PUBLIC OPTIONS WITH A ROYAL TOUCH



Is it of interest to my fellow Americans that the tercentary of the birth of English author Samuel Johnson coincides with the current debate about the inclusion of a public option in the proposed health care reforms of President Obama? I believe that it should be, if only as a reminder of a public option that was acceptable in Johnson’s time long ago but might currently, in a more “progressive” day and age, be regarded as intrusion by big goverment.
Samuel Johnson was born in poor health on September 18, 1709, and was never free from pain and illness until he died on December 13, 1784. In later years, he was also never free of the often obnoxious presence of James Boswell, a Scotsman and his self-appointed biographer.
Frail at birth, and not expected to live, he was baptized at once by the vicar of St. Mary’s in Lichfield, his hometown in Staffordshire. But it seems that he was already possessed of the tenacity that enabled him to survive and later distinguish himself by writing dozens of works in almost every genre that offered decent payment in pounds if not guineas, and to be outranked on Parnassus Britannica only by William Shakespeare, who wrote a mere 37 plays, 154 sonnets and a few other poems, all so full of allusions to Greek and Roman mythology that you can’t enjoy them without reaching every other line for a reference book by Thomas Bulfinch and/or Edith Hamilton.
Put out to a wet-nurse who would have been disqualified by the National Health Service if it had already been established, he contracted scrofula, a form of tuberculosis affecting the lymph nodes of the neck. Scrofula was known also in England as the King’s Evil, because loyal subjects, if they valued their necks and their exposure to a hangman’s noose, were compelled to concur that royalty ruled by Divine Right, and that it enabled a sovereign, among his other powers and prerogatives, to employ a Royal Touch and rid subjects of scrofula, perceived at the time as a sort of supernatural evil as well as a debilitating disease. Also, in a quaint departure from present-day financial arrangements with healers and HMOs, the patient not only didn’t pay so much as a farthing for the treatment but was presented with a coin valued from about ten to twenty shillings, according to such fluctuating factors as the crown’s share of the booty from pirates it had sanctioned sub rosa, just as our own government has sanctioned such activities as rendition and virtual torture.
Though recommended to his parents by no less an authority than Sir John Floyer, former physician to Charles I, the treatment did not work for some reason, and the disease left Johnson with permanent scars and frequent bouts of depression about his health and appearance. Despite this disappointing outcome, Johnson was a royalist all his life, as demonstrated by his opposing the revolt of the American colonies in 1776 and graciously accepting a pension from the crown. On the other hand, he would have scorned so much as a dinner invitation from such an ignoble nobleman as Lord Chesterfield, who had once refused to support his plan for a new and definitive dictionary of the English language.
Formed by decree of Henry VIII in 1540, the Company of Barber-Surgeons was in Johnson’s day more than the equivalent in prestige of today’s American Medical Association, and neither its own archives, nor that of its successor organization, the Royal College of Surgeons, indicate whether it approved or disapproved of a monarch’s intrusion into their learned profession, which included but was most certainly not limited to brain surgery, then as now the hallmark of competence. But disapproval of the Royal Touch, and denouncing it as quackery and restraint of trade, would have been of no avail, not if the Company wished to maintain its privileges, tantamount, in modern parlance, to both a vertical and horizontal monopoly.
It is interesting, however, to speculate what would have happened if, throwing caution to the winds that prevailed over the Tower of London, the Company, in the manner of special interest groups of our own day, had engaged a professional scribe to present their case to the kingdom against a public option like the Royal Touch. According to my informal poll of a group of scholars at my daughter’s old school in London, King’s College, by far the most qualified scribe for the assignment would have been one Thrush Limberger (1690-1763), author of Demons over Westminster and a frequent contributor to the Birmingham Bludgeon. And by a stroke of good luck, one of the scholars recalled that Limberger actually did write a broadside on the subject in question, and he was kind enough to consult his archives and provide me with a copy. The following two excerpts, the exordium and the peroration, are typical of the style and flavor.









