Tom Glenn's Blog, page 100

Alcohol and me (3)

Along the way, in my thirties, I discovered wine. Its unique and wonderful taste captured my imagination. Before long, I learned that my favorites were red wines and champagnes. Over the years, I narrowed my focus to cabernet sauvignon and only the most expensive champagnes. As a result, I rarely drink champagne, but I have unearthed many excellent cabernets at reasonable prices.

As my experience as an oenophile grew, I took pleasure in the paraphernalia of oenophilia. I paid a cabinet maker to create for me a grand wine chest. It’s over four feet wide and three feet high and perhaps two feet deep, constructed from medium-light maple, with sliding doors on the front. On the right side are six drawers large enough to hold two magnums each; on the left are seven drawers, each sized to hold three regular (750 milliliter) bottles. In the middle are two side-by-side sets of three shelves cut so as to allow me to hang 18 goblet-size stemmed glasses.

The glasses are the best crystal I could afford. They all ring beautifully when rubbed around the top rim. And I have a collection of corkscrews that make opening even the most recalcitrant bottle easy.

So these days in my retirement and working full time as an author, I have come to terms with my fear of alcohol. I allow myself a small grass of cabernet sauvignon when I’m eating food complemented by it. And I enjoy a gimlet (vodka and sweetened lime juice) before dinner. I no longer worry about becoming addicted to alcohol. I’ve passed the test of time.

Coming to Terms on Ebook

My newest book, Coming to Terms, published in August, is now available in various ebook formats. For details, go to https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1047291

Alcohol and Me (2)

Some years later, after I was married and a father and living in Maryland while working at the National Security Agency (NSA), I got a phone call from the Oakland, California police. They told me my mother had collapsed in the midst of an alcoholic bender. I flew to Oakland, got her into a hospital, closed down her apartment, and gave away what little furniture she had. Then I brought her back to Maryland to live with me while she recovered. When she was well enough, she moved to West Virginia to be with her family—and resumed drinking. Through it all, she was a heavy smoker and died not long after from lung cancer.

Meanwhile, both in college and in the military, I was surrounded by people who drank, sometimes to excess. Gingerly, I began to experiment with alcohol until I learned how to drink enough to seem like one of the guys but little enough that I didn’t lose control. I realized quite young that I actually disliked inebriation. I taught myself to drink slowly enough to avoid it.

Then came my years undercover in Vietnam. Between 1962 and 1975, I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S. Except for the period after 1973, when the U.S. military was pulled out of Vietnam, most of my time there was spent with the military, army or Marine Corps, on the battlefield. There was plenty of drinking, but I mostly didn’t participate. I needed to keep myself in tiptop shape at all times. I never knew when or if I’d be able to sleep. I never knew where the next attack might come from or when.

My work after Vietnam is still classified, so I can’t discuss it. Suffice it to say that I spent a good deal of time working with the military. Lots of alcohol everywhere I was assigned, but to keep myself fit and ready for action, I didn’t participate beyond the level required to be considered normal.

Through all those years and during my retirement, I distanced myself from drinking as much as possible. I have no idea if alcoholism is hereditary, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Every so often, when I could do it without looking peculiar to those around me, I drank no alcohol at all for several months at a time, just to assure myself that I was not addicted.

More tomorrow.

Alcohol and Me

Through much of my early life, I maintained a leery relationship with alcohol. I had already observed up close the damage that drinking can do, and I wanted to be sure that I didn’t succumb.

My mother and father separated when I was less than two years old. My mother and I moved from California to West Virginia where my grandmother lived. I got to know my uncles, two of whom were alcoholics. I watched as they drank themselves into insensibility. For the first time, I became aware that my mother, too, drank to excess often.

At age six, I moved with my mother back to the west coast when my parents were reunited. They belonged to a crowd that partied and drank regularly, and I became accustomed to caring for myself when my parents were either sleeping off their binge or simply weren’t home.

