You think you're something? All that?

You're not.

To prove it, get an appointment at Kaiser Permanente.

Say your elbow hurts. Mine did.

First you have to get the appointment. That will take a while. Never go in person — not if you want to stay employed. Call. Automation will be frustrating (Press 1) But realize that even if you get to a human being that might help you find a time to meet a doctor, your conversation will be monitored for quality control purposes; and it will sound like it. The person talking to you is human — you're pretty sure — but like a machine. Efficient, bloodless, courteous but curt. I was tempted to ask the person who came on the line with me something about their life — their age, where they went to school, what they ate for lunch, but I might have gotten them fired. No nonsense.

I got a call from a robot three days before my appointment telling me, in that slow, methodical robot syntax, who I'd be meeting with. The connection went bad just at the moment I was told my doctor's name. Turns out that wasn't who met with me anyway.

I got there 15 minutes early, as instructed by the robot, and walked into what looked like a big open room; it wasn't big. Or open. It was packed with people. And most of them were younger than 30 — with a few elderly exceptions. There was a line beginning right at the door with flat, black plastic feet on a rubberized walkway indicating where I was to step on my way to the end of the mat and the desk where I was to check in. That means you pay money and prove you're really who you say you are with a photo I.D. — and a Kaiser card that the robotic human being behind the counter swipes into a computer to call up your name and number and records. Your name sort of matters. The number matters more — all the numbers.

Keep in mind, nobody in this entire process has shown any concern for how sick you are, how disabled, whether you're near death. (The robot does give you instructions that if you need to see a doctor because you are, in fact, dying that you should bypass all the robotics and just go to the emergency room. There are robotic human beings there, but there are more of them on any given day —though my wife has learned you have to pick your times carefully. One night she told me she was really in pain and needed to see a doctor. I told her to go at 7 p.m. even though — smart woman that she is — she said she'd wait until 10 p.m. She sat in the waiting room until 10 p.m.)

After the robotic person takes your money and verifies who you are, you go sit in a room with chairs that are very close together, but you can tell someone has done calculations as to how close is too close. It's all very efficient. Nobody has to climb over anybody else — but nearly.

Somebody emerges from a locked door every 10-15 minutes or so and calls a name. Somebody seated next to me yelled, "What?" at one person who emerged from a door across the room. The person repeated the name.

After a while, someone opens the door and says my first name then begins wrestling with the pronunciation of my last name; as she begins, I'm on my feet and headed over.

The key to success in this environment is to be robotic. It's how it's all done anyway. You can't let it get to you. The plasticity, the pre-fabrication, the efficiency in the face of disease, sorrow, dread, even terror — none of it must register on your face. Stifled emotion is the best route. You can't get angry (though I can tell by the looks I get from nurses and even doctors, that some do); you can't laugh. The absurdity will not find shared humor with anyone — well, mostly no one — in this place. Even when you're sitting there for hours. Even when they seat you in a room next to an X-ray machine and make you contort your body to take pictures in just the right way — the robotic way.

"Raise the table," somebody says from a back room. Zing. A moment of glimmering humanity. Someone with more experience is looking through the little window and compassion and logic combine. The older X-ray tech wants to spare me a sore shoulder trying to get the picture this younger tech thinks she needs. MMMMMMMM. The table lowers and I can turn my hand backwards as commanded. Is it compassion or is it another efficiency?

You can't show emotion even when they're asking you things like "Do you exercise?" And when you say yes, they ask "How many days a week?" The temptation is to engage them in conversation. But that's what humans do.

"Would you like to know my mileage each week?" you want to ask. "Want to know my minutes per mile? Does it matter if I'm doing hill repeats and sprint surges 2-3 times a week? Do you want to know how many days I'm lifting and what my reps are on what weights? Does it matter if I cross-train?"

To do that would be an annoyance.

The question isn't coming from them. It's coming from someone in a cubicle — maybe several cubicles — in the Virginia office complex. The cubicle people (trained to act like robots) are assigned to risk management in this health organization. Research by a study group some years past found a statistical probability of less expense (higher profit margin) from enrollees that had a certain number of hours per week of physical exercise. Bam. Make that policy for the entire national organization. It messes up the research to get detailed about what kind of exercise that is for what body density and whether the weight involved is muscle mass or not.