Concering True and False Healers


With the help of God and this plume plucked from a true English goose and not a Burgundian bird of prey, let the truth be revealed at last to all honest and patriotic folk in the land, from the Shetland Islands to Cornwall! Have not we all, and especially the middle classes, the good merchants and yeomen of England, suffered long enough from our own lethargy in a matter that concerns our health and that of our wives and babes, our kith and kin, and also, lower in the social order but also children of God, the cooks who prepare our roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and the maids who serve them and afterwards scrub our pots to our satisfaction?
Verily, and with Bible in hand, I swear upon my life that no one reveres the Crown more than I myself, and, with God’s grace, may the present king and queen and their progeny rule with glory until the Day of Judgment. And may they repulse and crush both Catholics and Jacobites at home and the French and Spanish abroad. But to suggest that royalty has a God-given dispensation to treat scrofula or, for that matter, any other affliction of body or soul is, I say, sheer balderdash and poppycock. And this asserveration is not only my own but also, a fortiori, that of the synod of learned ecclesiastics that met only a fortnight ago at Bury St. Edmunds. The original purpose of their meeting was to deplore the plethora of witch trials that had occurred in that town at the behest of the Lord Chief Justice, but while in session they had also felt it their moral duty to discuss and denounce (1) such royal disgraces as dalliance with actresses and (2), far more heinous, the retention of such ineffective and unholy practices as the King’s Touch.
..........................


Enough of my discourse! Great God of heaven and earth, what more reason and example can I offer to convince my fellow Englishmen that the king oversteps his powers when, despite his lack of an apprenticeship to a qualified member of the Company of Barber-Surgeons, he presumes to employ one or more of his digits to cure an affliction of such gravity and complexity as the scofula. Considering the number of traitors at home and the number of foes abroad, I humbly suggest the king’s hands would be better employed in the perfection of such worthier skills as archery and swordsmanship.
eHhBefore I take leave of my readers, permit me to mention once again the doleful case of Samuel Johnson of Lichfield. If his parents had rushed their Sammy to the surgery of a qualified physician instead of to the royal palace, he would almost certainly have been cured and then forever after free of the scars and mental indispositions that, inter alia, limited his choice of a wife to a widow nineteen years his senior. According to his dedicated and meticulous biographer, James Boswell, her rejection of the customary and natural noctural duties of a true English wife forced Johnson to exercise his manliness in a manner that violated his religious principles and evoked a perpetual fear of divine retribution in the afterlife.
In 1649, Charles I was executed after having been convicted of the high treason of making war against his subjects when, asserting Divine Right, he attempted, like our current king, to more fully exercise what he believed to be his just powers. Opposing Parliament and marriage to a Catholic princess from France, a dangerous and longtime enemy, were, admittedly, far more serious transgressions than curing scrofula, and yet, as a loyal subject, I am duty bound to remind our present monarch of the propensity of disgruntled subjects to make molehills into mountains.
At any gathering, I have always been the first to raise my glass, whether of ale or port, and to cry out, “God save the king!” Currently, with the current epidemic of scrofula, I am compelled to add, “May God also save the physicians who are members of the Company of Barber-Surgeons and therefore more qualified to rid England of this scourge!

Boswell nowhere mentions what became of Johnson’s shilling. We can be sure, however, that if Johnson saved it until he moved to London in 1737, and there spent it at one of the fleshpots on Fleet Street and on every other street, lane and alley, Boswell, who shares a Hibernian ancestry with Rupert Murdoch,iberH would have mentioned all the lascivious details in his biography, regarded as the greatest and most entertaing in all literature.

A SORT OF HOMILY ABOUT HALEY

My son and his wife have become parents for the first time, and I would dearly love to offer them some nuggets of wisdom on the subject, but we are of different generations, as different as Bach from the Beatles, and I foresee that advice might be misconstrued. I suppose that a safe alternative is to relate a few pertinent and perhaps pedagogic memories of my own upbringing, such as it was.


