Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Blog

Make Them Answer the Tough Questions: The Realities of Political Debate and Health Care in 2008

By Carey Kriz

The elephant is in the room, and it is time that the political parties seeking to run the U.S. government start acting like they understand the issues of U.S. health care in 2008. First a couple of questions that we need to start asking: Will universal health insurance fix our health care system? The answer is easy: absolutely not. A bumper sticker approach to solving problems means identifying one big emotional issue and suggesting an obvious solution. For health care there a number of these, with the big story being the unfeeling administrator denying benefits to a patient with real needs. Ultimately, this story comes back to the failure of our insurance industry to be portable, to be with you throughout your lifetime and generally to be fair.

And yes, this is a great cause. But it is not the answer.

Will more doctors bring more health care to our communities? The answer to this one is also easy: absolutely not. The U.S. system of educating and branding physicians is arguably the best in the world. Yet we have an imbalance in knowledge and need to think about why our neighbors are getting so fat, or indulging in behaviors that are obviously bad for them. Do any of us understand that we are actually in charge of our bodies?

Will blockbuster science and new drugs cure disease? Dreaming is good for us, and we do have a number of major scientific advances that impact the world of health care – and how that health care can lead to improved longevity and a better quality of life. But science alone is not the answer here. We have a problem in health care that cuts across treatments, diagnosis and infrastructures.

So what will fix our health care system? For the answer to this question start asking your political leaders where all the money is going – and whether we have any idea of the cost/benefits of our investments. When we think of spending money on health care what we fail to also mention is that we spend more than anyone else in the world, that we have declining productivity in our quality of life indices, and are making a “business” out of something that comes close to being a survival requirement. Guess who pays the highest cost for drugs in the world? Yes: we do. Not your neighbors in Australia and Singapore – or Europe.

Imagine how stupid we would look as a society if we charged for the right to breathe air. Now imagine denying someone access to care because they slipped through the coverage cracks – or discriminating against them because they already had a disease. Now add to this reality that a ton of people were making money from this mess, including big investment funds, management, professionals and shareholders. Yes we have cancer and it has metastasized into every corner of the health system. The fix will not be pleasant and will definitely be painful. But it is a requirement and it will be hard on all of us.

So it’s time to put some real debate into health care and start looking at the elephant of big business, profits and motivation. Hiding from a problem, or misleading the public about how bad it is, will not solve it.

Carey Kriz is the author of The Patient Will See You Now (Rowman and Littlefield).

The Paradoxes of Turkish Democracy

By Meltem Muftuler-Bac and Yannis Stivachtis

For the foreign observer, Turkey is a highly interesting country where European and Islamic cultures live in an integrated fashion. Its uniqueness stems from its imperial past, and the development of a secular democracy in a country where the population is predominantly Muslim. Turkey’s position in the European order has been firmly established since the end of the Second World War as Turkey joined the Council of Europe in 1948, the OECD in 1949 and NATO in 1952. It is interesting to point out that Turkey was an integral part of Europe and the Western order while, for example, Spain and Portugal were not.

Turkey’s political destiny has changed with the end of the Cold War in 1989. Even though it was still part of the European architecture, its position as an integral part of Europe became under serious scrutiny. The Turkish candidacy and the subsequent opening of accession negotiations with the EU in 2005 were important milestones in the Turkish endeavor to fully belong to Europe. The EU accession process has brought significant pressures into the Turkish political system as the Turkish political norms and rules are different than the European norms. These differences are most visible when the Turkish norms on the ‘supremacy of the state’ and ‘the national identity’ are being challenged by the norms of liberal democracy such as freedom of expression and individual rights and liberties. These differences become highly controversial when the Turkish governments since 1999 began to adopt political reforms that would enable Turkey to meet the political aspects of the Copenhagen criteria.

