Obamacare Takes Root

Norman Rockwell

This morning, NPR aired a story following a thirty-something man as he  tried to work through the Obamacare website. NPR followed him through his first frustrating encounters, then as he gradually wended his way through the web, and finally as he discovered a plan which would work for him. The plan costs about $180 a month, more than $200 a month less expensive than his current plan and it covered his prescriptions, had minimal co-payments and deductibles and was overall way better. In the end he phoned the insurance company, Unity, which would be his new insurer and they confirmed the good news, which he could hardly believe.
"The really funny part, " he said in the end, "Is that it was Unity which rejected me a year ago, because I'm diabetic. Now they are giving me way better coverage at a fraction of the cost."

Family Plan

This, of course, is an anecdote. It's the kind of reporting that is easier because you do not have to fight through statistics and computer screens and try to draw conclusions which are supported by statistics. And, as they always say in journalism, it's got the "human dimension." You can follow the individual. The problem is, how do we know whether or not that individual is representative of a larger trend?

If he is, then the Republican party, and people like Fred Rice and Nancy Stiles should, eventually be in big trouble, if voters remember how they tried so hard to prevent this leap forward in healthcare. 

Of course that's a lot of "if's."  If Obamacare works this well for the millions. If voters remember who tried to prevent it and who made it happen.  If voters go to the polls.

John Singer Sargent 

But, if this sequence occurs, it will be good for a lot of people, and it will be a huge step forward for the nation. 

Fried Rice

"We face a $17 trillion federal deficit and $128 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Continuing to look to Washington as a bottomless pit of money that we can draw on just by complying with increased federal conditions is irresponsible and leads to greater dependence on government for everything in our lives."

--Fred Rice, Republican Delegate House of Representatives, New Hampshire

Whenever people start throwing around big numbers, you can be pretty sure they have no idea what they are talking about. When they talk about thousands, they may have some inkling; millions, they are in a fog; billions, they are listening to someone else; trillions, they haven't the faintest idea.  There is a strong inverse correlation between large numbers and solid evidence.

--Mad Dog, Hampton New Hampshire Democrat

Fred Rice voices the standard Tea Party Republican tripe when he says we cannot afford Medicaid for our New Hampshire citizens, and we cannot afford health care for our nation. The line is so old  and wrong it is like a worn out pair of shoes: leaky, inadequate, but  comfortable.

Here's how it goes:  We are spending more money than we can afford. This will result in catastrophe, not necessarily today, but tomorrow, when the bill comes due.If we agree to this Medicaid thing, then we will be involving ourselves more with the federal government, and that is always bad. The federal government is bad. Government is bad. Someday, when the bill comes due, we will be owned by the Chinese, and our grand children will have to learn Chinese. They will be working for Chinese companies, living in dormitories next to the factories and they will live in a soulless country where there is no free market. Government spending is always bad. If we had only not spent government money during the Great Recession, we'd be oh so much better off. General Motors would have gone bankrupt, but that would have only hurt the unions, so that would have been a good thing.

One advantage of mouthing this line is that it is easy to remember and it never changes and it sounds homey and has the ring of truthiness.

Only problem is, it is total rubbish.

We have the money.  Medicare is not,  and never has been,  and in the foreseeable future will not be in economic trouble. Social Security is not in danger of default, unless the Republicans drive it in that direction. Medicaid will not bankrupt the state of New Hampshire, especially given the federal government's generosity when it comes to this program. (Of course, Mr. Rice knows the federal government is just trying to trick us into taking part in this program so it can control us later.)

What Mr. Rice and his Republican colleagues really fear is not that Medicaid will hurt New Hampshire, but that New Hampshire will come to love Obamacare as much as it loves Medicare, and maybe, just maybe, New Hampshire voters will remember who tried to give them health insurance and who tried to stand in the way.

Remember, expanding Medicaid is not a way to help the few, but the many. The reason we worry about denying Medicaid to fellow citizens is not because we care so much about those who need Medicaid. What we really care about is if we don't insure those Medicaid eligible people, they will go to the Emergency Rooms, where they will run up the bills for all the rest of us. 