It makes me wonder what they say to the 300 lb. guys (or gals) who waddle in and perch on the chair and the blood pressure cuff barely goes around their arm — and they smell like cigarette smoke.

The PR campaign says they want people to thrive (See the pictures? People are smiling.) The word "thrive" is code for "not costing us money."

I get seated in an examining room and a doctor comes in and apologizes for how long it's taken. He figures out I need physical therapy for my sore elbow. He prescribes it. He also tells me cortisone shots might be needed — but they'd like not to have to do that. (Costs money. Remember, this is about cost efficiency.) He says I'll get a band to put around my forearm that will help.

Then he leaves.

I'm taken to another room.

The nurse puts all the data in the computer and she says someone will be coming in to help me with the arm band.

At this point, humor almost enters the equation.

A burly guy comes in wearing the scrubs that all nurses and doctors wear but I can tell he's not a doctor. He asks me where it hurts and I tell him. He grins. Tennis elbow on the outside, golf elbow on the inside. He puts it on me and explains how to tighten it up. It's almost as if he sees the inanity of my waiting for him to come in and show me what I could have figured out by opening the box and reading the directions.

"Any questions?" he asks, looking bored and a little amused.

Yes, I have one. Do I wear it at night?

He stops smiling.

"I don't have authorization — I'm not a provider. Uh, let me go ask."

He goes and finds the apologetic doctor. And it takes a few minutes.

"I got your answer," he says. "You don't wear it at night. Give it a rest."

He looks relieved and he's back to his still bored and a little bit amused self.

He points the way out of the labrynth of hallways to the main lobby.

The crowds have thinned out now. Nobody's standing on the plastic feet leading to the front desks with the debit card readers.

You walk out into the vaulted main hallway and realize how truly tangential how you feel is to this whole process.

The best way to get better is to find a way never to have to come back here.

His name is Jie.

It's the name he uses at Starbucks when he orders a drink — no smiling, no blinking. He makes the barista pronounce it back to him.

He's a Ph.D student in Economics at the University of California-Riverside. And he's learning about the United States by degrees. He's been here since last August.

I got his name from an organization that seeks people to practice English with visiting internationals at universities. And I'm learning more from him than he is from me.

Jie is from northern China, where they speak a type of Chinese that isn't spoken in all parts of that vast nation. In fact, he says, there many variations of spoken Chinese and he's amused at Americans who think it's all the same. Actually, a lot about Americans amuses him.

Greetings are funny right now — like "wussup?" He said that one stumps him. Should he say "good?" or maybe "yes?" He paused to ask my advice. I told him it's actually not a question. It's a figure of speech. But the proper response is to act like it's a question; but don't try to answer it. Just say, "not much."

He nodded, pausing, and I could tell he was taking mental notes.

Jie lives in an apartment with another Chinese student who is also studying doctorate-level economics. Ming-Ming is his name. And apparently he's brilliant — highest grades among new Ph.D students in his incoming class. In fact anything Ming-Ming does, he attacks with a vengeance, Jie says. It could have something to do with the fact that his right hand was injured when he was a newborn. It's a small, thin stump that's visible just outside the cuff of shirts he wears. Maybe kids teased him when he was young; maybe family made an issue of it. But it would appear that he's taken every opportunity to show he's capable of whatever comes along.

Jie said in a recent class session, a prof had noticed Ming-Ming's hand and had asked if Ming-Ming needed accomodation of some kind. The question angered Ming-Ming and he told the prof that he could write faster and better with his left hand than most people could with their right. Jie said he'd learned not to ask Ming-Ming if he needed help — with anything. If Ming-Ming needed it (and mostly he didn't) he'd ask.

I took Jie to Wal-Mart today. He said he needed to buy furniture. He said he'd considered taking it on the bus with him but decided it would be too awkward. He knew we had a van because we'd used it to take him to a Chinese grocery store once. (He'd called it "China Town" so we'd loaded up the van with my teenagers who love authentic Chinese food. Turns out it was just a plaza in Pasadena where a Chinese grocery and some boutiques were clustered.) I didn't hesitate. I was trying to build Jie's trust.

