Adorno: Cultural Marxism Isn't All Bad

Conservatives are all riled up about "cultural Marxism" right now, with Michael Walsh's book The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West providing chapter and verse for preachers on conservative hustings.

But my encounter with the inventors of cultural Marxism, the so-called Frankfurt School, has been more equivocal.

I agree that the switch from economic Marxism and its liberation for the workers to cultural Marxism and its liberation for everyone else except patriarchal white men has the odor of rank political opportunism, along the lines of: Hey, our war to take down capitalism using the workers as our cat's paws didn't work so let's try it with women, blacks, and gays.

I agree that the Gramscian idea of the "long march through the institutions" is chilling, and the Marcusian doctrine of intolerance towards the opponents of progressivism is monstrous. And Reich is getting into cuckoo-land.

But The Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno is a book that any supporter of capitalism and freedom ought to respect, and that is why I give it its due in my American Manifesto. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Enlightenment and its cult of reason is about freedom for humans gained at the expense of the rest of creation. "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men." Here is Alex Thomson in Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed:

[M]an's attempt to set himself apart from nature is bound up with the domination of nature, which reveals that man has not in fact escaped from nature at all.

You could say that with reason man has made nature his plantation slave, with all that implies.

Here is Thomson's gloss on Adorno's idea of freedom, a treatment that explains the Marxian distaste for capitalism.

Freedom is partially activated in the transition from feudal or absolutist to a bourgeois society. The individual gains a degree of autonomy in being able to determine his own actions, and in buying and selling his or her goods or labour power. However freedom it a market society is in theses terms submission to the market. The freedom of the individual is only partial, remaining dependent on economic needs. Freedom fails to live up to its promise of reconciliation between the individual and society: a promise which allows us to criticize not only social unfreedom, but also the partial freedom hypostatized in liberal philosophies which justify the freedom of the individual.

Now I think that this paragraph is telling. It says that capitalism promised freedom and didn't deliver. It freed the peasants from feudalism but enslaved them to the market. And the paragraph also sets up the argument for the socialist promise. We will complete the freedom revolution, say the socialists; we will liberate you from the market. That is what Nancy Pelosi was talking about when she proudly announced that because of Obamacare artists and writers could go on writing and painting now that government had taken care of their health insurance.

Only, of course, such a promise is rubbish. All humans live under the daily servitude of finding the means to live: food, shelter and so on. The only question is how, in a human society, to do it. There is the idea that we should all go out and work and share and share alike. That doesn't work because of the problems that e.g. the Pilgrims discovered immediately on arriving in the New World. Some people shirk work and other people get demoralized and slack off too. So something other social arrangement is needed.

What we are left with are the two options developed by Eric Hoffer in "The Readiness to Work." Either the boss tells everyone how and when to work or the worker shoulders that responsibility himself. There is also a third option that rests half way between the two: the laborer hires his time out to an employer and the employer tells him what to do. The worker works for wages.

The conventional Marxists got themselves all in a twist about the exploitation of wage labor under the system of capitalism. But Adorno's student Jürgen Habermas saw that system was domination in any social setup: not just capital but government exploited and dominated by the nature of any hierarchical system, and government's form of domination amounted to an "internal colonization" of society. His solution in The Theory of Communicative Action was to leaven the dominatory systems with the reciprocal exchange of human-to-human communication and truth values in the day-to-day lifeworld.

Adorno also sees beyond the Enlightenment cult of reason and the fantasy of liberation. Suppose you experience reason not as the transcendental key to understanding the universe but as a natural development of man's instinct for self-preservation. You experience that reason gives man a competitive advantage over other animals. But, as Thomson paraphrases Adorno:

The fact that reason can reflect on its own nature, also allows for the possibility of going against nature. Reason means that we have the chance of going against our instincts and desires.

But we must not forget that reason does not free us from our natural condition. Freedom does not mean freedom from nature. Human life is equivocal, not a simple march to liberation.

These more careful voices have been drowned out in the modern left's lunge for power. The anti-colonialists in the left rail about the colonization of non-white peoples, yet they propose and advance a complete and cynical internal colonization of everything in their own society. Nothing is to be hidden from the gaze and the power of the social justice activist.

The optimistic thing about left-wing politics is that it fails every time it is tried. But it would be nice if some of the left's practitioners had actually thought a little about politics beyond the immediate tactical problem of how to dominate the political conversation and silence opposing voices.