Little by little, it became clear to me that my mother was addicted to alcohol, but my father, who drank as much as she did, was not. I discovered that she kept bottles hidden around the house and would secretly tipple at all hours of the day and night. Then, as I was becoming a teenager, my father went to prison for the first time. As an attorney, he had embezzled $40,000 from one of his clients. From then on, he was in and out of prison for a variety of crimes. My mother, now on her own, drank more.

At age 17, I started college at the University of California in Berkeley, only a bus ride away from the Oakland slums where we lived. The tuition back then was only a little over fifty dollars a semester. I worked at part-time jobs to support myself. Lack of money forced me to stay with my mother for the most part, but I lived elsewhere whenever possible. When I graduated from college four years later, I immediately joined the army—I was going to be drafted if I didn’t.

More tomorrow.

The Art of Reviewing Books

For a number of years, I have been reviewing books for two different organizations, the Washington Independent Review of Books and the Internet Review of Books. I discovered early on that reviewing is an art in itself that requires both humility and impartiality.

The purpose of a review is to tip off readers about a new book coming on the market so that they can decide whether to invest the time and money required to consume the new work. That means that I, as a reviewer, can’t assume that my biases are the same as those of my readers. In fact, I have to try to judge the book I’m reviewing with no biases at all.

So I have to portray fairly the essence of the book, point out its most important features, ideally offer some quotes that demonstrate what the book is up to, compare it to other volumes in its genre, and offer a recommendation.

I don’t write reviews recommending against a book. If I don’t think well of a book, I simply don’t review it. Fortunately, because of the wide range of subject matter in books given to me for review over the years, I can view a book against a broad background and judge its quality fairly. I find few books so unlikeable that I won’t review them.

That said, as the two organizations that supply me books well know, I specialize in works about Vietnam and warfare, two subjects I am all too well acquainted with. Through the years, I have reviewed at least a dozen books on Vietnam and many more on combat. I favor narratives that pull no punches in describing the savagery of the battlefield and the grisly deaths that result. Typical of a book I admired for its frankness about combat was Mark Treanor’s A Quiet Cadence (Naval Institute Press, 2020).

The reason that impartiality is required of a reviewer may be obvious, but maybe the obligation to stay humble is less evident. Book reviewers, myself included, are authors. The ever-present temptation in reading another’s work is to draw comparison’s with one’s own in hopes of boosting one’s own sense of superiority. But the reviewer’s job is to read from the point of view of the reader, not that of the writer. That demands a humble approach—my task is to help, not to dominate.

Trump’s Illness

The press and the media are overwhelmed with reports of President Trump’s diagnosis with covid-19. Many of those around him and, especially those who attended his Rose Garden nomination of Barrett for the Supreme Court, have also contracted the disease. I’m sure many more infections will be confirmed within the next two weeks.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Trump and his supporters have dismissed the pandemic and ignored the warning of scientists about distancing, masks, and avoidance of crowds. It was almost as if they were going out of their way to dare the disease to attack them. We should have seen this coming.

The White House and presidential staff offered conflicting reports about when Trump was diagnosed. Trump’s physician failed to provide critical details including whether Trump was ever on oxygen. Only later did a “senior official” confirm that Trump had been given oxygen at the White House before his trip to Walter Reed National Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

My greatest concern is that the American people will be so taken with the specter of Trump struck down by the virus that they will be moved to support him. We need to divorce our sympathy for the ill from our support for a budding fascist who has threatened to hold onto the presidency even if defeated in the election.

The president and the first lady will almost certainly worsen as the disease progresses. Let us send our best wishes while holding fast to our determination to defeat the worst president the U.S. has ever seen.

My Apple Tree

As a matter of health and self-discipline, I eat lots of fruits, vegetables, and eggs, and little fish or meat. As a result, I end up with plenty of seeds, especially from apples. I usually toss the seeds into the trees and bushes behind my house (I eat on my deck whenever possible) in hopes that they’ll sprout. If they do, someday there will be a wild apple orchard at the back of my house.

But I planted two of the seeds in pots on the deck. Both sprouted, but one really flourished. I kept it in the sun on my picnic table and fertilized it once a week. It grew so quickly I had to find a larger pot for it. When the weather cooled, I brought it and the other potted plants in. Now it’s about a foot tall sitting by a sunny window in my piano room.