When we got to the store, I found out what Jie wanted was bookshelves. They were in a 4-ft box that weighed probably 80 lbs. I suddenly understood why hefting it to a bus stop would have been hard. He also wanted to exchange some headphones for ones that fit better. He'd gotten a defective pair. To make the exchange, he had to endure bad directions from a clerk, then had to wait in a fairly long line of people at the customer service desk. I noticed how cash register people treated Jie like a child when they heard his pronunciation of English.

In the van, Jie asked how my family was and I told him. He asked, in particular, about my 16 year-old daughter. I told him she was in love — with a baseball player at school who had just worked up the nerve to ask me if she could be his girlfriend. I told Jie I was waiting to chat with the boy after his team practice in a few days. Jie said he wished he'd had a Dad who had talks like that with him when he was young. In China, he said, the concept of dating wasn't practiced much. Arranged marriages were more common. He said it gloomily.

As we headed back to his apartment, he handed me a box of tea. It was Chinese tea specifically designed to lower cholesterol. He remembered that I was working on that.

When I dropped him off, I stopped in the apartment for a moment to say goodbye and he apologized for the mess. It smelled like rain had gotten in some windows and mold had set in. There were food-covered plates all over the kitchen table, pots and pans were on the reddish-stained stove with food caked on them. Our feet stuck to the floor as we walked. Jie said they'd not had time to clean up much (or eat, actually) over the last couple weeks. But they would now, he said.

As I was leaving, Jie got a call from his roommate who said he wouldn't be home for supper. Jie said he would make something for himself. He hadn't bothered to turn the lights on inside and it looked dark in the twilight. I shook his hand as we parted and it occurred to me that we were becoming friends. But it would be a friendship slowly earned.

The quiet of the evening was broken by soft music and a woman's laughter from an apartment in the vicinity of Jie's.

There's nothing quite so clarifying as to walk into an emergency room shortly after midnight, twice in two weeks, and sit on a plastic chair waiting for testy, tired medical staff to care for one's spouse.

The world of emergency rooms is a world of desperation — of tired children's cries, of adult moans and groans, of near-death experiences, of police action and of after-effects of the violence police seek to quell. The world of dark streets gives way here to the dull green glare of fluorescent bulbs, scuffed linoleum, scarred doorways, gurgling tubes and beeping, blinking machines. No one here will ask why (though they want to know). They do what they can to help with the pain. But the wounds they see are so often self-inflicted — results of rage, stupidity, naivete, illusions of immortality in the young and those who should act their age.

Here death comes. And here the healthy should beware. For the burden of proof is on the patient to prove she is not a careless, mindless piece of flesh waiting for the next needle, the next numerical mandate. Sickness floats in the air like a vapor. All is sterile, but not clean.

Speak slowly, clearly and with command of medical terminology in this place, or risk long hours of confusing waits for answers you knew before you arrived. Earn respect, and you'll get it; demand it — in loud tones, and with profanity (for the indignities of this place can make one profoundly angry) and you risk longer waits than those who are merely inarticulate.

Slate called it painful. The oozing coverage of the crowds and parties in Washington, D.C. had hit the max.

Yes, this is a momentous occasion. But skeptical journalists long for substance. They're saying "Show me."

Sure, we have the first African-American in the presidency. And he actually has ties to Africa. He's half-Caucasian. He's a gifted orator and, from what we saw in the election race, a very smart guy. Not just lawyer smart, but people smart. And clean — so far. For someone to come out of Illinois politics (with real ties to slimy Chicago precinct activity) and show no signs of taint, Rod Blagojevich notwithstanding, is no small feat.

But things are too dark for journalists to abide the parties for long. I'm glad those hoses in Birmingham are history. Mississippi's not burning anymore, not in the same way anyhow. But to move forward by looking in the rearview mirror is dangerous.

Our pastor prayed for Barack Obama Sunday. I hope pastors and priests were doing so all over this country and around the world. I hope they continue. This inauguration has the world's attention, because "firsts" that involve both race and political shifting get noticed. Political groundswells like this are common in other countries — not so much here. But people forget how uncomfortable change is. Oh, how we like our routines.