It would be nice if they used their critical theory to critique not just bourgeois society but their own ideas.

Republicans Have Never Reached Out

Last Monday I was listening to Michael Medved doing the liberals' work for them by castigating Ben Carson on the Muslim issue. Michael ended his radio show segment by asking how the Republicans possibly can expect to thrive if they don't reach out beyond the Republican base.

Er, what planet are you broadcasting from, Michael? The Republicans have never reached out, at least not in my lifetime. They don't know how, because they are just a teeny bit embarrassed about handing out free stuff.

And yet Republicans have still managed to elect their share of Republican presidents and now control Congress. What gives?

It is simple. Republicans are nothing more than Americans that have been chucked out of the Democratic Party. Starting with Ronald Reagan, who famously said: "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."

That's how it works for everyone else. Remember the Reagan Democrats of 1980? They also felt that the party had left them. Then it was Conservative Christians that found the Democratic Party didn't want them. Then it was white men.

Oh, and don't forget the whole South. Democrats have been telling themselves ever since I came to political consciousness that they lost the South because of Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. Could be. But the reality is that Democrats have been dissing the South for decades and the South has got the message. Just in case the South didn't get the message the Democrats just reminded them how they don't belong in today's inclusive Democratic Party with an unmistakable message in the Confederate battle flag flap.

Now it's the turn of the Trumpers, who sound to me like the much maligned white working class when they call Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Remember when the Democrats just loooved the white working stiff? That's ancient history now.

And what about chaps like you, Michael, America's corps of smart Jewish kids? The Republicans have never known what to do about the Jews, not since the days of the Jewish quota at Harvard, but they didn't have to. First of all liberal Jewish intellectuals like Irving Kristol got mugged by reality in the 1960s back in New York, and now Jewish Americans know that the Democratic Party is the party of Muslims and Palestinians and is developing a reputation for anti-semitism. So Jews are moving silently into the Republican column. Not because they left the Democratic Party but because the Democratic Party left them.

I wonder who will be next? Obviously married people with children would be crazy to vote Democrat. And in fact any unsuspecting "cis-gendered" American today would be unwelcome in the ranks of the inclusive. After all, any uncloseted cis-gendered American is committing a microaggression by just existing.

Then there are college men. Why would any man in college have anything to do with the Democratic Party? After all, the Democrats want to criminalize good healthy young male behavior, by making any sexual assault accusation into an immediate ticket to oblivion, without benefit of the court system and its protections for the accused.

Then there is the Uber generation. Anyone that works in the gig economy is bound to get the message sooner or later: Democrats are not your friends; they are instead the pals of established interests that want to roll over you and continue to enjoy the customary rents they enjoy as a reward for their votes and their contributions.

That's not to mention ordinary wage workers. One fine day the workers are going to wake up and wonder what they are getting in return for the swingeing payroll taxes they and their employers pay for the possibility, one day, that they will get a pension and a bit of death-panel-administered health care. They might think that the Democratic Party and its politics of tax-and-spend is a direct attack on people like them. They might think that, but I couldn't possibly comment.

But never mind about the nobodies that nobody who is anybody cares about. How about east Asians? They are already being Asian-quota-ed at the nation's select universities, and they have pushed back against the Asian quota at the University of California and at Harvard. How long can it be before the signal goes out to the Democratic operatives with bylines that Asians are really as racist and exclusionary as cis-gendered whites? How long till Asians find out that they didn't leave the Democratic Party, the party left them?

What about Hispanics? The information I've read is that Hispanics are Democratic when they first arrive and want to bring the rest of the family to the US. But when the family is all here and they start to thrive -- well then they start to vote Republican.

And hey, what about the most Democratic of all Democrats: African Americans? Surely African Americans must be fit to be tied by the disappointments of the Obama administration. In fact they would have a good argument to say that they were the hardest hit by "fundamental transformation." And pretty soon they won't have to support America's First Black President as a part of their racial identity.

Maybe the only people left in the Democratic Party after a suitable period of adjustment will be the liberal poster-children that we have learned to know and love in recent years: Julia the Government Girl, Pajama Boy, Mattress Girl, and now the Muslim Clock Boy, all celebrated by non-cis-gendered people, credentialed social justice warriors, and those darlings of the Democratic Party, the Global Association of Green Energy Crony Capitalists, Tom Steyer, proprietor.