As for Mr. Rice, as an example of a specimen of this Republican species, we must always remember that Mr. Rice has (and continues) to insist that building a motorway along the abandoned railroad line between Hampton and Portsmouth would be better for the environment than building a bicycle path.  You see, Mr. Rice informs us, the new two lane road would reduce traffic along Route 1, and with fewer cars, there would be fewer cars idling their motors at traffic signals and that would reduce emissions and seacoast air would be cleaner.  So there you have it: Worried about air pollution? Build roads.  Build roads and the roads will carry fewer cars. (If you build it, they will not come. Roads are good. Roads do not simply fill up with more cars if you build them--they empty out.)

Mr. Rice is probably not, at heart, a bad sort. It is true, he voted for lowering cigarette taxes because his unfailing economic compass told him if we lower taxes we could sell more product and if we sold more product, even at a lower price, we'd make more money. When confronted with the question about why we tax cigarettes, what we hope to accomplish, he looked like a deer in the headlights. Why? To make money, of course. But do we not hope to diminish the use of cigarettes by taxing them? Are we not concerned with the health of the citizens of New Hampshire?  Well, Mr. Rice replied, what we are really going to see is all those Massachusetts residents will drive across the border for the cheap cigarettes. So, Mr. Rice was asked:  "Are we trying to export our lung cancer to Massachusetts?"

Mr. Rice replied, "Well, cigarettes are legal aren't they?"

Fellow citizens of Hampton, do we not have a single human being willing to stand in the next election against Mr. Rice?  Can we not rid our town of this vexatious priest of Republican obtuseness? 

The man, plainly put, is an embarrassment. And he represents Hampton! People up there in Concord must look at him, listen to him and say, "Do they still have lead in the drinking water in Hampton?"

Ms. Liasson, Mr. Obama and Death by A Thousand Cuts

Mara Liasson first grabbed Mad Dog's attention during the 2008 Presidential campaign, when her pieces for NPR got Mad Dog frothing at the mouth and in risk of being taken away by the Humane Society as a rabid canine.

What she would do was subtle, but effective. A piece about Sarah Palin would have several extended clips of Ms. Palin delivering zinger after zinger, invectives against Mr. Obama and, with five seconds left, Ms. Liasson would  squeeze in, dismissively, a  terse summary of what Mr. Obama had said in response. So it would go something like this: 

  Sarah Palin clip:  "Senator Obama has insulted not just every soccer Mom in this great country of ours, but he has betrayed his own sexist attitudes about women when he snidely said you can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig. Well, I don't think I resemble a pig, and that's unworthy of a serious candidate for President of this great country of ours."
  Ms. Liasson:  "Mr. Obama replied Governor Palin had used the lipstick imagery first, so it was fair game."

And so on.

Over the past five years, Ms. Liasson's  antipathy toward the President has become increasingly apparent.  Now is a slow news stretch with Congress on recess,  and when dead calm strikes, reporters start interviewing each other.  Ms. Liasson was asked to comment on what the Obamacare website fiasco means for Mr. Obama's Presidency and Ms. Liasson told her NPR listeners:
1. Mr. Obama's "signature" (read that as "only") accomplishment has been the passage of the health care law.
2. The law is now moribund, owing to the catastrophic breakdown of its website.
3. Mr. Obama's Presidency will never recover from this blow.
4. He has nobody but himself to blame because this is simply a matter of incompetence. 

President Obama, one might conclude listening to Ms. Liasson, may as well pack it in.  He has been a thoroughly worthless President and he should resign in disgrace. 

During the last Presidential debates, Mr. Romney informed Jim Lehrer that as President Mr. Romney would defund public television and public radio because it is anti-American for the government to spend money on things the private sector can do. 

Apparently, National Public Radio panicked. We need to appease those conservatives, who think we are a sort of Fox News for the left.  So, we'll put forward a few really rank conservatives and then we can claim we are "balanced."

Mad Dog has no problem with that. Just call a spade a spade. 
Just say:  "And here is NPR's answer to Rush Limbaugh: Mara Liasson." 
 

New Hampshire Medicaid: Chris Muns and Nancy Stiles

So here's the thing about Medicaid: Most people do not want to think about it.

Most people do not want to think about prisons, either.

These are things which happen to other people and we have enough to think about when it comes to things which might happen to our own selves.

