Literary leftists: Clarence Darrow, free will, and poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

When I was young I came across this book of courtroom speeches by Clarence Darrow. Although I was only about eleven years old it enthralled me, and I think it was one of the reasons I ended up going to law school not all that many years later.

So I came to law from a literary angle, because to me Darrow’s speeches were thrillingly eloquent. I knew nothing of his politics, and very little about the law itself. But he was an old-school leftist of the hard-nosed-crossed-with-bleeding-heart variety (if that makes any sense). And boy, could he talk!

I had first come across Darrow in a fictionalized version through the play “Inherit the Wind,” but shortly afterward I became interested in learning about the real thing. Thus, the book. His closing argument in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial was particularly memorable because it dealt with such strange and horrific facts: the cold-blooded murder of a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks by two older teenagers who came from fabulous wealth and who were both considered geniuses. Their motive seemed the strangest of all: besides implied thrill-seeking behavior, they thought they were supermen who could commit the perfect crime, a la Raskolnikov (although there’s no indication that they’d read that book—which might have acted as a deterrent—they in fact had read and been influenced by Nietzsche).

The country was clamoring for Leopold and Loeb’s execution, and Darrow had the unenviable task of pleading for their lives to be spared. They had already pled guilty, so it would have been unusual to have executed a murderer under those conditions, but the crime was so heinous and the trial had become so notorious (the first so-called “Crime of the Century”) that their execution was a very distinct possibility. In his subsequently-famous summation before the judge (the murderers had avoided a jury trial by pleading guilty) Darrow spoke for twelve hours.

Looking back now at his speech now with the perspective of an older person rather than the child that I once was, I am again struck by Darrow’s eloquence, but also by how much he focuses on the idea of determinism as opposed to free will, and by his world-weariness:

Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. Mr. Savage, with the immaturity of youth and inexperience, says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will forever….

I know how easy it is to I talk about mothers when you want to do something cruel. But I am thinking of the others, too. I know that any mother might be the mother of little Bobby Franks, who left his home and went to his school, and who never came back. I know that any mother might be the mother of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, just the same. The trouble is this, that if she is the mother of a Nathan Leopold or of a Richard Loeb, she has to ask herself the question: “How come my children came to be what they are? From what ancestry did they get this strain? How far removed was the poison that destroyed their lives? Was I the bearer of the seed that brings them to death?” Any mother might be the mother of any of them. But these two are the victims.

No one knows what will be the fate of the child he gets or the child she bears; the fate of the child is the last thing they consider.

I am sorry for the fathers as well as the mothers, for the fathers who give their strength and their lives for educating and protecting and creating a fortune for the boys that they love; for the mothers who go down into the shadow of death for their children, who nourish them and care for them, and risk their lives, that they may live, who watch them with tenderness and fondness and longing, and who go down into dishonor and disgrace for the children that they love…

Darrow goes on to describe the stupidity of the perpetrators despite their academic brilliance—their failure to take even the most elementary precautions (for example, they killed the boy in their car in the middle of traffic) as evidence that they’re crazy.

I have to say he has a point:

They get through South Chicago, and they take the regular automobile road down toward Hammond. They stop at the forks of the road, and leave little Bobby Franks, soaked with blood, in the machine, and get their dinner, and eat it without an emotion or a qualm.

I repeat, you may search the annals of crime, and you can find no parallel. It is utterly at variance with every motive, and every act and every part of conduct that influences normal people in the commission of crime.

Even sociopaths usually have more instinct for self-preservation than that, although just as little conscience (evidence of their later lives points to the probability that Loeb was a sociopath but Leopold was not, a combination that is not unusual for criminal duos).

Darrow’s argument was not only one against giving Leopold and Loeb the death penalty. It was really an argument against the death penalty itself, and against retributive justice and capitol punishment in general:

If these two boys die on the scaffold, which I can never bring myself to imagine, If they do die on the scaffold, the details of this will be spread over the world. Every newspaper in the United States will carry a full account. Every newspaper of Chicago will be filled with the gruesome details. It will enter every home and every family. Will it make men better or make men worse? I would like to put that to the intelligence of man, at least such intelligence as they have. I would like to appeal to the feelings of human beings so far as they have feelings– would it make the human heart softer or would it make hearts harder?

