Getting from here to there

I asked my niece, Amy, the other day what she would be doing if she had not chosen international relations as a profession, if she had it to do all over again. "Geography," she said. "I'd study geography." I absolutely loved that idea, since I play that game all the time. Not sure I'd want to be a geographer professionally, but I would love to spend a good chunk of my childhood as a geography nerd. I've been doing that in recent months, as the destruction of Ukraine continues to dominate the news and I need to have other things to focus on. 

"Poor Mexico," they say, "So far from God and so close to the United States." You'd have to say the same for Ukraine. At least we don't try to spread the fiction that Mexico is not a real place, that it's a part of the U.S., and we have the right to bite off chunks of it at will. (We did that when my home state of California was taken from them and turned into an anglo-saxon enclave, but that's another story.)

So are the blunders that Putin has made another story. But there is a tie-in with geography there too.

Just as the war criminal George W. Bush, who started a war in Iraq because he couldn't tell a Shia from a Sunni and missed the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudis... just as his war in Iraq killed an estimated 300,000 Iraqis, and considerably more if you add in the results of illness, disease, malnutrition and the like, and handed the Iranians a Shiite victory over their Sunni neighbors, Putin's war, waged to conquer Ukraine and push back against the growing specter of NATO on his doorstep ended up getting neutral Sweden and Finland to give up generations of neutrality and join NATO. These jokers are leaders?

The idiocies don't stop there. Putin tells his media-captivated countrymen he's fighting Nazis. The president of Ukraine, a guy recognized by both Ukrainians and most of the world as well as a national hero, is a Jew. Putin annexes much of Eastern Ukraine, where many people speak Russian as a first language. But they also would prefer life outside of Russian control, much as the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Georgia, Kazakhstan and other former soviet republics do. And that's just the eastern half of Ukraine. The western half has long been more conspicuously anti-Russian, pro-European. There is such irony in the fact that Putin, just as he blundered by driving Sweden and Finland to want to join NATO, has managed to unite the Russian-speaking part of the country with the Ukrainian-speaking part against him.

I need to escape the intensity of the war news from time to time, and one of the things I have fun with is geography.  I've been enjoying the fact that Google maps provides you with just about all the geography trivia you can  handle. 

Consider this: if you were to travel from the northernmost town in the U.S. to the southernmost town, how long would it take you by plane, car, bicycle or on foot?

If you took the most direct route, how many Canadian provinces would you go through and how many states?

I don't like playing guessing games when the answers are easily available, so I'll give you the answers. First off, you can walk the just over three miles from Prudhoe Bay (the northernmost town in the U.S.) to the Deadhorse Airport in Deadhorse, Alaska. That would take you about an hour. Or you could go by bicycle in about fifteen minutes. Or by car or taxi in about seven to ten.

From Deadhorse Airport (SCC) you would fly to Key West (EYW), stopping three times: in Anchorage (ANC), Seattle/Tacoma Airport (SEA) and George Bush International Airport in Houston. If you want to avoid any association with George Bush, you can pay $151 more and fly via Tampa, instead. Both Tampa and Houston have direct flights into Key West. Houston also has flights that touch down in Charlotte, Fort Worth or Miami along the way, but you can fly direct if you want to.  Best get an experienced travel agent to give you the time it would take because there are many choices of routes and airlines, and the direct routes are not necessarily the cheapest.  But I'd count on not getting there in less than twenty-one hours, and many take ten or more than that.

You could drive, of course, and that trip, a distance of 5487 miles (8830 km) would take you about 90 hours. A very hard nine days, driving ten hours a day, or a more reasonable two and a half weeks, more or less, driving about five hours a day.

And if you're hardy, and can handle the hills, you could go by bicycle. If you do that, you can cut about twenty-four miles off the journey, and do it in 5463 miles, or 8791 km. That should take you about 450 hours, give or take.   That's forty-five ten-hour days, and since there are precious few athletes alive who could handle that, I'd suggest you allot three months, and cut that down to five-hours a day on the bicycle.