So come on Michael. Get a clue. We Republicans don't have to do anything to win elections, even if we knew how. All we have to do is sit here on the sidewalk with a nice cup of Starbucks Blond and wait for the migrants and the refugees pouring over the border from their forty years in the wilderness of the Democratic Party into the Promised Land of the People of the Responsible Self.

The Liberals' Modest Proposal

A couple centuries ago, Jonathan Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal" to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland. The subhead for the article was:

For Preventing The Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being A burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to The Public

The solution? Parents should eat their children. And this was over a century before the Potato Famine.

Yesterday I read Charles Murray's review of the book of a fellow poverty intellectual, Robert D. Putnam. Putnam rose to fame on his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse of American Community, which bemoaned the fact that Americans don't join organizations any more. Gosh, I wonder why?

Now Putnam has written Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. It is the liberal answer to Murray's recent Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. Both books demonstrate that things are not well with America's working class.

Like Charles Murray, Robert Putnam grew up in a small town in the 1950s.

Port Clinton had class divisions in the 1950s, but the town corresponded closely to the American ideal: lots of interaction across social classes, stable and mostly loving families in all social classes, low crime, and high levels of community engagement. I grew up in the same era in the same kind of town.

But things are different today.

Since Putnam left Port Clinton, it has become a radically different place, with haves and have-nots separated by chasms not just in income, but on a wide range of cultural dimensions that, to borrow from the book’s subtitle, have put the American dream in crisis. The kids of today’s working class have it worse in so many ways that climbing the socioeconomic ladder, as many of Putnam’s classmates in the 1950s succeeded in doing, has become dauntingly difficult.

Murray's book tells a similar story. Things are great in Belmont, a suburb of Boston, where folks like Mitt Romney live. Things are horrible in white working-class neighborhoods like Fishtown in Philadelphia, where the women don't marry and the men don't work.

From Murray's perspective, Putnam's book provides a good view at the liberal conventional wisdom on how this could have happened.

The leading culprits are economic—globalization, stagnation of working-class wages, and loss of manufacturing jobs. When cultural factors are involved, they are such things as the sexual revolution.

Could the policy reforms of the 1960s be a cause? Not a chance.

This is not rocket science. Why do women marry? To bind the father of their children to them. Why do men work? To provide for their children and maintain access to sex. But marriage to an unskilled, undisciplined man is a hard row to hoe. It's much easier to take free stuff from the state.

In Visible Man, George Gilder showed how this works. He tells the story of a disabled vet from Vietnam that knocked up an underage girl and worked hard to support her and his child. But when the girl got old enough for welfare she ditched him and got a nice apartment.

Putnam has a raft of liberal ideas to fix things, including universal pre-K. But Murray argues that pre-K doesn't make that much difference. What really matters is IQ, and that is inherited.

So that set me to thinking. If you look at the range of liberal policies they appear as though they were designed to hammer the poor. Margaret Sanger and abortion and cleansing the race of the unfit with Planned Parenthood conveniently close to minority neighborhoods? Check. Welfare policies to discourage marriage and fatherhood and so make lower-income boys into gang-bangers? Check. Lousy inner-city schools that don't even succeed in basic discipline? Check. Race and identity politics that divide the poor and recent immigrants from the basic cultural myth of the American Dream? Check.

Here's another issue that Charles Murray brings up. The IQ chasm between college graduates and high-school graduates has been getting bigger. Back in 1960 the gap was 14 points. Today it is 23 points.

So the result of another liberal policy, that "everyone goes to college," means that everyone with an half decent IQ goes to college and the rest get left behind. And their children get left even further behind.

Now we all know what a big premium liberals put on being the smartest people in the room and how they know that they are more evolved, more intelligent that other people.

People like that would instinctively make life difficult for people with a low IQ. They would naturally segregate themselves into a kind of Brahmin caste. Oh, they would care for the Untouchables, but not so much that they would dirty their hands.

And think about it. The modern workplace requires people with a certain facility for service and interacting with computers and media. There is not much need for the strong back. Wouldn't it just be a kindness to put the low IQ People of the Strong Back out of their misery?

I don't know. You tell me.

Why Would Ta-Nehisi Coates Ignore the Elephant in the Room?