It goes on and on, and on and on. The entire address, long as it is, has the cadence of poetry, but it ignores the other side of the argument: that some murders are so heinous, some victims so innocent, that the crimes call out for the death penalty as a way to register the gravity of the act and the depth of society’s outrage.

Darrow almost seems to be arguing against free will in general:

…[I]ntelligent people now know that every human being is the product of the endless heredity back of him and the infinite environment around him. He is made as he is and he is the sport of all that goes before him and is applied to him, and under the same stress and storm, you would act one way and I act another, and poor Dickey Loeb another.

Darrow is arguing for a system of law in which mercy is stronger than justice, or at least one in which mercy is redefined:

I do not know but what Your Honor would be merciful if you tied a rope around their necks and let them die; merciful to them, but not merciful to civilization, and not merciful to those who would be left behind. To spend the balance of their days in prison is mighty little to look forward to, if anything. Is it anything? They may have the hope that as the years roll around they might be released. I do not know. I will be honest with this court as I have tried to be from the beginning. I know that these boys are not fit to be at large. I believe they will not be until they pass through the next stage of life, at forty-five or fifty. Whether they will be then, I cannot tell. I am sure of this; that I will not be here to help them. So far as I am concerned, it is over.*

I wrote that Darrow spoke poetically, but he also quoted poetry with some frequency in his summations. In addition, it turns out that Darrow was himself the subject of poetry; one of his law partners was the poet/lawyer Edgar Lee Masters, of “Spoon River Anthology” fame. Masters wrote three poems about Darrow, the most famous of which is this:

This is a man with an old face, always old…
There was pathos, in his face, and in his eyes.
The early weariness; and sometimes tears in his eyes,
Which he let slip unconsciously on his cheek,
Or brushed away with an unconcerned hand.
There were tears for human suffering, or for a glance
Into the vast futility of life,
Which he had seen from the first, being old
When he was born.

Darrow once gave a talk (text here) where he discussed poetry, including anecdotes about Thomas Hardy and A. E. Houseman, both of whom he had met (through Masters?), as well as Omar Khayyam and Edward FitzGerald (whom he had not met). The address also contains a lengthy passage arguing against the existence of free will, which seems to have been a particular béªte noire of Darrow’s. He quotes “The Rubaiyat”:

But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-Board of Nights and Days:

That’s a poet speaking; whether it be Khayyam or Fitzgerald or some combination of the two. But no system of law, however merciful, can actually believe we are helpless pawns and still function as a legal force.

Darrow contrasts Khayyam/Fitzgerald’s fatalism with Henley’s “Invictus,” that defiant ode to individual responsibility for which he has contempt.

As for me, I believe that we human beings are responsible for the choices we make during our lives here on earth, and that no system of law can possibly ignore that, and that exceptions should be rare and only under extreme circumstances. The rest is—as Thomas Sowell described so well in his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice—a doomed and dangerous attempt to produce cosmic justice here on earth, rather than earthly justice.

But I also know that one of Darrow’s favorite poems, Houseman’s “The Culprit,” which speaks in the voice of a boy (or man?) condemned to death by hanging (and which I first read as a young teenager myself) is unutterably and chillingly sad, and expresses some profound and complex truth about humanity:

The night my father got me
His mind was not on me;
He did not plague his fancy
To muse if I should be
The son you see.

The day my mother bore me
She was a fool and glad,
For all the pain I cost her,
That she had borne the lad
That borne she had.

My mother and my father
Out of the light they lie;
The warrant would not find them,
And here ’tis only I
Shall hang on high.

Oh let no man remember
The soul that God forgot
But fetch the county kerchief
And noose me in the knot,
And I will rot.

For so the game is ended
That should not have begun.
My father and my mother
They have a likely son,
And I have none.

Darrow once said, “Inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet.” For most people who know lawyers, that might be an incomprehensible sentiment. Of Darrow himself, it was true.