Then there's the third option: to hoof it. Don't know how that works those long initial miles through the Yukon Territory. I have no idea whether it's ever been done. It's 56 km from the first town, Beaver Creek, to the second town, Koidern, or about an eleven hour and a half walk. And if you make that, it's another 86.7 km to the next town, Quill Creek, or a seventeen and a half hour hike on foot. And those long treks don't end there. From Teslin, still in the Yukon, to the next town, Swift River, Yukon, a route which takes you into the Northern parts of British Columbia, it would take you over 23 hours. No thank you by a long shot.  And we haven't begun to tap into the long endless treks through Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Northern Minnesota before you get to even slightly more populated places in Wisconsin (or Iowa - you can choose either route) and Illinois.

Once you get to Illinois you have to hike the entire state from north to south. Then you walk through a little part of Western Kentucky, and you get to Tennessee, another state you traverse from North to South. Then Georgia - again full trek North to South. Then Florida - again full trek North to South.

I suppose there are venturesome folk out there who might want to give it a go, but I've just completely wiped myself out, particularly now when it's all I can do to walk twenty minutes around a couple blocks here in Berkeley.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach, we used to say; and somebody would usually pipe up, "And those who can't teach teach teachers how to teach."

I see a parallel here.

Those who can't walk anymore imagine walking from one end of Estados Unidos to the other, just for the hell of it.

Back now to the Netflix menu of mass shootings, car accidents, crime, corruption or social decay that seem to be all the rage these days.

Mine eyes have seen better days. I actually used to read ten or more hours a day, but now two is a real stretch.

And I used to be able to hike at least half that much.

You'll understand now why I've turned to Rachmaninoff and Chopin.

And, of course, Google maps. 

Do you know how far it is from Lavry, in the Pskov District of Russia, right up next to Estonia, to the Big Diomede Island, from which (pace Sarah Palin) you can see the United States?  Those are the westernmost and easternmost points in Russia. Google maps tells me, and I quote: Sorry, your search appears to be outside our current coverage area for driving.

I know it's about 8000 km and spans ten time zones, but I can't seem to find anybody who can tell me how long it would take to walk or bike it.

Germany's dilemma over Ukraine

A dilemma is what you call being faced with having to make a choice between two bad options. A perfect dilemma is one in which both options are equally bad and you can't justify to yourself following the path of lesser evil.

I think what's going on in Ukraine is not a dilemma. I think the world should come to the aid of the Ukrainians, help them remove the invading Russian army and get back on their feet. But I'm in the (to me) curious position of being out of step with all my leftie friends, who argue, some on practical grounds (Russia is too big and powerful to beat), some on ideological grounds (did we commit to war-no-more or didn't we?), that our highest priority should be a) to mind our own business; and b) to avoid nuclear war at all costs.

Nowhere is this ideological confrontation more clear than in Germany. I just listened to an extended debate in the Bundestag over whether or not Chancellor Scholz and his new Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, should put their money where their mouth is (sorry - can't keep my opinion out of it) and send Ukraine the Leopard 2 battle tanks they maintain they need to resist the invasion effectively.

I follow German politics sporadically and have for years felt that if I were a German citizen, I'd be voting socialist. I lean left, and once was a great fan of Sahra Wagenknecht, whom I now view as Putin's tool, and loved the idea that Germany had a green party that not only advocated for environmental issues, but had some real clout, but all things considered, I wanted to be associated with the party of Willi Brandt, the heroic German who actually left Germany to join the Norwegian forces to fight against the Nazis driving his own country into the ground and slaughtering millions. When Willi Brandt fell on his knees in Poland in 1970, as chancellor, at the site of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I became and never stopped being a hero worshiper. I wanted to be in his party, the SPD - the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the party of the current chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

So what am I to make of the various positions the German political parties are taking vis-a-vis the war in Ukraine? There is a curious coming together of the two extremes: the Left Party (die Linke) is taking the view I mentioned earlier that Germany cannot and must not do anything to betray its commitment to never again fomenting or assisting war - and besides, Russia is just too big to beat. At the other extreme, the Alternative Party (AfD), the far-right German radical nationalist party, has been traditionally pro-Russian, but is currently split over what path to take. Many of their supporters are in the eastern states, i.e., the former DDR, and have retained more sympathy for the Russians than have Germans in the west.

The six main parties (seven, actually, since "the Union" is comprised of two parties: the CSU in Bavaria and the CDU in the rest of the country) in the middle are ideologically split into what some would label liberals (the Socialists and the Greens) and conservatives (the Union Parties and the FDP, the "Free Democrats." And then there's the AfD illustrating how the snake can bite its own tail and reflect the larger national split down the middle at the same time.