So, when Obamacare (now the Affordable Care Act) gets passed, New Hampshire gets offered a lot of dollars if it will only sign on, but Republicans in New Hampshire, particularly Republicans in the Senate, like Nancy Stiles, see treachery in these dollars, and they know those are tainted dollars, dollars likely to lead us down some dark, sinister road to perdition. These are dollars with Democratic fingerprints all over them, and they vote to refuse the money, on principle. On the principle that no money from Democrats, even if it goes to New Hampshire citizens, can be good money.

But, as Mad Dog has said, Medicaid is  not something most people in New Hampshire care about, because Medicaid is for poor people, welfare queens, people who are not willing to work, people who would accept government charity, people who are lazy and undeserving. 

Even if all that were true, there is a problem with the Republican position: When those lazy, undeserving people get sick, they do what?  They go to...you guessed it, THE EMERGENCY ROOM.  And guess who pays for their care?  The deserving, upright, hard working citizens of New Hampshire. 

It's not a direct tax bill you see on April 15th, but that does not make it any less real.

Think on that, Granite staters.

As Chris Muns said, rather forlornly, after Nancy Stiles voted with her Tea Party friends to reject federal Medicaid funds, these Republicans don't care who they hurt, or how crazy their position is, from a public policy or public health viewpoint--they only care about an ideology:  Government is bad. Democrats are bad. Democrats handing out money is doubly bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. 

The question is, do the good folk of New Hampshire really want to be led by fundamentalists?  

Mad Dog and Marijuana

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Mad Dog must admit, from the outset, he does not smoke marijuana, has never given it a fair try, has never smoked cigarettes, although he once tried and found the experience uninspiring, does not drink caffeinated drinks, cannot tolerate much alcohol, although he has tried to develop a taste for wine and beer, just cannot.

(In fact, Mad Dog married a Jack Mormon, whose entire family can regularly drink Mad Dog and all his relatives under the table.)

Having said all that, Mad Dog may not be qualified to say much about marijuana, but that will not keep him from trying.

Patrick Radden Keefe's article about Mark Kleiman and the legalization of marijuana in the state of Washington, which appears in the Nov 18 New Yorker, triggered a potent memory in Mad Dog.

Sometime in the mid 1990's Mad Dog received a notice to report to  the Rockville, Maryland Courthouse at  the Montgomery County seat for jury duty. Mad Dog's initial reaction was dread and anger: Mad Dog was in the private practice of medicine and if he were taken out of his office for a week he would have trouble meeting his payroll, his rent and his expenses, while most of the members of the jury pool would be getting a free holiday from their government and corporate offices. 

But when Mad Dog was seated for a trial the judge assured everyone this would be a one day trial and Mad Dog quickly became enthralled by the experience:  The defendant was seated at a table in the courtroom and the jurors filed in and took their places in the jury box. Mad Dog was the 13th juror, the alternate juror.

Looking around him at his fellow jurors, and then across the room at the defendant, Mad Dog could see immediately this defendant was marked as clearly "guilty" and stood next to no change of acquittal. The jurors looked much like Mad Dog, white, dressed in the wardrobe of  Ann Taylor, Brooks Brothers, Talbot's, Barney's--white bread through and through. Guido, the defendant hand been cleaned up for the occasion:  clean shaven,  dark slacks and a new, pressed shirt, but the clean up would not help Guido, whose dark, slicked back hair and Hispanic/Mediterranean features marked him as guilty, guilty, guilty.

The judge asked the jury if anyone knew of any reason he or she should not hear this case of the sale of marijuana. Mad Dog raised his hand and the judge told him to approach the bench and they turned on some white noise machine and the prosecutor and the public defender flanked Mad Dog as Mad Dog explained to the judge Mad Dog did not believe selling or using marijuana ought to be illegal.  The judge asked Mad Dog, "But if the state could prove to your satisfaction the defendant did in fact sell marijuana and that selling marijuana in Montgomery County is illegal, could you find the defendant had violated that law?"  Mad Dog had to admit, meekly, he could. That satisfied the prosecutor and Mad Dog was told to go take his seat. 

The only witness for the prosecution was a florid faced Montgomery County detective named O'Shaunessey (or something Irish) and he testified he had been sitting in his car, with a delicatessen sandwich on a waxed paper wrapper in his lap, looking through binoculars at the housing project buildings 150 yards away, across a playground and walkways. He was on a stakeout on a separate case, looking for some felon, when he saw a young man in a red tropical shirt drive up, park and start talking to Guido, who had been working with his brother, under the hood of his car. Guido reached into his pocket pulled something out and slapped the hand of the red shirted guy and Detective O'Shaunessey knew, from years of observation, he had just seen a drug deal go down, and the pass off of a packet of something illegal and the exchange, with another hand slap of cash. 