Eventually, I’ll plant my sapling in the ground between my house and the pond to my immediate north. Meanwhile, I guess I’ll keep putting it in larger pots.

Or maybe I’ll be the first in my neighborhood to have a potted tree bigger than he is on his deck.

The Debate

Tuesday night’s debate between President Trump and Joe Biden is being hailed by the press as the worst presidential debate in history. Biden did fine, but Trump disgraced himself and the presidency with a performance marked by strings of lies, incendiary rudeness, and repeated attempts to bait his opponent. None of that comes as a surprise.

What was startling to me was Trump’s indication, once again, that he will not accept defeat in the November election. He suggested that mail-in ballots are fraudulent. He shocked me when he called upon Proud Boys, an extreme white-supremist rightwing group that includes violence among its tactics, to defend him: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by.” He went further: “I’m urging my supporters to go into the polls and to watch very carefully because that’s what has to happen.”

Those remarks should set off alarm bells across the land. The president is threatening to use armed force to shape the election and to remain as president even if the election goes against him.

If Trump does indeed attempt to intimidate voters or to hold the presidency by armed force, we are faced with a coup d’etat. If that doesn’t constitute treason, what does?

U. S. Health Care

According to the Peterson Center on Healthcare, between 2010 and 2019, health spending across the 37 nations that make up the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) averaged about 8.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) annually. But healthcare spending in the United States rose from 16.3 percent to 17.0 percent of GDP during that same time period.

The Peterson Center reports that “In 2019, the United States spent about $11,100 per person on healthcare—the highest healthcare cost per capita across the OECD. For comparison, Switzerland was the second highest-spending country with about $7,700 in healthcare expenses per capita, while the average for wealthy OECD countries, excluding the United States, was only $5,500 per person.”

The U.S. spends about $940 per person on healthcare administrative costs—four times the average of other wealthy countries and significantly more than we spend on preventive or long-term healthcare.

Despite significantly higher healthcare spending, the U.S. actually performs worse than other OECD countries in some common health metrics like life expectancy, infant mortality, and unmanaged diabetes.

Why do we pay more and get less in healthcare? Because in the U.S., healthcare is a for-profit business. Doctors are in business to make money rather than being professionals dedicated to the care of others. In most OECD countries, medicine is a government-provided service. In both Canada and the U.K., for example, the public health service, a government agency, provides healthcare for all citizens. It is paid for by taxes.

The U.S. compromise is health insurance, often provided by employers. That still leaves many Americans uninsured. Obamacare, that is, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was an attempt to reduce the number not covered. But even with the ACA, some 27.5 million Americans (9.1 percent) are without health insurance.

It’s long since time that Americans changed the way we do healthcare and made it a government function. We are hesitant because of our traditional distrust of government. We fear “socialized medicine.” Our working model stresses rugged individualism rather than brotherly assistance. It’s time we grew up and joined the other nations in the world in caring for our citizens.

Gun Ownership-Gun Deaths Ratio

When I read of the number of Americans killed by firearms every year and the number of weapons we own, I’m repeatedly shocked. More than 15,000 people died by gunfire in the U.S. in 2019. That was up from almost 11,000 in 2018.

And our rate of gun ownership is the highest in the world. Forty percent of Americans say they own a gun. Americans own some 390 million firearms. That means that most gun owners have multiple guns—we have more guns than we have people. In the U.S., our firearm ownership rate is 120.5 per 100 people.

The ratio between gun ownership and gun deaths is relatively constant worldwide: the more guns, the more deaths. Our gun death rate  in 2017, the most recent year for which I can find statistics, was 12.2 per 100,000 people with an ownership rate of 120.5 per 100 people. Compare us with our neighbor to the north. Canada has 34.7 guns per 100 people and an annual gun death rate of 2 per 100,000 people.

Americans are forever telling me that guns are at the heart of American culture. Ever since our pioneer days when guns were a necessity, guns have been an intrinsic element of our daily life.

There’s no question that they’re right. My answer: is it better to nourish our culture or to change it and prevent an annual death rate now approaching 20,000?