[NOTE: *Only Leopold lived long enough to demonstrate what happened when he reached the next stage of life, as Darrow had speculated. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936 (twelve years after the crime), but Leopold got out on parole in 1958 and lived a life that seems (at least, as best we can tell) to have featured repentance and good works.]

Caring about Benghazi and caring what the Times writes about Benghazi

The New Neo Posted on by

There are plenty of take-downs of the recent New York Times article that had asserted no al Qaeda tie-in for the Benghazi incident of September 2012, if you care to read any of them. But it’s clear not only that the Times has its own agenda on this, but that opinions on Benghazi solidified a long time ago and no one’s mind is about to be changed by any report from the Times or elsewhere.

I’m talking about what Hillary Clinton so offensively and yet brilliantly tapped into when she asked, “What difference does it make?” I discussed the answer here:

But Hillary is correct; to most voters, Benghazi, and a host of other things that used to be considered important, make no difference at all.

One reason, which may seem somewhat paradoxical but really is not, is widespread cynicism. If the public doesn’t expect integrity or truth from what used to be called our public servants (what a quaint phrase!), then lies and strategic stonewalling will not bother most people at all. What matters is what those public servants can get for you, and what they can scare you into thinking the opposition will take away from you…

Also see this:

The American people do not seem to be “concerned,” [about Benghazi] either, not at all. Major Garrett can ask all the questions he wants”¦but few people except us blogophiles on the right are listening, and Carney and Obama have learned that simply thumbing their noses at the American people is an excellent way to get the people to shrug”¦

I discovered this myself a few days after the election, when I had dinner with an old friend who is an intelligent, moderate, non-leftist Democrat with some conservative tendencies. This friend just didn’t care about Benghazi or the administration’s handling of it, didn’t know the details and was cynically dismissive of the topic because “all politicians lie.”

Although the public’s opinion of Obama has fallen considerably since I wrote those two pieces, it still doesn’t make much difference regarding Benghazi. The drop in approval ratings for Obama is composed of one part NSA spying and three parts Obamacare, and the rest is pretty much background noise (including the IRS scandal, which after all only affected us right-wing nutjobs—and according to the left we deserved it).

It has become fairly clear that the only thing with a chance of getting a significant percentage of erstwhile Obama-supporters to turn on him is something that affects them negatively, personally, directly, and obviously. In the NSA brouhaha, all of us have had our phone logs kept and therefore potentially accessed. In Obamacare, all people are potentially affected, either by already having seen their rates go up and their doctor access reduced, or by fear that the rot will spread to their own health insurance (even if employment-based) soon.

So why does the Times even bother to stir the Benghazi hornet’s nest again? I submit that its article wasn’t targeted to those of us on the right who might happen to have read it. It was pitched for its true readership: liberals. It has the purpose of reassuring them, if Obamacare and other problems has tempted them to revisit old controversies such as Benghazi and to re-evaluate them in the light of their crisis of Obama-faith, that there’s nothing much to see there. Perhaps more importantly, it sets the stage for a 2016 Hillary Clinton candidacy if she so desires, and prepares the prospective voter to cast a ballot for her with a pure heart.

Did you know that Obamacare’s Pajama Boy…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is so obviously Jewish, according to the Forward, that mockery of him is clearly anti-Semitism?

Nope, I didn’t either. But I do know that the Forward has officially jumped the shark on this one.

For what it’s worth, I hadn’t really thought about Pajama Boy’s ethnicity at all prior to this. But if pressed on it I might have said he was vaguely Hispanic or Italian or Jewish. Certainly not Scandinavian, anyway.

At any rate, now that I’ve watched the Obamacare video ad featuring Pajama Boy that the Forward has thoughtfully provided, I will go on record as saying that, whatever ethnicity Pajama Boy might be, his parents are most definitely Not Jewish. Nor does he resemble them in any way.

So perhaps he’s adopted. Because—well, see for yourself:

Snow gets in your eyes

The New Neo Posted on by

How would we know if we see exactly the same way other people do? After all, we can’t step momentarily into someone else’s brain.