Journalists who are smart know that you cover the unusual. They should be making the obligatory parallels. The Lincoln Memorial speeches. The Reflecting Pool and the crowds. Lincoln and his Bible. Kennedy, his youth, and his faith. Martin and his dream. FDR and the recovery.

It would be surprising for the coverage not to look like this. But what I dread is the likely headlines coming in the next 100 days. Clinton — also an orator and a very shrewd politician — pulled off some amazing economic and international relations coups. Fast. And they stuck, for the most part. But his were different times: recent, yet so far away. Steve Jobs was healthy back then. So were Microsoft and Yahoo! and the Big Three. The housing markets were booming. Bernard Madoff was doing great.

The key to Kennedy's success was his ability to bring in good help. There were other factors that nobody really knows now — perhaps related to his last name, probably tied to what was happening elsewhere in the world that the U.S. tapped into. Kruschev pounded his shoe on the table, but deep down one wonders if he liked Kennedy. Will we ever know? We have such a rose-colored perspective of that time.

A lot of people are out of work as these inaguration parties kick into gear. The fear in our nation is something that is affecting not just the economy. It makes people party harder. The same happened in 1930, I suspect. Obama has used the word "hope" a lot, and it is, indeed, audacious in its claims.

But the fix is bigger than what one U.S. president can pull off alone. He's said as much. He's no dummy. But nobody's listening to his cautionary rhetoric. They're too busy throwing confetti — and lining up with their hands out.

In large part, the success of this president will not be related to his skin color or heritage. It will spring from his ability to say "No" to some people and to some things we've all gotten very used to. That's hard to pull off. We like "Yes." The other word makes people mad and is a surefire party-stopper.

This president's success and ultimate legacy will also come from his ability to persuade those around him and in other parts of this world to make some fairly drastic changes in how they do business, trade, even what used to be considered domestic issues like education, health care and the environment. And war. Gaza? Tehran? Kabul? The threat of attack on the U.S. is not gone. But that, too, is not something the U.S. presidency alone can avert. It never has been. How quickly we forget the lessons of history.

And good help is hard to find — moreso when times are tough. Reformers don't make as much money as conformers.

What the celebrants are forgetting is that for all our shock at change in this country, people around the world aren't impressed by all this as we are. They want to know what's in it for them. And we're a tired, much poorer, much weaker nation than we were in the 1940s when FDR was turning things around and gathering alliances around the planet. We're more multicultural than we were in FDR's time — or Martin's time — and we won't even admit it to ourselves.

So we celebrate a new administration. We applaud a man who will likely bring (or oversee) change like we've never experienced before. But I hope the celebrants in Washington will do what they can, when they get home, to help make good change happen. Bread and circuses can't fix what ails a nation or an empire.

Hope brings audacious results only when it can elicit methodical work at the mundane day-to-day tasks of cooperative reform.

There's an unseen level to all of this. And Lincoln, so goes the legend, knew it. Apocryphal or not, the image is compelling of that tall, bearded man kneeling in prayer as the torrents of civil war and economic unrest in this nation raged. There's too much in Lincoln's writings to refute the notion that he had a sense of God's power in the governance of a republic.

Aquinas, quoting Augustine, notes that no ruler will succeed who does not rule his own soul. And the real power of that ruler to bring the people happiness comes not from the trappings of power but from the measure of restraint that ruler shows when tempted toward excess. Happiness and the satisfactions of life, at their core, come from peace with God. A president who knows it will pass this truth on to his people in ways small and large.

May our nation find this truth to be self-evident as this inaugural year unfolds.

Will that bring splashy news coverage? Not like we're seeing this week. But there's something to be said for change that goes deep — deeper than the day-to-day headlines and TV quotes and radio bits. Smart journalists will get that, even if they have to report it from the margins.

I'm ready. And waiting, like everybody else.

Ledes.

They matter a lot in the work of daily journalism.

And they're hard to do at political conventions — especially near the end.