As I listened to the "debate" in the Bundestag, I felt a sense of despair. There was no debate. It was a shouting match of people on all sides with very powerful ideological convictions. In another curious set of combinations, the once "liberal" (don't take that word too far) Greens are in league with the once "conservative" FDP (the "business-oriented" party) and the Union Parties (the union of Angela Merkel's party, the CDU, and its sister party the CSU in Bavaria) in being in favor of sending the Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine - on the one hand, while the the foot-dragging Socialists, for very different reasons, find themselves aligned with the extreme right and left parties. That means, if you line the parties up from left to right and ask them if they want to send the Leopard 2 to Ukraine, their answers will be: no-no-yes-yes-yes-no. The country has itself a perfect dilemma.

There are arguments, to be sure. But they've been out there for some time; everybody knows what they are, and the so-called debate didn't shed any new light on them. It was pretty much a free-for-all, with each party line being hammered home again and again. I found myself tensing up every time an SDP Party member took the podium and looking forward to bobbing my head in approval when Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the FDP took her stand and spoke for me.

How did it come to this? I've been a committed lefty since the 1960s when the Vietnam War convinced me we were not governed by an educated public with informed opinions, but by the military-industrial complex of corporate overlords and their lobbyist lackeys. And here I am, right plunk in the laps of people I once considered center-right fellow travelers of those corporate titans.

Why is this? Is it because of those photos of bombs hitting apartment houses, hospitals and schools? Is it that simple? Am I being led down a primrose path by a touchy-feely media? Blind to harsher, but more objective reality? Was I wrong to celebrate Germany's downsizing of its military during the post-war years?

I've been trying, as the years go by, to cultivate and spark my innate skepticism and compensate for my tendency to believe the most recent thing I see or hear, to debate with myself. If I find myself too confident, I try to find ways to poke holes in my convictions. I listened carefully to the SPD arguments, that Germany doesn't have the armaments to spare, that its military has been savaged by years of CDU/CSU control, by Angela Merkel's well-intentioned but wrong notion that Germany should disarm and give the world a reason to sigh with relief at the fact that Germany is clearly no longer a nation of black boots marching across cobblestones. All we're asking for, say the Socialists, is a little more time to give top priority to German defenses. Once that's done we can then turn to other nations, like Ukraine.

This argument lifts me out of my chair screaming at the TV screen (it's now a YouTube monitor, but let's not be distracted). My door is closed and my husband is working with headphones on, so fortunately he can't hear me when I shout, "NO NO NO NO NO! The Ukrainians are bleeding and dying! Are you going to wait till the last of the youth of Ukraine are all dead, the last apartment house and power station is bombed to smithereens, the last hope of rebuilding a country is gone? What the hell is the matter with you people? Where is your heart?" I hear you saying that surrendering to Putin is"the only smart/reasonable thing to do.  Are you deaf, dumb and blind to the fact that the Russian invaders have brutalized the populations they've overtaken, shut down any and all free speech, tortured the opposition into silence? Must Ukrainians give up their language and rewrite their history to match Putin's narrative? These guys? You want them to surrender to these guys?  The Ukrainians voluntarily surrendered all their nuclear weapons to Russia back in the day, and now you tell them they need to fear the Russians because they have nuclear weapons? Where is your head in all this? I understand making sure it's your head, not your heart, making decisions, but where the hell is your head?

Let me backtrack just a bit. I do remember somebody (from the Greens? - can't remember) saying the Socialists' argument is bogus, that there are lots of tanks lying around in need of repair that can be fixed up and forwarded to Ukraine. And besides, it's not just about Germany sending tanks. There's something about needing the go-ahead for other countries (Finland? Poland?) to send their tanks, as well. I don't follow that argument that well, and will dig for more information on that. Scholz' insistence on presenting a united front and never going it alone. My take on that is that the socialists have been out of power so long they've forgotten how to lead. Or lost the courage. They were a coalition party to Merkel's CDU/CSU and had to take a back seat and go along. What is it, guilt? Fear of being alone out front?