O'Shaunessey reached for his radio and rained down mayhem upon the playground and environs of this housing project,  as half a dozen Montgomery county police and detectives swarmed over the grassy knoll, guns drawn, brushing aside squalling infants, and young children, and their mothers and nannies, as they raced across the 150 yards, toward Guido, his brother and the unfortunate buyer in the Hawaiian Punch shirt. 

By the time the cops reached the scene of the crime, Guido had disappeared into his apartment building and the cops arrested his brother, who had just lifted his head from under the hood and was bewildered, thrown to the ground, arms pinned behind his back, handcuffed and told he had just sold some drugs to the tropical shirt felon.

Guido then emerged from his apartment and breathless cops realized they had arrested the wrong guy and they arrested Guido. It is not clear how long Guido's brother had his arms pinned behind him. 

Presented to the jury for their viewing pleasure and edification was the roll of cash found in Guido's pocket, the cell phone he carried. Guido had no drugs on his person. Hawaiian Punch had a packet of marijuana in his pocket.

The prosecutor held up the roll of cash and the beeper confiscated from Guido at the scene and said, "This money, this beeper, which is used by drug dealers to set up sales,  is all the evidence, taken with Detective O'Shaunessy's testimony, you need."

Now the beeper as an incriminating article struck Mad Dog as particularly bogus. Mad Dog ran an inner city clinic in Washington, D.C. and every 13 year old carried a beeper. Most of these beepers were not even operational--that would have meant a monthly bill and required a credit card. They were simply status symbols. If you had a beeper, you were cool, a player. The prosecution never even established Guido's beeper was activated. The roll of money, Guido's lawyer explained, was no crime, no indication of venality. Guido, like many project people, had no bank account, no checks and lived on a cash economy and the arrest occurred on a Tuesday afternoon, and Guido had just been paid.

Guido's public defender made one tactical error, by saying Guido had purchased the beeper because his girlfriend was pregnant and he needed to be reached when she went into labor, which suggested to the white, upper class Montgomery County jurors: A/ Guido had fathered a child out of wedlock  B/Guido did not live with the mother of his child and C/ Guido likely did not support the mother. D/ The mother was likely some 13 year old child, living with her parents, who would not allow Guido near her except for the event of the delivery, because they knew Guido was a no good scum bag, a point of view the jurors, at a glance, could readily understand.

To Mad Dog, if the story were true, it suggested at least Guido intended to do the puffing and panting with the mother of his child at the delivery.

Probably none of these assumptions was true.  But the fact all these assumptions were in play suggests an explanation why the vast preponderance of convictions for marijuana sale and possession occur among the underclass in America although the numbers of middle and upper class children and people who use the drug vastly outnumber those in the underclass who do.

After the testimony, the judge instructed the jury which rose to go deliberate in the jury room and Mad Dog prepared his impassioned argument for acquitting poor Guido,  when he heard the judge call his name and summon him to the bench. The judge said, "Those also serve who only watch and wait." And the judge dismissed Mad Dog, who would not be allowed in the jury deliberations with the 12 real jurors.

In the hallway, the prosecutor and the public defender collared Mad Dog to ask how he would have voted. Why these two were so interested escaped Mad Dog. But they were 20 somethings and they had done at least some work on the case, and it was a game to them and they wanted an early signal about who might win. 

"I'd have voted to acquit," Mad Dog told them. "The cops arrested the wrong guy initially which speaks to confusion about who actually saw what when. And no drugs were found on Guido. No packet was actually seen through the binoculars. In fact, the major risk to public safety that day was all the police with their fingers on their triggers, running around among a dozen children on the playground. If anyone should have been charged, it should have been O'Shaunessey for reckless endangerment."

The prosecutor told Mad Dog, the only other juror he had as a choice for  the 13th juror was someone who had been convicted of marijuana possession a decade earlier. So Mad Dog, even after his statement to the judge looked like a better bet. Even in that white bread county, they couldn't find 14 people who had never used or admitted to using marijuana. 
 