When the European Commission declared in its 2004 Progress Report for Turkey that “Turkey sufficiently fulfills the Copenhagen criteria’; this was in response to the vast political changes in Turkey adopted in order for accession negotiations for EU membership to begin. Nonetheless, Turkey still had serious problems in its political system stemming from the restrictions on freedom of expression, most notably the Article 301 which foresees legal action against those who insult ‘Turkishness.’ The very vague implication of Article 301 has enabled the ultra-nationalists in Turkey who are skeptical of the EU accession process to petition for cases against the political reformers or intellectuals. Even though most of these cases are dismissed and never come to court, as long as such articles remain in place, Turkey’s democracy is criticized by the EU as falling behind the European standards. As long as such legal changes are not adopted, Turkey’s EU accession might be problematic. However, an equally important aspect of political change is that the norms on freedom of expression and individual rights need to be internalized by the Turkish public. In other words, only changing or amending the Constitution will not suffice. The process of norm diffusion is a much longer process that needs to involve the different segments of the Turkish society.

Meltem Muftuler-Bac is a professor of international relations and the Jean Monnet Chair at Sabanci University in Istanbul. Yannis Stivachtis is an associate professor of international relations and director of the International Studies Program at Virginia Tech. They are co-editors of Turkey-European Union Relations (Lexington Books, 2008).

Don't Blame Katie Couric -- The First Sole Female Anchor Is Not the Cause of the Low Ratings at CBS Evening News

In 1983 TV Guide asked, “Why Are There Still No Female Dan Rathers?” And if Katie Couric steps down as the anchor of CBS Evening News, we still won’t have any “female Dan Rathers.”

When Couric took over at CBS Evening News, the press was quick to add her salary and new title: a five-year contract, a fifteen million dollar salary, Managing Editor, Katie Couric was heralded as the one who would reshape CBS Evening News. CBS executives were hoping that Katie Couric would build a bigger audience, including more women and younger viewers. Now that the newscast’s ratings have tanked, the media is pouncing on Couric – and the underlying theme is that “because she is a woman”-- her anchoring stint was unsuccessful. Katie Couric made history as the first woman anchor she is also being marked as the first woman anchor to fail. John Dickerson of Slate.com, and son of former pioneering correspondent Nancy Dickerson, said that it has taken women over thirty years to get to the anchoring position because “men have always run the networks and it takes time to convince men that women can handle the task. But it’s also the audience. Networks are risk averse and putting a woman in the anchor chair is a change for viewers and advertisers who fund that crucial hour of television. People took time to get used to a female face in the position of authority.”

And it would seem like they still aren’t ready, if we jump on the bandwagon and blame the low ratings of CBS Evening News on Katie Couric’s gender. Truth is, the failure of CBS Evening News is much more complex than that.

Sure, Katie Couric fell prey to the usual intense focus on her appearance, as most women on television do. It is true that the focus on Katie Couric’s appearance was a debilitating factor, but nothing new to women in the media. As Katie Couric readied herself for her new job as evening anchor on CBS, the media was filled with speculation on how effective she would be in the job and mostly, what she would wear and how she would style, and tint her hair to move from “perky” to the gravitas personality needed to deliver the weighty evening news. A story appeared on NBC News about how a publicity photo for CBS Evening News, featuring Katie Couric, had been airbrushed to make the new anchor appear slimmer. The caption on the screen, while the anchor told the story, read “Can CBS News Be Trusted?” The controversy spurred the debate about the standards of appearance for women in television and how they differ from the standards for men. And no one ever mentioned that a photo of Charlie Gibson has been re-touched to make him appear more fit and trim to anchor the news. If anything, the press seems to dote on Gibson’s “avuncular” average man appeal. When Harry Smith, (who by the way is missing a lot of his hair – but no one seems to comment) co-host of CBS The Early Show interviewed Katie Couric about her new position and pointed to the fact that so much hype about her appearance and qualifications, Katie Couric commented, “I think there is some residual sexism, and I think women are sort of judged by different standards. But I try not to get too preoccupied by that. I think that I feel very confident in who I am as a person and as a professional.”