Understanding a chap like Ta-Nehisi Coates is troublesome for a conservative. Why would he insist in his book Between the World and Me that anti-black racism is still America's big problem. Why would he pen his 17,000 word "The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration" in The Atlantic and never mention the problem of fatherless boys. Kay Hymowitz:

You might think that an article on the Moynihan report and the black family would mention somewhere that today 72 percent of black children, up from 24 percent when the report was written, are born to unmarried mothers. 

Instead, what Coates wants to talk about is that "Mass incarceration is the latest iteration of the American oppression of black people."

Well, maybe, but there is the unfortunate fact that young black males commit murders at 8 times the rate of young white males. Of course we could let them back on the streets so they could kill more black people.

So what is going on here?

It is really quite simple and it is staring us right in the face. It is the problem with capitalism. The problem with capitalism is that it says that, if you sort out a few things like property rights, you don't need much in the way of government to supervise the economy.

And that is a problem -- for the ruling class.

If you are the son of a bourgeois father with a yen for politics and a hall pass into the ruling class, untrammeled capitalism must not stand. Because if you are into politics, you are into government, and government is all about finding things that need force, and even a war.

Marx was the guy that first got a handle on this. Capitalism was a monstrous system of oppression and exploitation, he argued. Only revolution and complete subjection of the capitalist class to the political class would release the burden of exploitation and oppression on the working class.

Well, Marx had an excuse. Nobody knew in 1850 that the average person was just starting to experience an increase in material living standards of 3000 percent in 200 years.

After World War I it was clear that, first, the working class was in fact getting a lot more prosperous. Second, it was also clear that the working class identified first with their nation and only secondly with their class.

So the geniuses at the newly coalesced Frankfurt School took President Eisenhower's big idea -- before he had even thought of it. If you don't know how to solve a problem, make it bigger. They decided that not just the working class, but women and the subjects of the European colonies, and oppressed minorities and gays were grievously exploited and oppressed. Therefore an evolved and enlightened elite was morally and ethically bound to do something about it, using government force.

And so was born the whole poisonous culture we call political correctness, from Gramsci's march through the institutions to Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals to the Cloward-Piven strategy.

In his book The Devil's Pleasure Palace Michael Walsh accuses the left of cynicism in formulating and executing on this cruel and monstrous philosophy. But I give the left credit for actually believing in its faith. For it is a faith, a millennial faith in "fundamental transformation" and totalitarian politics. I use "totalitarian" in the strict sense of economic, political, and moral/cultural life being collapsed into the political.

I look at the totalitarian current in our modern ruling class as merely the normal surrender to temptation that you would expect in any ruling class. Any member of a ruling class will believe in the uses of political power. Of course the real message behind any belief in political power is that "I like power" but we humans are smarter than that. We do not usually own up to such a crude philosophy. We say we only want power because of the existential need to fight foreigners or enemies or end oppression. Otherwise we would be like the improbable Iago who revels in his evil.

So I just say that our modern ruling class, descended from the German Romantics of the late 18th century, has just assembled an apology for power just like any other ruling class. If it hadn't come up with economic Marxism, that the working class was cruelly exploited, or with cultural Marxism, that women, blacks and homosexuals were grievously oppressed, because sexism, racism, and homophobia, they would have figured out something similar.

And so a chap like Ta-Nehisi Coates can expatiate in books and articles about oppression and racism and American oppression of black people and make a great name for himself. Nice work if you can get it.

Our problem is to develop a counterculture against this naked apology for power. Our challenge is to formulate and spread a culture that says this oppression stuff is all baloney. It is baloney that is exposed as baloney by the facts. All anyone has to do in America is make themselves useful by acquiring a marketable skill and they will do OK. All anyone has to do on the sexual front is get married before having children. It's the old formula: don't drop out of high school, don't have kids in your teens, don't have kids before marriage.

It's all so obvious that the next question is: how could we be living in an America where the tenets of cultural Marxism are ruling the culture and ruling the country? How could it have happened? How could we have allowed it?

I don't know, but there is no use whining about it. Our task is to restore the great bourgeois culture of responsible individualism, spread it out among the people, and then storm the commanding heights of politics, recognizing that politics is downstream from culture, and take America back.

I suspect that, beneath the extraordinary excitement caused by the Donald Trump presidential candidacy and the extraordinary viewing figures for the first two presidential debates, is an inchoate madness of crowds that is yearning for a different America.

