Daily Archives: October 18, 2010

How Many Canadians Use American Health Care?

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Every year my parents winter in Florida, and every year they are buttonholed by Americans who insist on telling them how bad Canadian health care is, and then get sniffy when assured that, no, no, it’s fine, the service is reliable and comprehensive and safe; no long waits, no preventable deaths caused by waiting.  Like universal health care everywhere else in the developed world, Canadian Medicare is vastly superior to the American system when it comes to access and cost of delivery (about half what it costs the Americans).  The Republicans are of course responsible for the canard that Canadian health care is all about nightmarish waiting lists, and that as a result desperate Canadian patients flood the U.S. border in search of relief (Republicans also insist on calling our system “socialized medicine,” which it is not).  Over the years they’ve successfully twisted the reality to fit their propagandized version of it for cynical, self-serving reasons.

But the quantifiable reality of the situation may startle even Canadians.  You can see it at a glance after the jump.

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Moby Dick

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryIK9TLAoAs

The finale of the film adaptation of the novel.  Pardon the occasionally laughable special effects: it was 1956.

On this date in 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was first published.

Frye makes a fair number of references to the novel, but this one in Anatomy is particularly resonant because it relates the archetype to its entire mythical family and suggests what this might mean both to the reader and to the writer who engages it:

If we do not accept the archetypal or conventional element in the imagery that links one poem to another, it is impossible to get any systematic mental training out of the reading of literature alone.  But if we add to our desire to know literature a desire to know how we know it, we shall find that expanding images into conventional archetypes of literature is a process that takes place unconsciously in all our reading.  A symbol of the sea or heath cannot remain within Conrad or Hardy: it is bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol of literature as a whole.  Moby Dick cannot remain in Melville’s novel: he is absorbed into our imaginative experience of leviathans and dragons of the deep from the Old Testament onward.  And what is true for the reader is a fortiori true of the poet, who learns very quickly that there is no singing school for his soul except the study of the monuments of its own magnificent.  (CW 22, 93)