One of those visual differences among people appears to be the existence of something called “visual snow.” The condition is a seemingly-normal vision variant that does not represent pathology and has no particular meaning—and is something that (to the best of my recollection) I’ve had my entire life. It is also my unverifiable hunch that most if not all people have at least a small degree of it, although some may have it more intensely than others. However, those who are aware of having it might be people who pay more attention to detail and are more observant about their bodies and sensitive to gradations of perception.

So I actually think that visual snow may be very common. Perhaps even normal. But at any rate, it’s “normal” for me. The phenomenon is also somewhat of a figure/ground thing where attention can be a big part of it.

Here’s a video purporting to show what visual snow is like. I’d say that this is what it’s like in the worst of circumstances; just ramp it down quite a bit and you’ve got the idea:

This commenter at YouTube describes my story pretty well:

I’ve had this my whole life. I remember trying to explain it to my mom as a small child “what are all the zillions of little spots mommy?” She looked at me like I was crazy, so I never really brought it up again, even though I was always conscious of it. It wasn’t till I was an adult that I realized some other people see like me as well. In my case it doesn’t bother me… but I do wonder what normal vision is like sometimes.

Actually, it wasn’t until I was middle-aged that I realized that everyone didn’t see like that—or at least, didn’t describe their vision that way.

NOTE: The title of this post comes from this song:

And speaking of Camille Paglia…

The New Neo Posted on by

…which we were doing yesterday—there’s an article about her in yesterday’s WSJ.

Paglia is a curious amalgam. She prides herself on being unique and iconoclastic, and she certainly defies categorization. She seems to ally with the right on Obamacare, global warming, and the foolishness of denying the differences between men and women, and she doesn’t pull her punches discussing any of them. But she voted for Obama in 2008.

Here’s a Paglia quote that seems to ally her strongly with the right in a basic philosophical way:

These people [most Americans, post-draft] don’t think in military ways, so there’s this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we’re just nice and benevolent to everyone they’ll be nice too. They literally don’t have any sense of evil or criminality.

Paglia on schools and masculinity:

They’re making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters…This PC gender politics thing””the way gender is being taught in the universities””in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralization of maleness…Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There’s nothing left. There’s no room for anything manly right now.

On college for everyone:

Michelle Obama’s going on: “Everybody must have college.” Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum…[the drive for college is] social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window.

Actually, there is nothing in the WSJ article that indicates a leftist or even a liberal orientation on Paglia’s part, although that vote for Obama would certainly suggest it. That is the puzzlement of the Obama appeal; how could someone like Paglia have ended up voting for him?

There’s a hint of the answer in this interview with Paglia from October of 2012. She didn’t support Obama any more by 2012, but asked why she wasn’t voting for Romney instead, this was her answer:

I cannot cast a vote for a party that cast so many votes in the primaries for the vile Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum! The Democrats may be naive about institutions and economics, but the Republicans seem to be culturally and psychologically naive in imagining for a single second that Newt Gingrich is a deep and erudite thinker!

Did she consider Obama “a deep and erudite thinker”? And is that the proper criteria by which to elect a president, or is it more akin to the selection of a professorship in the academia Paglia has criticized so strongly?

Paglia goes on to add, “No, the Republican Party has become very provincial in terms of culture,” in contrast to Nelson Rockefeller’s abstract art collection; I kid you not. But that’s Paglia for you.

That is bizarre reasoning, or at the very least a frivolous response (selecting presidents for their attitude towards abstract art?). And after all, it’s not as though Gingrich or Santorum won the nomination, either, and it’s not as though Obama is noted for his abstract art collection.

But I don’t think “reason” really had a lot to do with any of this for Paglia, although she would probably strongly disagree with me. I think (from personal experience) that it’s just very very difficult for someone—even someone who prides herself, as Paglia does, on being an independent thinker—living in a liberal environment to actually vote for a Republican, so thoroughly has the Republican party been demonized.

What’s the best response to marauding flash mobs?

The New Neo Posted on by

My answer: I’m not at all sure.