It's been awhile since I covered presidential candidates. When I last did, Michael Dukakis was the top Democrat on the ticket. But political culture — and the journalism that covers it — doesn't change much over time. You go, you chase people in suits (and pant suits) around a really big convention center, you stand at the doorway of parties (or wait for your interviewee to come out of them), and you anticipate. A lot.

This time it was all happening in the Twin Cities. And the press pool media were listening to a man too many had written off as a serious candidate for president. Now he was there, at the podium, accepting his party's nomination to be the Republican candidate. It was a Thursday night, Sept. 4.

And words seemed to fail them. I know because they used too many. You know the old saw, "If I had more time, I'd have written less."

Sometimes words fail because the writer is way beyond the moment. Sometimes it's the feeling-behind thing. The feeling is intensified by how muscular the scripting police are doing what they do. At this event, one got the impression there was not much wiggle room for reporters. (In all fairness, the same was probably true for the Democrats' convention. Ask National Public Radio.)

Let's just say the national press corps, mentally, had left the building before McCain got to that big podium with the crystal-blue stairs. Maybe I'm wrong. But look at the ledes.

The Associated Press (with two bylines) said "John McCain vowed Thursday night to vanquish the "constant partisan rancor" that grips Washington as he launched his fall campaign for the White House." Okay, that's not all that long a lede, but it took them three grafs to get to the fact that this was a speech aimed at being not what people thought. (McCain's not a scary conservative and he's not a scary liberal, either.) Granted, that's a hard concept to get across. The important thing, I guess, is that David Espo and Robert Furlow got it in by deadline and got to stick a fork in this convention coverage. Long day, longer week.

David Jackson, with USA Today, apparently just as weary, put it this way: "Republican John McCain launched the final phase of his campaign against Barack Obama and of his nearly decade-long quest for the presidency Thursday, trumpeting what he called a record of reform while casting his Democratic rival as a novice unprepared for global leadership." Yow.

In swimming as in running as in political reporting, you know the person's tired when the mechanics fall apart. Here you see it in a verb like "trumpet" and in a word like "vanquish."

By the third graf Jackson does hit on what was probably worth noting — something readers needed reminding of. History is about to happen. We'll have the first black president ever, or the first female VP ever. Change is coming. No matter what. (So don't stop thinking about tomorrow.)

The headline on Jackson's piece (thank you copy editors) put that fact right up top under the flag on page one.

Deadline convention coverage is so hard to do well.

The following is a letter I sent to the staff of the newspaper for which I'm faculty adviser.

It's the kind of letter I've had to send in the past.

Education for journalism is a journey — one with seemingly limitless adventures. (I do see a kind of predictability in it as the years go on.)

Names have been changed to protect those who, I hope, will do some serious thinking about what they do and how they do it.

Hi Bob,

I'm copying your editors on this because they were part of the decision to run the review you wrote about the Sarah Marshall film.

Let me start by mentioning that I got a call from the president's office this morning about your review. I was told of a parent who had read your piece and had some concerns about the angle you took on this film. (This is a parent who has a daughter attending Biola.)

The concern this parent had with your review was, first of all, that the Chimes paid for you to go see this film. Secondly, he wanted to know how the Chimes selects films to review — was the film making an important statement about life, society, current issues, etc.

He was troubled by what seemed to be an endorsement of this film as a must-see (he noted your five-star notation) — though he apparently missed your fairly pointed warning that this was not a film for everyone.

This is a man who doesn't understand the place of journalism in American society. He also doesn't understand that one student's opinion in a student-run publication doesn't constitute the university's endorsement of either the student's view or the film that student is reviewing.

His question was what separates the journalism of the Chimes — particularly in its film reviews — from the review of the Daily Bruin or the Daily Titan or any other university newspaper on a campus that makes no claim to knowing God.

I defended the Chimes as a publication that uses discernment.

But as I read your review a few more times, and when I saw the trailer on the Chimes' web edition showing (albeit subtly) the full frontal male nudity you described, along with scantily clad women, and flippant depictions of casual sex, I had to pause.

There is a problem here.

It's come up before — actually, on the film review pages.

It has to do with what the Chimes is all about.

The Chimes is a newspaper seeking to be as hard-headed and clear-eyed as any secular publication when it comes to tracking down the hard issues of life and exploring them.