I'm deeply deeply disappointed in what I thought were my kind of people - democratic socialists. I hear their argument that we are all on the same side - pro-Ukraine, anti-Russian invasion - and they just need time - but I'm not buying it.

Should I be?  How am I to know?  The more I read and listen to explanations, the more I feel I'm going around in circles.  Can somebody help me out of this dilemma?

photo credit

If found, return to Kaiser

"No need to put it around your wrist," the nice young man told me who signed me up this morning to get my head examined. "You can just carry it."

Being a contrarian, I began to wonder why I shouldn't put it around my wrist. These things are called wrist-bands, after all. It has my name, my date of birth, my preferred language, my Kaiser member number (at Kaiser, you're "members," never "patients.") The only thing missing is the directive: IF FOUND, RETURN TO KAISER OAKLAND. 3600 Broadway, to be specific. They'll know what to do with him.

I woke up pissed as hell this morning because my doctor is taking so long to get me to see a dermatologist. I'm sputtering to myself, "All these so-called gate-keeper doctors do is make sure you don't get through the gates. On December 17, I contacted her with a request to see a dermatologist. I had three complaints: a scaly scalp (psoriasis?), an ugly growth on my back, and jock itch. All problems too gross to talk about in polite company. 

Because it was Christmas season, getting an appointment wasn't happening. She was on vacation, I was told, but would get to me as soon as she returned. Fair enough. Who am I to downplay Christmas? When I finally did get to see her it was another of those bum's-rush sessions, where you know doctors only allow themselves ten or fifteen minutes per patient. I got a whole twenty so I convinced myself I wasn't supposed to complain.

Clickety-clack, she goes, as she always does, not looking at me but at the computer screen as she goes down the list of latest maladies and seeks quick and efficient solutions. Have to give her that. She's nothing if not quick and efficient.

Scaly scalp? My assistant will take pictures and send them to the dermatology department. Thing on your back? That's a benign growth. If you want it removed Kaiser will bill you between $200 and $800 for the job. Jock itch? Try this cream.

Can I see a dermatologist, please?

Now here's where the story gets complex. The scaly scalp isn't fun, particularly when what might be normal dandruff begins to look like a snowstorm. The thing on my back will have to go on the back burner (sorry for the clumsy semi-mixed metaphor). If I had been thinking clearly, I would have said, "What really driving me crazy is this damned jock-itch! I am scrupulous about hygiene, shower two to three times a day, apply the salve religiously. But directions say, "if the condition persists for more than two weeks, see your doctor." It has been going on for more than a month. I see my doctor and what does she say?  "Apply the salve for three weeks." If I could go back in time I would have rung down the curtain and said, "Now listen here. You're not paying attention. I don't need a further diagnosis; I need something to stop the itching and the salve isn't working!"

I think the reason I didn't get aggressive is 1) I still suffer from an age-old belief that doctor-knows-best and you never get aggressive with doctors; 2) she's a young woman and I'm frankly not keen on the idea of pulling down my pants, lifting up my testicles and saying, "SEE!  LOOK AT THAT!!!", and 3) I didn't see any reason to be concerned about #2 because I could take that up directly with a dermatologist. No need to flash the jewels twice.

So she's out the door leaving me with her assistant to take photos of my scalp. End of session. I go home feeling like I've been duped. 

I write her (Kaiser has an internal e-mail system) and tell her my complaint and accept responsibility for not stressing that it's the jock-itch that's driving me crazy and should have been highest priority. She takes a couple days to respond.

Meanwhile I get a call from Kaiser to schedule a brain scan. I do that, completely passively, still annoyed at the fact I haven't heard from a dermatologist.

This morning I go in to have my head examined - radiation to the brain on Friday the 13th?  - did I really agree to that?

"That'll be $195 co-pay, says the nice young man." "No way," says I.  I have Medicare, and I pay $100 a month on top of that for Kaiser supplemental, and you want another two hundred bucks? It dawns on me then that I'm acting like a pin-ball, merely bouncing wherever the flippers want me to go. 

Nice-young-man looks it up, "It's for your vertigo," he says.

Oh. Cue Emily Litella. Never mind. I pay the $195, have my head examined and vow to go home, calm down and wait for dermatology to call and schedule me in for a closer inspection of the naughty parts.

Life was much less complicated when I was young.