So Guido went down, found guilty, found guilty by a jury of his peers, convicted of selling a packet of marijuana, sent off to jail, missed the birth of his son, likely lost his job at Jiffy Lube. 

The whole concept of being tried by a jury of your peers, as Mad Dog understands it, arose in English law and was incorporated by the English colonists who wrote the American constitution. No peasant wanted to be judged by a jury of disdainful aristocrats who would not know about the status symbol value of a beeper (or its 18th century equivalent) among the peasants. But that jury of your peers thing has been perverted by the complexities of class and class resentment and disdain in America today. So the poor get tried in front of a jury of their betters and they get sent to jail more or less ruthlessly and ineluctably. 

Maybe he's moved to Washington State by now, where he would likely be arrested even today, for selling marijuana on the black market.  

As Keefe observed in the New Yorker:  "When legal marijuana goes on sale, sometime next spring, the black market will not simply vanish; over-the-counter pot will have to compete with illicit pot. To support the legal market, Kleinman argued, the state must intensify law-enforcement pressure on people who refuse to play by the new rules."

It's third season of the wire, coming to real life, where Major Howard Colvin's experimental "Hamsterdam" emerges on the streets of Washington state. As David Simon and the Wire ensemble so intricately and clearly showed, the results of drug legalization, even for the most benign drug, marijuana, will likely not be pretty and will create new problems. 

Hopefully, the new problems will be less damaging than the current problems. But watching that third season should be required viewing for legislators from New Hampshire to California.

It's all right there, in the good book called "The Wire," if anyone would actually brave up and watch it.

Is America More Dysfunctional Now than Ever?

With all the talk about the staggering start to Obamacare, with the crumbling of the middle class, the emergence of gridlock as a permanent state of Congress, the capacity of a few Southern states to throw a wrench into the gears of the federal government, we hear  a lot about how things are simply not working, dysfunctional and blame is assigned depending on your Republican or Democratic roots.

But, the fact is, banks are lending. Maybe to the wrong people, maybe for the wrong projects, but they are in business. Insurance companies (outside of health care insurance) are doing business and cheating their customers just as happily as they ever have. Automobiles are being made, sold, crashed, replaced. Hospitals are doing surgery, admitting patients, discharging at least some of them.

The military has found wars to fight, and although they are winding down some wars, new opportunities for dropping bombs, shooting guns, air lifting troops to war zones will inevitably present themselves. Career advancement in the military may not be as rapid or assured as it was when the armed forces were larger, but in the era of eternal war, which has persisted since WWII, things look good for the military's long term prospects.

Our infrastructure may be crumbling, but, eventually, unless the Tea Party wins more elections, the government will get around to refurbishing bridges, roads, telephone and power lines. 

Fracking may pollute under ground aquifers, but we are likely to be less hostage to Saudi sheikhs and we may be more energy independent and we may even use methane, wind and sun power better someday.

When you look at the 1860's, with open rebellion from the states which became the Tea party states, or at the 1960's, when boys were torn from the bosoms of their families, sent to Vietnam and killed, today's mercenary armies look much more benign--at least for the 98% of people who know they will never have to wear a uniform and shoot a gun in combat.

It may not be the worst of times/ best of times, but, for now our problems are mostly financial, and financial problems were worse in the 1930's.  Just about every problem we face now, was worse at some other decade in our history.

Of course, it will take only one terrorist with a nuclear bomb to undo this rosy picture, and we ought not tempt fate.

But we ought not despair. History can be a wonderful nostrum.

Eric Schlosser: Command and Control or Lack Thereof

Eric Schlosser

"When the missile left the ground, you could feel it in your bones. The blast, the roar, the sight of the flames slowly lifting the Titan II upward--they suddenly affected me. They were more visceral and powerful than any Cold War story. I had grown up in the 1970's hearing about missiles and warheads, throw weights and megatons, half believing that none of those weapons really worked, that the fears of nuclear Armageddon were overblown and based on some terrible fiction. The Titan II hesitated for a moment and then really took off, like a ten-story silver building disappearing into the sky. Within moments, it was gone, just a tail of flame somewhere over Mexico.
Watching that launch, the imaginary became tangible and concrete for me. It rattled me. It pierced a false sense of comfort. Right now thousands of missiles are hidden away, literally out of sight, topped with warheads and ready to go, awaiting the right electrical signal. They are a collective death wish, barely suppressed. Every one of them is an accident waiting to happen, a potential act of mass murder. They are out there, waiting, soulless and mechanical, sustained by our denial--and they work."
--Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

Thus ends Eric Schlosser's book, Command and Control. It is a catalog of accidents involving nuclear bombs: Bombs dropped five feet while being loaded into airplanes, bombs carried in airplanes which crash and explode, and one bomb which was simply struck by a falling wrench when a nineteen year old Air Force Airman--just a boy really-- dropped a wrench piercing the "skin" of a Titan II missile, setting off a chain of events culminating in the missile exploding, taking lives with it, as airmen and officers frantically tried to undo the mistake, the slip of a metal tool. 