Other factors that contributed to the low rating of CBS Evening News include the format of the broadcast, which was radically different than viewers were used to. There was a “free speech” section that featured people commenting “op/ed” style about issues of a topic nature, and longer interviews conducted in a more relaxed, homey atmosphere Unusual for network anchors, Katie Couric offered personal asides during the broadcast. In addition, CBS also strove to create a larger web presence for the broadcast, and this effort never gained traction.

Before she made her September 5, 2006 debut as anchor of the CBS Evening News Katie Couric went on a "listening tour" of six cities. Of the listening tour, Katie Couric noted “I think face-to-face conversations with people and really getting a sense of where they are and their likes and dislike, their frustrations, is invaluable.” In addition to meeting her CBS audience in person, Katie Couric also spent her time on the road raising money for cancer awareness. Many of us who follow women in leadership and media wanted her to be a resounding success. But it sounds as though, even if she ultimately leaves the CBS Evening News before her five year contract is up, Katie Couric, has been successful. Before starting her new job, Katie Couric said that she would have regretted not taking advantage of the opportunity to be anchor more than she would regret taking it. So before you quickly write off the first woman anchor of a major network, think about the many factors that go into being successful, and resist blaming it on gender.

Nichola D. Gutgold is associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State University at Lehigh Valley and is author of Seen and Heard: The Women of Television News (Lexington Books) and Paving the Way for Madam President (Lexington Books).

Oscars for No Country for Old Men

Although many people admired No Country for Old Men, some were repulsed by its nihilism and violence, and quite baffled when the film captured four Oscars (best picture, director, actor in a leading role, and screenplay based on material previously produced or published). To be sure, Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote, directed, and edited the film based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, have rarely lingered over sunny aspects of human existence. Nonetheless, No Country’s gore seems especially relentless, unrelieved as it is by either comic or heart-warming turns such as somewhat soften, brighten and humanize Fargo (1996)--another tale of mad violence, and the sole other Coens’ film to garner Oscars (best screenplay written directly for the screen and best actress in a leading role). Indeed, No Country’s relatively uniform style and tone set it apart from most of the Coens’ oeuvre. One might even argue that surprising shifts of tone and generic allusion in Romance and Cigarettes (2005), a film executive-produced by the Coens but written and directed by John Turturro, are more Coens-like than the path charted in No Country.

Errol Morris is another director who has won recognition at the Academy Awards for a film that is uncharacteristic of his work as a whole. Morris’s The Fog of War, which received the Oscar for best documentary in 2003 and the companion book subsequently published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2005, is more linear and conventional in its imagery, picture-sound relationships, and other aspects of form than earlier, more experimental films by Morris. The insertion of staged scenes in The Thin Blue Line, along with apparently whimsical optical and aural effects as in later films by Morris, provoked the Academy Awards committee to disqualify it from documentary competition. Alert to such doubts as to whether Morris’s films were truly documentaries, Roger Ebert wrote admiringly when The Thin Blue Line appeared, “Although he makes documentaries, Morris is much more interested in the spaces between the facts than with the facts themselves.”

To return to the Coens, though, if in forgoing in No Country the playful shifts of tone and generic allusion that distinguish much of their earlier work, including O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) as well as Fargo, they retreat from experimentation, Javier Bardem’s performance of the horrific villain Anton Chigurh in No Country possibly represents a new perception on their part, while he offers perverse compensation to the film spectator deprived of playful generic turns. Anton Chigurh is not merely a killer such as appears in other films by the Coens, or in Westerns by other filmmakers. Rather, as he keeps re-emerging abruptly, magically, a ubiquitous, wounded figure of destruction relatively free of bodily constraint as well as reason, he represents an evil spirit overtaking the world--or at least the Southwest, where the action occurs. If one accepts the notion that films reflect broad concerns of the society in which they arise as well as of the filmmaker, it’s not inconceivable that this new film bedecked with Oscars points to an unusual surge of pessimism and foreboding in the American psyche.

