative national effect, no consideration is given to the consequence of the court’s action. A court has held that it is “outrageous” to sell live polio vaccine since the killed virus vaccine is safer. It is safer, but less effective. That the risk of contracting polio from the live vaccine is one in six million and that there is nothing the manufacturer can do to prevent it is held to be irrelevant. So is US health policy, which prefers the live vaccine. Why, if this judgment stands, will any company manufacture the live product?

The fear of lawsuits is so pervasive that almost everyone, not just doctors, who provides a service or product that has the potential for risk finds insurance premiums rising to ruinous rates. The example of not-for-profit day care centers for children provides a poignant example. The Rockland After School Programs in Rockland County, New York is faced with a tenfold increase in liability premiums with certain coverage impossible to obtain, despite never having filed a claim. If your child falls off his bicycle at home, too bad. If it happens at school, you may have hit the jackpot. The day care industry is faced with extinction because of an insurance crisis. Is this the purpose of our system of “justice”? It is instructive to relate a statement made to me by a partner in one of the country’s major law firms when I asked where the justice was in something he had done. He replied that he was in the law business not the justice business.

Lawyers who can smell money better than French pigs can sniff out truffles stretch the concept of damage to fit almost anything and convince juries who seem to think money is dispensed by Parker Brothers to hand it out for almost any, or no, reason. The nauseating rush to Bhopal by hordes of tort lawyers is an example of self criticism greater than any observer can muster. Lawyers, judges, and juries have surpassed the powers of the most imaginative fabulist in setting damages not only for palpable harm, irrespective of intent or possibility of prevention, but in assessing emotional injury, and requiring that your product or service be free of all risk if you are to be free of liability. Our courts impose a standard God could not meet. After all, He made us imperfect. Some lawyer is doubtless preparing a brief and trying to find a process server.

So great is the caprice of our courts that you can be held liable for mislabeling a toxin even if the wording of the label was required by a federal agency. A court held the manufacturer of paraquat of mislabeling its can though the wording was mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The Searle Corporation faces the possibility of billions of dollars in damages because some patients using its intrauterine contraceptive device (IUD) have developed pelvic inflammatory disease. That the device passed extraordinarily stringent testing by the Food and Drug Administration and that a recent report found it one of the safest IUDs on the market may prove unpersuasive to whatever local courts and juries hear the cases brought against the company. There seems little doubt that IUDs will predispose to pelvic inflammatory disease in some women. The sky, no, the national debt’s the limit when a state court assesses a judgment against Texaco of eleven billion dollars for corporate malfeasance, an amount greater than the corporation’s net worth.

The problem runs deeper than the lottery tort law has degenerated to. The law has even better tricks ready to dazzle an already dazed observer. Tort lawyers respond to criticism and proposals for the reform of the malpractice mess by saying if we weed out our bad actors the problem will go away. This suggests that peer review of physician practice should be strengthened. The experience of an Oregon peer review group suggests that only lawyers will benefit from tighter physician scrutiny of physician practice. An attempt to discipline a supposedly incompetent surgeon inevitably brought lawyers into the case and eventually resulted in a successful antitrust action against the physicians on the peer review body. The legal imagination is cosmic. Ignore substandard practice and we have only ourselves to blame for malpractice action. Institute stringent practice standards and we are restraining trade. Regardless whether this antitrust judgment is upheld or not on appeal we can be sure that our system of law will not permit any sort of disciplinary action to be taken against doctors without the intervention of lawyers. We can also be sure that the considerable cost of this process will resemble those of malpractice actions where upwards of 70% of the money spent and awarded goes to lawyers. This distribution is true of all tort costs. Since the law is written by lawyers and since the slick among them reap fortunes from the business, don’t expect the law to be changed short of armed revolt.

Remember, we are considering a profession that now is seriously debating whether its members should knowingly allow their clients to lie on the witness stand. A federal appeals court recently overturned a murder conviction because the defendant’s lawyer refused to allow him to lie on the stand. The court held that the lawyer’s refusal to help the accused commit perjury violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The Supreme Court will soon hear the case. I am really not making this up; see Nix vs Whiteside. The question under consideration is whether lawyers should be constitutionally required to help their clients commit perjury. If the Supreme Court upholds the appeals court, then lawyers will be guilty of misbehavior if they make their clients tell the truth. On reflection, that won’t be a change from current practice. [The Supreme Court unanimously overturned the lower court.]

What can physicians do when faced with a force greater than nature? Probably not much, except marvel at human ingenuity and self satire. Alternatively, we can consider why lawyers make so much money from malpractice cases. It is because we are so well insured. Without the million dollar policies there would not be much money in the business for a lawyer. Most doctors develop ventricular fibrillation at the thought of going naked in the malpractice market, but depending on the state in which you live there may be little risk. In Texas, your house, car, or personal effects cannot be seized to satisfy a malpractice judgment. Your salary cannot be garnisheed under any circumstances. Thus, your exposure without insurance is minimal. Doing without insurance is, of course, unfair to a patient with a legitimate grievance. But he is not likely to get much money anyway after the lawyers take their cut. Hospitals require that their staff members have certain minimum insurance coverage. While subject to change, these levels are usually well below what most physicians carry. Lawyers might further be discouraged if physicians insured themselves not for malpractice, but for the legal expenses incurred in defending a malpractice suit. I admit it’s not much of an idea, but it’s the best I can think up. See your lawyer; he’ll probably give you better advice.

Originally published:
Kurtzman NA (ed): The Law and Lewis Carroll. Sem Nephrol 6:1-2, 1986.