The book is repetitive and could have used some editing, as events and time sequences are jumbled,  but that is forgivable in a book which took 6 years to write. Even the repetition and losing track of sequences of events is not wholly a distraction, in that it builds the central thesis which is that all works of man are inherently subject to error and are flawed, imperfect creations which can do harm as well as function the way they were intended to function.

Schlosser takes us through eras past, when the Soviet Union constructed a perimeter defense of nuclear tipped missiles which would automatically fire, unless manually over ridden, if the system detected  an "attack" from the United States occurred. It was straight out of "Dr. Strangelove," because the Soviets never told the United States about this system, so it had no deterrent effect. It was simply an instrument of reprisal. 

He takes us through the current perils of India and Pakistan armed with nuclear weapons, of terrorists who are plotting to steal a few.

The critical point Schlosser makes is that more weapons have not made us more secure, but less.  

We once had three parts to our deterrent scheme: Part One, Airplanes with nuclear bombs which were kept aloft circling the northern borders--Pease in New Hampshire was part of the Strategic Air Command--and New Hampshire was targeted because airplanes with nuclear bombs flew out of Pease; part two,  missiles in the ground in places from Arkansas to Kansas to Washington state to California; and part three,  missiles in submarines which were and are essentially undetectable and untouchable and are enough of a deterrent all by themselves, because there are enough of these stealth weapons to kill Russia and before that, the Soviet Union several times over.

The problem with the airplane part is that airplanes were clearly  ineffective. They never would have reached their targets. They also were very risky to the owners, i.e. the people of the USA. Airplanes crashed. They accidentally dropped bombs on the land they flew over, namely the United States of America. Fortunately none of these mishaps resulted in the detonation of the nuclear part of the bombs, but that was, as one of the generals said, "Part good technology, part  heroism and part divine intervention. The last part being by far the most important." The airplane part was kept going because the Air Force wanted to be in on the game; air force generals wanted to be power players in the game. And they had political clout. But the lumbering B-52's were kept parked by runways, or lumbering into the sky long after they were a credible threat or deterrent. They were like so many Don Quioxte's, riding on broken down steads off to do glorious but doomed battle, no real threat to anyone.

The problem with the in ground missiles is they needed maintenance, and they were sitting ducks. The Russians could target them, and did, dozens of times over and the ground missiles would be wiped out in any first strike. There was once a plan to move the missiles around in a massive shell game, to thwart a first strike, to remediate this vulnerability, but this plan was too expensive even for the American Congress. Even jackasses can occasionally do sums. So the missiles we've got which are still in the ground, are magnets for nuclear missiles from Russia, but likely they pose more threat to the communities they are buried near than to any city in Russia or any Russian military base.

The submarines were and are still pretty much invulnerable, as long as no captain or crew goes berserk, and as long as communicating with all those submarines occurs flawlessly.

This is a worthwhile book. It is a book Congress men and women should read, if they can still  read at all.

Mr. Schlosser has written about other important topics: he has focused on the American food chain, made a movie based on Michael Pollen's Omnivores Dilemma, the excellent "Food, Inc."  He has written about the American prison system.   So he picks topics we do not want to think about, because thinking about these things it makes us uncomfortable.

The problem is, this is the same problem "The Wire" encountered. Truth, no matter how important, when it becomes too uncomfortable, is something the greater public (and I use that phrase ironically) is apt to deny, or to ignore or to simply refuse to hear. As magnificent as "The Wire"was, it never won an Emmy, never won a large audience. It was simply, funny as it could be, in the end, too sad and depressing. And this may be the fate of Command and Control an important topic we'd rather not think about.

As T.S. Eliot observed: Humankind cannot bear too much reality.