You might say that that different America is as different from Ta-Nehisi Coates' and Barack Obama's America as black is from white. You might think that.

I couldn't possibly comment.

After the Debate: Obama's Gift

OK, so I actually watched most of the CNN debate. And I wish that the candidates had tried the "Democratic operatives with bylines" gambit. On at least abortion. As in: "hey Jake and Dana, how many minutes has CNN devoted to the Planned Parenthood videos? And when you propose to cover this important, possibly criminal issue?"

And yes, I liked Carly and Marco and maybe Chris and Ted. And I liked that the candidates did not really pick up the invitation from CNN to fight among themselves.

But here I want to shake a finger at the media types that don't like the issue-free nature of the Trump campaign. I was getting it yesterday from Michael Medved on his radio show. And then there is the Wall Street Journal talking about The Joy of Madness of the voters.

I come back to Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. There can be no such thing as democracy, he writes, in the sense of the people actually ruling.

Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity if accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them.

That definition explains a lot. It explains why political campaigns are typically fought over one-and-a-half rather inconsequential issues. Or indeed basically over two questions: "four more years" or "time for a change."

In this context it seems perfectly ordinary that we should have a candidate like Donald Trump whose campaign has much of the flavor of a TV reality show. The voters are saying "screw you!" Which is perfectly natural and physical.

It is appropriate that voters should act like cornered rats from time to time. When you are cornered, the sensible thing to do is to lash out, in the hope that you will change the situation. That is entirely sensible and practical if you are otherwise screwed. And the fact is that, ever since the start of the agricultural age, humans have been "caged" by the fact that without the benefit of society life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

The Journal knows who is to blame for all this in their "madness" piece.

Barack Obama is fundamentally apolitical... Doing politics, left or right, isn't his thing... You think you're mad? Talk to members of Congress, Republican or Democrat, and you will discover people also driven nuts by the virtual impossibility over two presidential terms of practicing normal politics.

And Michael Barone too:

In 2008 Obama promised he would "fundamentally transform" America, and Obamacare and the Iran deal are indeed fundamental transformations of policy --transformations most Americans oppose...

And so a president who came to office with relatively little experience has managed to tarnish experience, incumbency and institutions: a fundamental transformation indeed.

The truth is, though, that the "fundamental transformation" that conservatives want is only likely to come when ordinary ruling class politics is seen to fail.

And that seems to be the reason for the madness of the moment. Voters are coming to see that their lordly ruling class has got them in a box. And they don't like it. The only thing to do, the rational thing, is to stir the soup, and hope that something good comes up from the bottom of the pot.

And so the bottom line is that President Obama is the gift that keeps on giving. He has done what seemed unthinkable. He has brought the legitimacy of the established ruling class into question.

What is the Right Way to Undo Obama?

The great challenge facing the next President of the United States is perhaps not what to do but how to do it.

It is easy to say that we should reverse all the executive actions of President Obama and teach the liberals a lesson.

But then we would be just making the same mistake as the Obamis made, pushing the limit on everything without bothering to forge a consensus. Arguably, the reason that the Democratic Party has been put in the worst electoral position since 1928 is that President Obama has not governed by consensus. His Obamacare was passed by legislative legerdemain and lies, and was always opposed by a plurality of voters. His Iran deal is a folly. If you can't get a treaty passed in the US Senate, mainly because there is no support in the country, then what you may have agreed with a foreign power isn't a treaty.

So what do we do about Obama?

Victor Davis Hanson asks this question as it applies to The Middle East, The Law, Race, and Debt.

On The Middle East, Hanson says it doesn't matter what Obama's motive was, he's broken the Middle East and now we have to deal with it. But I think that the bigger issue is this. Obama has inadvertently made clear that peace in the Middle East was predicated on US hegemony. The end of US hegemony -- a long-term liberal objective -- means a humanitarian disaster as the various regional powers fight it out. OK, but now we have to decide what to do next. What really is the US interest in the Middle East? Obama has provoked this question like no president before him.

On The Law, Hanson writes:

There will be a temptation for a reform president to use the lawless means that Obama has bequeathed — executive orders to unconstitutionally bypass Congress; arbitrary suspension or simple non-enforcement of laws, depending on where we are in the national election cycle; exemption of party loyalists from legal accountability — to achieve the noble aim of restoring legality. But such short-cuts to reform would be a terrible mistake.  