But I was brainstorming the question after reading about the most recent incident of flash mob violence, which occurred in a Brooklyn mall:

A wild flash mob stormed and trashed a Brooklyn mall, causing so much chaos that the shopping center was forced to close during post-Christmas sales, sources said Friday.

More than 400 crazed teens ”” who mistakenly thought the rapper Fabolous would perform ”” erupted into brawls all over Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Mill Basin on Thursday at 5 p.m., sources said.

The troublemakers looted and ransacked several stores as panicked shoppers ran for the exits and clerks scrambled to pull down metal gates.

As you can see, there was nothing special—or even especially violent—about this particular eruption compared with past ones. In fact, there was nothing unusual about it as flash mob violence goes, nor about the coverage of it. It appears to have been coordinated through social media. There was some physical violence (and possibly one incident of the knockout game), but most of the mayhem was to store property. Mall security was temporarily overwhelmed. And the race of the perpetrators, although implicit in the article, was never explicitly mentioned.

All in all, typical.

Aside from some sort of re-organizing of culture, society, education, entertainment, parenting, and probably a host of other things that I don’t see on the horizon, is there any remedy? The problem with anything one can easily think of is the mismatch of the number of perpetrators to security personnel. Even if stores were not afraid of lawsuits, arming guards even with something such as mace would be problematic because of the math: no guard or even several guards could mace enough of the teenagers to avoid being swarmed by the rest of them and having the mace grabbed and used against the guard/s. Same goes for guns—only multiply the risks and dangers, including that of lawsuit after an error.

A possible deterrent, of course, would be laws that allow concealed carry. However, would that add to the problem more than it would help? I don’t know the answer to that, either. The problem with a flash mob as opposed to an ordinary criminal is the aforementioned strength in numbers of the former as opposed to any security method that would be used.

I tried to find out whether flash mobs have mostly been confined so far to locations without concealed carry, so that the teens could act without fear of serious retaliation. I couldn’t find anything addressing that exact issue, but it seems to me that the places where these incidents tend to happen (New York, Philadelphia, Chicago) either ban concealed weapons by ordinary citizens or have rules that are so restrictive that concealed weapons are effectively banned, especially in places of public assembly such as malls. Interestingly enough, Chicago (which has had its share of incidents) is in Illinois which has just passed a concealed carry law which is so limiting (see also this) that it’s hard to see how anyone could comply with it except by having the gun in a single location such as their car or place of business. And even in states where concealed carry laws are more lenient, I can foresee a thousand Zimmerman/Martin type cases in the making.

Another approach would be to make flash mob violence a special category of crime subject to harsher penalties. Illinois has recently tried that approach, too, by doubling the sentences for offenders who use social media to organize violent mobs. It’s too early to tell whether this has had any deterrent effect. But again, there’s strength in numbers: what are the odds that any one mob perpetrator will be arrested and suffer any real consequences at all? Probably not very high, and they may factor that into the equation and decide the risk of punishment is very low.

It used to be that mobs like this only assembled to protest or react to something, and then the mob would get out of hand. Now they’re assembled just for the purpose of destructive fun, and because they can organize such things so easily with the tools of social media. It’s no accident, either, that the Brooklyn crowd was hoping to see a rap performance, because most rappers glorify and promote a violent and destructive attitude. Why be surprised when the kids who listen to them take their lead?

The art of age

The New Neo Posted on by

Leonard Cohen is a songwriter, and a very successful one at that.

But he was a poet first. He’s old, too—if 79 can be called “old” these days. Accordingly, the style and content of his songs have changed over the years, although he already sounded sort of old even when he was young.

Here’s a recent song of Cohen’s that probably could not have been written by a young man, even by Cohen as a young man:

The words of the song remind me of a poem by Robert Frost, although the similarities are deep rather than superficial. The work appeared in Frost’s last collection of poems, In the Clearing, published in 1962 when Frost was in his mid-80s.