Though it may sound unkind of me to mention it so early in their parenthood, there may well come a time, now hard to believe, when Haley sheds her halo and appears to be in need of cognitive readjustment, which I gather from the media has become an increasingly popular alternative to the good, all-too-solid discipline of my youth. Certainly, I can't remember the last time I visited Home Depot and spotted rods for the purpose mentioned in Proverbs 84:18. Lucky for Haley that she lives and is loved in Buffalo Grove in 2008 and not on New York's Lower East Side during the Great Depression.


Slapping and spanking a naughty kid was regarded as meritorious back there and then, when, to borrow a Christian metaphor, the Holy Grail of child development was to follow tradition come what may, as in "Fiddler on the Roof." Responsible Jewish parents slapped and spanked at the drop of an obscenity or of a grade on a report card, modus operandi which they never doubted that they had the moral, legal and, above all, the biblical authority to employ. However. despite circumcision, boys were considered lucky, because God no longer told fathers to do what Abraham almost did to poor Isaac, who never even did anything really reprehensible, such as swiping a nickel ride on the Grand Street trolley and then, worse, being caught by the conductor. What if the conductor, probably an anti-Semite, had reported the kid to the cops at the police station on Clinton Street? Once arrested, he would be locked up with real-life counterparts of Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids. He would spend the rest of his days at Sing Sing or Alcatraz unless he participated in a successful breakout with George Raft, after which there would be a shootout for the affections of dubious dames like Ann Sheridan or Barbara Stanwyck.


Also entitled to slap kids, but never spank them, were my teachers at long-gone P.S. 147 on East Broadway and the Bialystoker Hebrew School on Willet Street. The Bialystoker Synagogue, which housed its Hebrew school up flights of stairs higher than Mount Sinai, is still extant and now also a landmark. But, on the other hand, gone and never to be forgotten, if only by me, is Gus's pool parlor down the block, where local prostitutes could avail themselves of a side entrance to avoid the cops. The ladies were so attractive in their snug and colorful dresses from maybe S. Klein's on Union Square that we kids hoped they were still in business and free from VD when we were of age to employ their services and could afford them. Toward that end, we hoped also that President Roosevelt wasn't kidding us when he said that prosperity was just around the corner and would last as long as we voted the straight Democratic ticket.


Especially forthcoming with physical as well as verbal punishment at my Hebrew school was Mr. Rubin, our bar mitzvah teacher. Over the long years, he has come to look to me like the modern-day actor Christopher Walken when he plays the sort of villain who, when apprehended, will end up in a mental hospital rather than a prison. Somehow, Mr. Rubin's unusually long black skullcap added to his menace, and he has always reminded me of executioners in horror movies with Boris Karloff. I don't like to think about what he wore at home, but in class, in addition to the skullcap, he always wore a shirt that may once have been white, a gray tie with stains that had held their own against Carbona, and a black suit that could have used a cleaning and pressing if not a replacement from Orchard Street, where the shops stretched from Hester Street to East Houston and may have been the country's original strip mall.


In fairness to Mr. Rubin, I must add that he wielded a wooden ruler rather than an axe, and that his instruction enabled me and all my classmates, even the dumbest of us, to perform acceptably at our bar mitzvahs, which ceremony would mark our assumption of the responsibilities of an adult Jewish male. As for the privileges, they would mostly have to wait till we married a nice Jewish girl of whom our parents approved after enough snooping to qualify them for the FBI. We were told repeatedly that when it came to brides, a good heart was more desirable than good looks, but we were too young and foolish to appreciate such profundities.