"Instead," he writes, "the next president must, as never before, obey both the spirit and the very letter of the law to restore to us what Obama has almost destroyed."

Yes, but it seems to me that the only way to make this stick is to make liberals regret they ever tried to cut corners with executive orders and ignoring the plain meaning of the written law, and do it by applying the law to liberals. Hey kids! What a concept! The next president has to get himself a mandate to do this by saying that there will be no corner cutting in his administration, and no liberal opt-outs like "sanctuary cities."

But suppose the president says that -- after liberals overturned decades of consensus on labor law at the National Labor Relations Board, and suddenly decided, by regulatory fiat, to regulate the internet as a utility -- that their lack of good faith means that the NRLB and the FCC must be abolished, because we cannot have institutions of government as cat's paws for a single political party. Could he get a consensus to do that?

On Race Hanson notes that Obama has taken racial tensions and made them worse. He suggests that

The next president should take a hiatus from our racial obsessions, and simply try treating Americans as if their race or ethnic background were irrelevant.

I have a better idea. I think that the next President should list all the failed race politics of the last 150 years, from the disaster of Reconstruction to the cultural wasteland left by Great Society programs to the resentments of Affirmative Action to the poison of diversity, the failure of the nation's First Black President and the community-organizer divisions of #BlackLivesMatter. Then he should say that the only way to solve this problem is to take it out of politics and government. All politics does is divide us. All government goes is try to force us together. There is only one thing to do. It is to beg African Americans for forgiveness. You know, just like they did in Charleston, South Carolina.

Seriously. What would happen after such a presidential speech? How would liberals deal with the president calling groups of people into the Oval Office every couple of months for their achievements in racial healing?

On Debt, Hanson writes:

When interest rates climb to 4 or 5 percent, the next president will face a budgetary crisis, augmented by Obama’s failure to address entitlement spending. We are in for rough times; whether Obama will get out ahead of the reckoning is unknown.

The way forward, of course, is to privatize as much as possible of pensions and health care and education and welfare. But that cannot be done by shenanigans and budgetary tricks. It has to start with the president and the ruling class selling the American people on the idea that they are much better off running their own pensions, health care etc. than letting government come in and screw it up. But I don't think the American people will be ready for that until after the money runs out.

The governing approach of the Obamis has been a disaster, because the Obamis either knew or feared that they couldn't get their agenda done any other way.

But it won't do for Republicans to do an Obama in 2017. We believe in law, in consensus, in the consent of the governed, and all that rubbish. We have to persuade. Every other way leads to the Maelstrom.

A Kidney Stone for Breakfast

This morning, out of a clear blue sky, I got a sudden pain in my lower-left abdomen just before breakfast. Pretty soon I was sweating, breathing rapidly, and finding it painful to walk. After a while, prompted by the Lady Marjorie, I called Group Health and they told me to call 911.

Pretty soon four burly firemen turned up and took my vital signs. The general consensus was to head to the nearest hospital, and so, once the fire truck had cleared the driveway, we headed off to Swedish in Ballard. Thanks fellas!

After the usual admissions frou-frou -- and the first thing they do is hook up an IV -- Dr. Burdick showed up and allowed as how he thought it was urolithiasis. That's a kidney stone to you. And the MRI confirmed a 2mm kidney stone that has just "turned the corner." All the folks at Swedish were pleasant and competent. All except that Burdick guy, who said I'd have to break his arm if I thought I was going to get out of hospital without submitting a urine sample.

OK, so that's all right.

They keep asking you to rate your pain on a scale from 1 to 10. I said 6-7 but pretty soon it was down to 3. Now it's just a ache in the lower abdomen. How do you rate that? Then, after thanking everyone, it was off to Group Health pharmacy to sit around for an hour to fill four prescriptions for pain, real pain, nausea, and a drug to "open up" the ureter.

Of course everyone at the hospital from the doc to the MRI tech said they had already had a kidney stone, so I guess that, as usual, I am the last to know.

Knowing what I know now, I would have said that I would have just sat there and waited for the stone to pass. But you never know. It could have be something else, as in life-threatening! And Lady Marjorie would have none of such foolishness.

Anyway, tomorrow it's back to the crimes and misdemeanors of our abysmal ruling class. But right now I have to go downstairs and do my DuoLingo.