I tried to find a video of Frost reading the poem. It’s one of the last ones he ever read in public, according to something I once read, but I could find nothing. Instead I discovered that someone had made a song out of it and posted it on YouTube. Unfortunately, embedding is disabled, but you can find it here.

Here is the text of the poem, which is titled “Away”:

Now I out walking
The world desert,
And my shoe and my stocking
Do me no hurt.

I leave behind
Good friends in town.
Let them get well-wined
And go lie down.

Don’t think I leave
For the outer dark
Like Adam and Eve
Put out of the Park

Forget the myth
There is no one I
Am put out with
Or put out by.

Unless I’m wrong
I but obey
The urge of a song:
“I’m—bound-away!”

And I may return
If dissatisfied
With what I learn
From having died.

And then, to switch mediums, there’s this painting by Edward Hopper, the last one he ever painted. Hopper was 83 at the time:

Hopper’s final oil painting, Two Comedians (1966), painted one year before his death, focuses on his love of the theater. Two French pantomime actors, one male and one female, both dressed in bright white costumes, take their bow in front of a darkened stage. Jo Hopper confirmed that her husband intended the figures to suggest their taking their life’s last bows together as husband and wife.

2comedians

Hopper may have loved the theater, but I think this painting expresses the same idea as the two poems above, which is that in life our identities constitute a temporary role that we then surrender (or which changes) at the time of death.

Judge rules in favor of NSA surveillance

The New Neo Posted on by

U.S. District Judge William Pauley ruled that NSA surveillance does not violate Americans’ rights to privacy:

In a 54-page decision, Pauley said the program “vacuums up information about virtually every telephone call to, from, or within the United States.”

But he said the program’s constitutionality “is ultimately a question of reasonableness,” and that there was no evidence that the government had used “bulk telephony metadata” for any reason other than to investigate and disrupt terrorist attacks.

“This blunt tool only works because it collects everything,” Pauley wrote. “Technology allowed al Qaeda to operate decentralized and plot international terrorist attacks remotely. The bulk telephony metadata collection program represents the government’s counter-punch.”

The problem, of course, is the possibility of the government abusing the program to do other things with it. At this point, it’s hard to believe that wouldn’t happen, and of course the potential is always there. But the potential is there anyway, especially as technology gallops apace.

Oh, brave new world.

Who on the left is readable?

The New Neo Posted on by

Jay Nordlinger asks an interesting question:

Do you have a go-to lefty? Someone or someones who will give you the best arguments of the “liberal” side? (I hate the corruption of the sterling word “liberal,” but there’s nothing that can be done about it.) Do you have writers whom you turn to for the sake of “balance”? Liberals who are interesting, honorable, and worthwhile?

Mickey Kaus would be the person who comes to mind for me, and Camille Paglia—although both, and the latter especially, can’t really be pegged as “liberals,” exactly. I’ve linked to both of them before.

After that there’s a tremendous falloff, except for people in the process of change from left to right, who really don’t fall into the same category.

Commenter “Eric” mentioned this essay by Tom Junod the other day, and I have to say I liked it very much indeed. You can feel Junod’s natural intelligence and honesty struggling mightily against his kneejerk tendency to parrot the party line, and—in that article, at least—his thoughtfulness wins out.

I also developed a bit of a fondness for Timothy Noah when I read his debate with William Voegeli on income inequality a while back. At least in that particular exchange (I’ve read little else by him) he seemed thoughtful, respectful, knowledgeable, and witty, and although I thought Voegeli won the debate, I thought Noah acquitted himself well.

You may note that at the time of that exchange Noah was a writer for TNR, but he’s a writer for TNR no more. He was summarily fired by Franklin Foer when the new owner came on board and decided that the magazine was going to become an even emptier and more leftist rag than ever. Noah landed at MSNBC, not exactly the open-minded venue either.

So that’s it for me. How about you?

Ever hear of temporary health insurance?

The New Neo Posted on by

Articles such as this one puzzle me somewhat:

Nelson, who will be 62 in January, said he had been without health insurance since 2009 and is trying to get coverage for him and his wife…

He was skeptical about Covered California’s offer of a grace period for those who were unsuccessful in signing up for coverage Monday.