Though official and binding in the eyes of God, a shoddy bar mitzvah would have disgraced not only our parents but also our ancestors all the way back to Canaan if not the Garden of Eden. Up in paradise, Kings David and Solomon, to whom every Jew is related, would have been forced to abdicate their thrones and maybe shed a few of the concubines that also served as status symbols. In many a household more pious than my own, such a scandal would have resulted in at least an hour of verbal punishment back home. The good news was that the amount of physical punishment to fit such a heinous crime was considered to be work, and that was forbidden on the Sabbath. But, an even worse punishment, parents could have withheld the weekly dime to attend that afternoon's double feature at a local theater, probably the Loew's Apollo, where the kindly ticket seller let you in for the children's price of a dime until your voice changed or you needed a shave. On the day of my friend Phil's bar mitzvah I accompanied this lucky kid to not a double but a triple feature, at the Palestine Theater on Clinton Street. One of the movies featured a rerun of Tod Slaughter in the perennial local favorite "The Mad Barber of Fleet Street," and it made us postpone for weeks our next visit to Mrs. Fiedler, the unisex barber on Stanton Street who also told their fortunes to women and was rumored to perform abortions when her advice led to misfortunes.


These homey folkways and others were practiced during the Great Depression. Were children better behaved then than now? Speaking for myself, the only thing I ever stole, in addition to the heart of my wife, which turned out as good as her looks, was second base during a punch ball game in the school yard across the street from P.S.147. Sure enough, God punished me when I next tried to steal third base and was tagged out by, of all people, Herman Zimmerman, whom I had recently given quite a big bite of my hot dog from Katz's deli.


I could offer a few valuable thoughts about friendship and people like Herman Zimmerman, but I will save them for when a schoolmate steals a bite of Haley's hot dog, assuming that she is not a vegetarian like her father.

CLIENT 9 REVISITED

CLIENT 9 REVISITED

by

Hy Brett

In our virtuous society, chances are that the media pundits who are still throwing stones at New York's former governor, Eliot Spitzer, aka Client 9 of a prostitution service, are themselves without sexual sin. Their virtue is to the great credit of themselves, their parents and spiritual advisers, and they make us proud to live in America and not in a country like France. There, the media was not upset in the least by the funeral of former President François Mitterrand, which was attended by his wife, mistress, and children by both women. From a distance, it must have been hard to distinguish the two chic women, attired in similar mourning from possibly La Maison Dior.


Hopefully, after Time, Nature's own therapist, has healed their traumas of disappointment in yet another leader whose public image was, inevitably, too good to be true, critics will acknowledge that though Mr. Spitzer had lusted not wisely but too well and too extravagantly, his choice of extramarital sexual activity in, of all places sacred and profane, the nation's capital, indicated, nevertheless, as commendable a dedication to America's highest value, the free market system, as that of any of his gloating foes on Wall Street.


Unlike with films and rap songs, there is no official or consensual ranking of America's core values, those ties that bind the nation together through wars, recessions and the administrations of subprime presidents, not that we've ever had any. But what may well serve the purpose in the case of Media et al v. Spitzer are the rulings of the nation's highest court. According to a New York Times Magazine cover story on March 16, conservatives and liberals on the Supreme Court differ on many issues. This came as no revelation, because, let us be frank, justices are nominated by presidents whose views the justices, being men and women of honor, are obliged to respect and transfigure into the holy writ of our secular religion, Democracy. But what was surprising in the Times article was the information that, despite the varying agendas of their sponsors in the White House, the nine justices agree almost unanimously in their support of the business community and its values and objectives. Wrote Jeffrey Rosen: "[Business cases before the court] involve billions of dollars, have huge consequences for the economy and can have a greater effect on people's daily lives than the often symbolic battles of the culture wars." Mr. Rosen specifically included among the symbolic battles such bellicose and presumably secondary, noncommercial issues as abortion, affirmative action and the death penalty. Space permitting, he could have added immigration, gun control, narcotics, wiretapping and privacy, torture, freedom of the press, the rights of women and minorities, the separation of church and state.


