The Healer and the Hack...Politics, the Market, Steve Jobs, and Barack Obama

[HT to Will Wilkinson on FB]

This 6 ½ minute YouTube video shows us, in the beginning, life as no one wishes to live it. Life when your spirit dims, your body becomes frail, and your intellect fails. Life awaiting death. 

This can be life’s horror in the end. This is the purgatory we Americans choose to place ourselves and our loved ones in because our Puritan heritage demands we treat suicide as a disease and a sin rather than a Godsend and a solution. At least, for some...and only if chosen on their own, not forced upon them. See in this regard Tom Szasz’s latest offering, Suicide Prohibition: The Shame of Medicine, Syracuse University Press, 2011.

Barack Obama, in the landmark [albeit not yet clearly Constitutional] legislation he heralded and  hectored on, log-rolled and lobbied for, the PPACA--better known eponymously as Obamacare--has a solution to all this:

Noting that the last few months of life bring with it the greatest amount of Medicare and Medicaid spending, his efforts to “bend the cost curve down” include “expert panels,” known by opponents as “death panels.” So in Obama’s America--the one governed by noble ideals (or at least Nobel ideals…) rather than Social Darwinism--first you suffer, unallowed to take your own life; then you die, the State unwilling in the end to pay to sustain it once you’ve suffered enough. Coming soon to a hospital near you...

But the YouTube video shows another story as it continues, a story of hope and resurrection, a story of youth returning to reanimate the aged. A simple story, really...and all it took was the insight of Steve Jobs, who came up with the solution without ever once thinking about the aged or their problems.

As famed neurologist Oliver Sacks (see his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) explains, simply allowing these people to listen to an iPod downloaded with their favorite music--jazz for some; religious hymns for others; Tommy Dorsey hits--leads to IMMEDIATE change in the behavior of forgotten geriatrics, men and women who, up until then, led lives of quiet desperation, each day a repetition of the last, of chronic pain, of being left only to one’s increasingly failing thoughts. All of a sudden, their eyes brighten, their feet begin to tap, a smile so long absent again presents itself to their faces. As Sacks puts it, their lives have been returned to them, through a simple device costing well under $100, with music added at 99 cents a shot.

But let Sacks speak for himself, discussing Henry, an old man whose improvement unfolds before us on the video link above:

“We first see Henry, inert, mainly depressed, unresponsive, and almost un-alive.

“Then he is given an iPod containing his favorite music, and immediately he lights up, his face assumes expression, his eyes open wide, he starts to sing and to rock and to move his arms, and he’s been animated by the music...The philosopher Kant once called music the quickening art, and Henry’s been quickened, he’s been brought to life.

“Henry, [formerly] mute and virtually unable to answer the simplest yes or no questions, is quite voluble….So in some sense Henry is restored to himself”

A miracle...of capitalism.

There are two points here:

1. Steve Jobs set out to make music easier for people to listen to. He no doubt had some selfish reasons. He thought he could make some money this way. He thought he could turn his company around. He personally, it seems, really enjoyed listening to music. He had no idea it could transform the bitter stunted lives of the elderly in rest homes. But that is COMMONPLACE for the market. People offer products EVERY DAY that end up having uses they themselves could never have foreseen.

1. Barack Obama sees himself as a political visionary, THE man who will remake American healthcare. And yet Jobs, without effort and without knowing--Jobs, no longer even with us--has already done more to improve the lives of actual patients than Obama has accomplished. And yet, to people like Barack Obama, guys like Steve Jobs are just people who don’t pay enough in taxes. 

We live in a society of great injustice. No wonder so many end up abandoned and wishing for an end that cannot come soon enough. But here we see there is hope for change...in a simple iPod. Who knows what else might be done?

If only Barack Obama would get out of the way...

Did Liberalism Kill Steve Jobs…?

Originally Written October 15, 2011

12/23/11--This was written 10 days after the death of Steve Jobs. Originally written partially tongue-in-cheek, as more time passes and more information about the cancer-related decisions Jobs made and why is released, my brief comments strike me as more worthy of consideration than I initially thought…

As most know by now, Steve Jobs, the brilliant CEO and founder of Apple, died October 5^th, at age 56, of pancreatic cancer. Although perhaps the greatest entrepreneur of our age, Jobs was, politically, a supporter of the Democratic Party. He put former Vice-President Al Gore on the Apple board and developed a strong “green” initiative in the production of Apple products. 