I'm one of the more pushy of our Journalism faculty in this pursuit. What bothers me is that I seem to have been remiss. I've pushed the staff to explore the seamy sides of life, but I apparently haven't conveyed to the staff (and, frankly, I'm not sure you and I have ever met, Bob) that with our exploration of the darkness, there must be light.

We are nothing, our work is pointless — and, actually, a disturbing kind of delusion — if it's not grounded in the person of Christ.

And Christ is nowhere in this review.

Please don't stop reading. I'm not saying you should have woven the Four Spiritual Laws into this review. Nothing so stupid or artificial was what I had in mind.

What I did have in mind was the kind of analysis C.S. Lewis brought to the hard issues of life — sex, hate, pride, selfishness.

Your review, Bob, was too thin.

You gave the false impression that this film had something meaningful to say about human relationships in western society. You didn't point out the dysfunction, the emptiness, the loneliness of pursuing connection with others apart from the holiness of union that we find in Christ.

Film reviews in the Chimes don't have to be theological treatises.

But Biola is not just any school. It's a university that takes seriously the integration of faith and reason. That should go, as well, for the student newspaper that serves it. This review delves into a film using reason, but missed its potential in that regard; it also left readers empty of the faith implications of what these film-makers were saying.

R-rated films are an area of cinematic expression that should be approached cautiously in the Biola community. Students who come here expect a level of spiritual discernment in those entrusted with the media they pay for. As such, the Chimes has a high calling — to do journalism that's not merely factual and contextual, but that infuses its narrative with the presence of God.

I was disappointed in this review. I hope, Bob, that as you and your editors choose films to review that you'll be more judicious in your selection. There are films out there that are more worthy of the Chimes' funding and journalistic attention.

And should you choose a film for review that contains nudity, obscenity, or depictions that denigrate women and the sexuality God created for marriage, that you'll do so only if your review puts all of the above in a Biblical perspective.

And I hope, too, that you'll keep me informed of your decision to run such a review. My job as adviser is to offer advice. Because no one informed me, I had to be informed by the president's office — a blindsiding that helps no one.

Journalism is not what it used to be.

But then, what is?

Yet the changes happening to American journalism — newspapers in particular — have got some people panicked in sort of a chicken-little-the-sky-is-falling thing.

Try this one on.

In Saturday's Los Angeles Times,one of the biggest stories on the front page had the article starting somewhere in the middle (the lede and first few grafs were missing). Both my sons, neither of whom are avid newspaper readers — not of the front page, anyway — pointed out to me the oddity of what they were seeing. And I smiled.

I was glad they noticed. I told them it's a sign that somebody wasn't paying attention (I suggested heads would roll, but knew inside that probably wouldn't be the case.)

Should I have taken that moment to point this huge error out as a harbinger of a much bigger problem — evidence that the big ship is finally going down?

Look at it! AUGH! Right there in front of us!

Or one might put it in perspective.

Journalism, someone other than Ben Bradlee said, is the first draft of history. (He picked up on it and repeated it famously.)

First drafts are rough. I know. I've been grading stacks of them this semester.

Newspaper journalism, television journalism, radio journalism, blogs, Webzines — if they have any sense of inquiry about them, any desire to be timely, are bound to run into problems (layoffs of copy-editors notwithstanding).

So somebody in the layout area of the Times newsroom had a bad night Friday. Asleep at the switch? Sent the wrong file to the press room?

Nobody 'fessed up in Sunday's paper. I suspect the newsroom got some mail on this over the weekend. Come Monday morning when the non-weekend shift comes in there'll be some pointed dialogue.

But I suggest that the bigger deal in all this is that this newspaper hit the driveways and news-stands Saturday despite its little problem.

In so doing, this newspaper — the big package — did what it's supposed to do. It informed readers in Los Angeles and surrounding regions (like mine) about our world. It got people thinking. Hopefully it got people praying — for Christians are called to be watchful as well as intercessory.

And tomorrow's another deadline.

Will journalists get it right? Probably. And they'll probably run into some snags.

But journalism, bigger than any one front page on a Saturday, will roll forward — or so we should hope in this era of diminishing democracies.

Carpe diem.