Ira Jaffe is professor emeritus and former chair of the Department of Media Arts at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Hollywood Hybrids: Mixing Genres in Contemporary Films.

Get to Know Your Local Record Store: Celebrate National Record Store Day on April 19th

By Alan O'Connor

With National Record Store Day fast approaching, I was reminded when I first stumbled across punk about 1984. As usual it was through friends because by that time the scene had mostly disappeared underground. Some roommates, who actually wanted nothing to do with me because I went to school, dressed in faded colors and played strange music on the house record-player. It was a real mix from New Order and the Smiths to local punk bands that were scared of Ronald Reagan’s joke about starting a nuclear war against the Soviet Union. “We begin bombing in five minutes...”

So I took myself off to the punk record store in Toronto. It was called the Record Pedlar. Of course I had the usual problem of bins full of records by bands with strange names. On the first trip I came home with twelve-inch records by the Dicks and Dead Kennedys. Sex and politics. And soon after that The Clash, Sandinista! triple album because I was a huge supporter of the revolution in Nicaragua that President Reagan hated so much.

The Record Pedlar moved around a few times, but today it no longer exists.

Independent record stores have always been important in punk scenes. They’re places to hang out, to learn, to sell used records when you’re desperate and to buy them when you’re not. There’s posters for shows, fliers to take away, and notices for “band with recording needs drummer must be willing to tour”. Record stores often have fanzines that you can’t find in magazine outlets. I bought my copy of Smash the State: A Discography of Canadian Punk (the book came with a 7") in a record store.

I traveled all around the USA in the Summer of 2006. My fifteen year-old Honda Civic died in the Arizona desert and a marvelous Mexican-American mechanic put new life into it. I went from Long Island to Florida, Austin, San Diego and Portland. And in every city, I stopped off in the independent record store to flip through vinyl, pick up flyers for shows, and most likely find the coolest part of town and somewhere to eat. It would be impossible to list them all and unfair to mention a only few. But the death of the indie and punk record store has been somewhat exaggerated. It is sad that the Record Pedlar and other like it are no longer with us. But most places still have a record store that sells music on independent record labels. You’ve just got to find it.

Alan O'Connor is associate professor in the cultural studies program at Trent University in Canada. He is the author of Punk Record Labels and the Struggle for Autonomy: The Emergence of DIY.

“Thrown Down the Memory Hole”

By Anne-Marie Brady

It was a crisp, wintry day in Beijing when I set out to pay my respects to the San jiao di notice boards, the historic signage at Peking University that had recently been demolished by the university authorities. San jiao di, or “the Triangle,” had been the favored spot for student protest meetings since the late 1970s—especially in 1989—and its notice boards were the conduit for information on the latest in student thinking and activism.

Unusually, given the sensitivity of the topic, the tearing down of the boards had been front-page news in the print version of Beijing Youth Daily a few days before. It was this factual, though extremely brief, report that had first alerted me to the destruction of this historically significant structure. According to the article, university representatives had stated that San jiao di was demolished because nowadays all “important” information was available online so the notice boards were no longer necessary for the spread of information. They also claimed that the billboards were being used for commercial messages and were thus not suitable for maintaining a tidy environment at Peking University.

Although I used to be very familiar with the campus, I had to ask my way; everything had changed so much. The university is currently a mass of construction sites and ugly new high-rises. I avoided asking the younger students, not sure if they would know the significance of the boards or their destruction. I finally found a man in his late thirties, who would have been about twenty in 1989. When I told him what I was looking for, a faint smile of understanding crossed his face. He gave me very precise directions to the spot, then instantly rushed off before I could ask him more.