“But that’s predicated upon, among other things, getting the first step done so that I can apply. But I can’t get the first step done, so I don’t think it would apply,” said Nelson, who has a doctorate degree in natural sciences. “And I’m sure there will be a lot of people like me.”

I have no doubt there are. And, having spent a great deal of time on the California website myself doing research, I’m not defender of the site (nor of Obamacare, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows).

But my point is this: why are so many people such as Nelson so very frantic at the moment? I fully understand why people who already had coverage that’s ending in January would be scrambling and almost desperate to get coverage that picks up where theirs left off. And I understand why those with pre-existing conditions who had trouble getting it before would be chomping at the bit as well. But for someone such as Nelson, who had no coverage before and who appears to have no pre-existing health condition that would drive him pronto to the doctor, why the terrific rush to get covered immediately? The Obamacare penalty doesn’t kick in unless a person hasn’t enrolled by March 31, 2014, and by my math that’s a full three months away. The present deadline (whatever it was or is) is only for coverage beginning on January first of 2014. If a person isn’t ill, and hasn’t had coverage in years, there’s nothing exceptional about that date, although it’s understandable to want to be covered as soon as possible.

But if a person is really eager to be covered tomorrow (and I mean “tomorrow” literally) there are temporary alternatives. Most people don’t seem to realize, and most newspapers don’t appear eager to tell them, that if they don’t have pre-existing conditions they can sign up in the meantime for what’s called “temporary” health insurance. It’s catastrophic insurance and non-compliant with the Obamacare regulations and therefore does not protect against the penalty if it’s held past March 31, 2014, but it’s better than nothing, and it’s relatively inexpensive (and, by the way, gives you choice of any doctor you want).

Several reputable companies sell it; it hasn’t been outlawed yet. The buyer pays month-to-month or in one lump sum for up to six months in California (a person can sign up for two 6-month periods, but that’s the limit in California and many other states). A person can drop it as soon as he/she obtains permanent coverage from Obamacare or elsewhere.

So someone like Nelson (who appears to have no pre-existing conditions; at least, the article doesn’t mention any) could buy temporary insurance, and as long as he drops it by March 31, 2014 and picks up Obamacare-compliant insurance instead, he won’t even be liable for the Obamacare penalty. For a 62-year-old man in California in the San Luis Obispo area such as Nelson, a policy with a $7,500 deductible would cost about $275 a month (I checked) or about $199 a month if paid for by the lump-sum method. For a man of 32, living in the same area, that same policy ($7,500 deductible) would cost about $77 a month, or a little over $52 a month if paid for in one 6-month lump sum (and not much more for a deductible of $2,500, although the differential for someone of Nelson’s age would be much greater).

That’s a lot less than either person would pay for regular insurance under Obamacare. It’s even less than most would pay with subsidies under Obamacare. And although temporary insurance only pays once the buyer meets that deductible, and therefore everything prior to that must be paid for out-of-pocket, it offers some peace of mind against catastrophic loss. Isn’t that what insurance was originally supposed to do?

Not a perfect solution, to be sure. But many people might prefer it to nothing and to anxiety while waiting for the recalcitrant website. Not only does it protect from catastrophic events, but it would buy time to let the Obamacare situation sort itself out at least a bit, if such a thing ever happens.

So I repeat: what’s the big rush to get Obamacare for those who don’t have pre-existing conditions? I think it’s because most people don’t even know about the existence of temporary insurance. Why the newspapers seem to be keeping mum about this option I’m not sure, but my guess is that they either are unaware of it too, or they are reluctant to say anything that would lessen people’s motivation to buy Obamacare ASAP.

I’ve had temporary health insurance myself in the past (I think I’ve mentioned that I’ve had almost every kind of health insurance under the sun), and I really liked it. It was exactly what I was looking for: low premiums, protection from the worst, with everything else out of pocket. My only regret was that I was forbidden by law keep on buying it past the two 6-month periods. Somehow the government decreed—even years ago, before Obamacare—that there needed to be rules to “protect” people from this sort of thing.