"Power is the great aphrodisiac," said super-senior statesman Dr. Henry Kissinger, perhaps the keenest observer of our backstage politics since French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), who toured the country in the 1830s and was particularly impressed by how our leaders evade impediments that had found their way into the Constitution. Like Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and other public servants before him and, for all we know, currently in office, Mr. Spitzer, the powerful governor of the Empire State, could have stooped to adultery with one or more married women, thus exposing them and their spouses and innocent children, some still in nursery school, to the sort of shame that has engulfed his own wife and daughters, hitherto able to hold their heads high at the most prestigious of gatherings in town, the sort graced by overachiever Donald Trump and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Or, as happens in both the public and private sectors, he could have, with or without a Christmas bonus, bedded the attractive women of varying ages and figures on his efficient and dedicated staff. Or, during college commencements, en route to a backward state to inspire graduates to the sort of civic virtue he was promoting so vocally at home, he could have solicited a female or male partner in an airport terminal, a place where strangers meet and then pass in the night, but not before the sort of brief encounters that are inappropriate in their hometowns.


Instead, he did, if the truth be known, what all too many a true-blue, red-blooded American guy might do were he affluent and, for whatever reason, dissatisfied with the sexual offerings at home, whether that home be in the city or the suburbs, where country clubs offer a broad selection of indoor physical activities besides Tai Chi. He resorted to the well-known magic of the free market place, and specifically to a firm with the respectable name of The Emperor's Club VIP. Naturally, doing business in Washington within the shadow of a White House totally devoted to faith and family, it would have been unseemly for such an enterprise to call itself The President's Club VIP, and their good taste is to be commended and worthy of consideration by the FBI.


And there in Washington, at a hotel named, prophetically, for the vessel that bore daring adventurers across treacherous seas to an uncertain future, Mr. Spitzer was willing to pay top dollar for his carnal pleasure, just as he and neighbors on Fifth Avenue often pay even greater sums for more acceptable modes of physical, emotional or aesthetic gratification. Be it a box at the Metropolitan Opera or a sky box at a Super Bowl. Or a table at an event where one can hear an inspiring, six-figure speech by a retired statesman who is still milking his beneficiaries and always will. Or a political fundraiser where, of course, expecting neither contracts nor favors, a good citizen can shake the eager palm of a would-be president and hear vows of ever-lower taxes for his particular bracket, from which manna will trickle down and make the economy bloom like another Garden of Eden but without clever serpents who would tempt visitors to read leftist literature composed on Apple computers.


Mr. Spitzer is reported to have spent $4300 for his tryst on St. Valentine's eve with the prostitute first identified as Kristen and later revealed as Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a name to inspire Rupert Murdoch to create an imprint called Boudoir Books and order it to reissue the almost 600 romance novels of Barbara Cartland. Let it be said in Mr. Spitzer's favor, if there is anyone to listen, that for a lesser sum he could have availed himself of the reluctant services of a Balkan or Asiatic teenager who had been kidnapped and smuggled into the country. Instead, he saw fit to hold fast to the standards of his socioeconomic class and to engage a middle-class young woman from New Jersey, the Garden State, and the home of the Institute of Advanced Studies. She was twenty-two, of an age to choose her career and lifestyle, and to buy a gourmet vodka advertised in Vanity Fair, and to help decide the fate of the nation and Iraq by voting in November for either Senator John McCain or the Democratic candidate, if one is ever selected.


As in many a mishap both personal and national, there may well be a silver lining in the Spitzer scandal. President Bush does not believe that the country is facing a recession, but just in case he is wrong for the first time in office, he has signed into law a growth package that includes a tax rebate that would encourage consumer spending and spur job creation. Though she is, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the bracket of maximum discretionary spenders, the sort of shopper who might drop into Barney's on Madison Avenue for a designer T-shirt on sale for $99.95 and emerge also with a Balmain top costing $7,090, Ms. Dupré, being single and childless, could have expected a mere $300 toward her patriotic desire and responsibililty to stimulate the economy. But one need not be a member of the president's Council of Economic Advisers to appreciate that, thanks to her professional income from Mr. Spitzer and perhaps also Clients 1 through 8, and 10 through…., she is already making a most significant contribution to the president's program, potentially the economic counterpart to his surge in Iraq. Needless to say, Mr. Spitzer's role in her present and future expenditures cannot totally expunge his misconduct, but if and when the economy improves, it will behoove his critics to consider a reassessment of his image.