Many extremely wealthy businessmen back the Democratic Party, of course, but it’s usually part and parcel of crony capitalism. However this is not a criticism I’ve heard registered against Jobs. Jobs grew up in San Francisco, spent most all of his life in the area. And he grew up in the 1960s and ‘70s, so he may well have simply been a liberal true believer, an imbiber not only of political liberalism but of the liberal culture of his time. Did it, in the end, kill him?

I ask because of a recent comment made by a respected academic oncologist—cancer doctor—on the East coast, claiming Steve Jobs didn’t have to die.

A brief background: as a broad but workable simplification, the pancreas has two types of cells: acinar cells, the bulk, which produce digestive enzymes released into the GI tract; and islet cells, a minority, which produce hormones—insulin, glucagon, etc.—released into the bloodstream. Over 95% of pancreatic cancers arise from the acinar cells, and these are deadly, with mere months between diagnosis and death, as Michael Landon and Patrick Swayze remind. But islet-cell tumors, although rare, have a better prognosis. Some are benign, and even the malignant ones kill over years rather than months. And, most importantly, while pancreatic cancers from acinar cells have typically spread (and therefore cannot be cured) before they are discovered, islet cell cancers can often be cured if treated promptly on discovery.

And this leads to the recent comment by that East coast oncologist. He notes that NINE MONTHS passed between Steve Jobs’ 2004 diagnosis and his pancreatic surgery, an interval that may well have spelled the difference between cure and spread, between life and death.

Why did he wait? Steve Jobs was, and his family remains, notoriously private about personal matters, so we may never know for sure, but there is some speculation he used that time to investigate “alternative therapies”—holistic medicine; Eastern approaches; herbal and dietary cures…Is that true? Steve Jobs, I suspect, was not a terribly religious man, but his chosen religion in the liberal San Francisco Bay area was Buddhism. Would Jobs have been a Buddhist had he grown up in Sheboygan or Syracuse, Arkansas or Alabama?

If it is true that Jobs spent too much time investigating alternative medicine, it would be a great tragedy, as the East coast oncologist says he has a 100% survival rate with people who had Jobs’ cancer and got immediate surgery and chemotherapy. Was Steve Jobs, who came of age at a time and place that made Haight/Ashbury famous, led by a cultural milieu in which he was raised to turn his back on a traditional and highly effective therapy, a cure? Thinking differently suddenly takes on a darker meaning…

We may never know if it was the cultural liberalism in which Jobs lived and learned that led to his early demise. But the possibility chills…

Losing Jobs

Originally written: October 6, 2011

Steve Jobs died yesterday, at the young age of 56. The homages pour in from all over the world, on machines and via communication methods that he popularized and gave to the masses. 

The world is vastly richer, more pleasant, and a more exciting place to live and learn thanks to this one man, someone who gave us not only Toy Story but the most magical Toy Store the world has ever known, filled with the most amazing and engaging gadgets and tools.

Jobs once said, asked to comment on Bill Gates’ giving away most of his fortune, “My congratulations to Bill. He has realized there’s no benefit to being the richest guy in the cemetery.” But Steve Jobs likely will be the richest guy in the cemetery—not in terms of the money he earned…you really can’t take that with you…but in terms of the wealth he created each year for society…which, sadly, he must now take with him. It is lost to us as we move forward.

It is perhaps not the time, with Jobs’ passing less than 24 hours in the past, to focus on current politics. But as I ponder the loss of Steve Jobs, I can’t help but thinking of Elizabeth Warren with her stump speech —really, what wealth has she bestowed on society?—, explaining that Steve Jobs didn’t literally make the iPad and the iPhone and all the rest entirely on his own, and therefore he has to pay back, as if flooding the world with iPads and iPhones wasn’t enough, as if creating hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs throughout the globe wasn’t enough. I can’t help but thinking of President Obama, condemning billionaires. The White House released Obama’s homage to Jobs this morning: “America has lost a great visionary.” But we all know what he was really thinking: “America has lost a great visionary who didn’t pay enough taxes.”

Obama is pushing the idea that “billionaires” don’t pay enough, pushing the view that their wealth is unearned, pushing the view that people like Jobs get rich by taking from others rather than creating immense wealth for society. Pushing class warfare.

Warfare is generally something to avoid. Peace is preferred. But there is a saying from Jobs’ youth that comes back to haunt…No justice, no peace.