Yet when I finally got to San jiao di, I felt bewildered and overwhelmed. It was as if the notice boards had never existed. The area was ringed by trees as before; there was still a bookshop and a convenience store on one side, dormitories on another. But something was missing. I searched my memory; trying to remember the scene from my many other visits. In the past, I’d often come to look at the boards, trying to keep up with student activities. The place looked much the same, yet somehow, something had altered.

It was only when I looked very carefully at the triangular spot of ground that is the heart of the San jiao di area that I noticed what had changed. A thin line of recently dug dirt ran around the inside of a concrete-lined grassy triangle. This was the only trace to show where the San jiao di notice boards had once stood.

I’d never noticed before that the boards were grouped around a number of ancient pine trees. Now these trees were revealed, and someone (surely ironically) had recently pasted a large notice for rental accommodation at the very top of one of these trees, well out of arms’ reach.

I glanced around the area and noted that there was a long row of display cases to the side of where the old San jiao di boards had been. These were pristine and glass covered, full of glossy government propaganda photos. They were very different from the informality and democratic nature of the rusty old signage, where anyone was free to post and anyone was free to come and read.

The San jiao di notice boards were a historic site with an important role in the story of dissent from authoritarian rule in modern China. It didn’t matter what was pasted on them in recent years, just having them there was enough to give a glimmer of hope that this tradition was preserved, however faintly. When I was a visiting fellow at Beijing University in the late 1990s, people would still gather there to meet.

San jiao di is certainly much tidier now than it was before. I took some photos of the scene, though there was little to focus my camera on. I was studiously ignored by the throngs of people passing by, though they all carefully got out of my way. A young stringer for a foreign newspaper came up and asked me for a comment, she said no Chinese person was willing to talk to her on the subject of the demolition of the boards.

Knocking down San jiao di and saying that the Internet has now replaced it is an example of why the Internet in China is regarded by the party-state as an effective tool of both control and propaganda. San jiao di was once a symbol of Peking University’s proud intellectual independence; it looks as if that independence is very weak indeed these days.

Anne-Marie Brady lectures on Chinese politics at the University of Canterbury. She is the author of Marketing Democracy: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

My High School Senior is Driving Everyone Crazy

After 12 years in the public education system, my child is driving me crazy. We can not blame it on hormonal rage or a transition period between the 10th, 11th and 12th grade. We can blame it on one thing, the failure of public schools to change and address the needs of our children. The senior in high school is at the top of the social order in his or her adolescent world with a vision, and only a vision, of what college is about. Many are left unchallenged academically and we all know that “idle hands are the devils disciple”. Unfortunately for many of these seniors they will return home after a semester at the college of their choice, a failure.

At that time, the parents and student will start the blame game. The student will not go back to visit their favorite teachers in high school because they would have to admit failure. They will probably take some classes at a community college and work until they grow up and mature. Then possibly re-enter a postsecondary institution to complete a bachelor’s degree.

This has become a norm of our society. State universities used to be famous for “tripling up” students in their dorm rooms which were designed for two students with the understanding that after their freshman year of college, 33% will fail out. Back in 1973 in my first Biology lecture, a seasoned professor told us to look left and then right, because next year one of you will not be there!

Change is difficult in public education and my book, Overcoming the Senior Slump: Meeting the Challenge with Internships, calls for such change. All of the adults in a child’s’ life, parents, educators and relatives will benefit from the progressive nature of the recommendations made in this book. The path for change is clearly outlined and the planning process needs to start now. We need to increase the academic rigor of the senior year, make learning challenging and relevant and give our seniors a chance to develop productive relationships with adults. Then, and only then, will all of our children make a smooth transition to college.

Dr. Randall Glading is a school administrator at Yorktown high School and an adjunct professor of Graduate Education at Mercy College and The College of New Rochelle. He is the author of Overcoming the Senior Slump: Meeting the Challenge with Internships, which will be available February 28th. Dr. Glading is the author of Overcoming the Senior Slump.