Governmental Insanity

Oct. 13, 2004

Give Paul Seifert, M.D., credit for having one heck of an imagination.
A retired professor of medicine, the Petoskey author’s new book is “The Certification of America,” which weighs in both as satire and social science fiction.
The book posits an America of the near future in which corporations and the wealthy have gained absolute political power through a coup (see sidebar). Alarmed, the President of the United States attempts to find 56 psychiatrists willing to sign a document called the Certification of America which will declare the government no longer competent to rule by reason of insanity.
It’s a well-written book with intriguing characters, a wry touch and lots of action. It also heralds a cause that Seifert feels deeply about.
“We’re starting to see a situation in our country where it’s government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations,” he says. “I’m starting to get concerned -- for the first time in my life I’m concerned about what’s going to happen to our democracy, which could be replaced by a plutocratic government.”
Seifert’s book is socio-political sci-fi in the tradition of George Orwell’s “1984,” Nevil Shute’s “On the Beach,” or “A Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood. Like those books, “The Certification of America” offers a chilling dystopian view of what could happen if the divide between rich and poor in America continues to deepen.
But there’s also a sense of hope in his book.
“One of the messages in Shute’s book is that ‘there’s still time,’ and that’s the message of my book as well,” Seifert says of the 1960s thriller in which misguided politicians destroy the world with nuclear weapons.
“’The Certification of America’ offers that hope that the core values that America was founded on will never be reliquished.”

REAL THREAT
Seifert, 63, sees the disintegration of American democracy as an obvious possibility, considering the influence of corporations, PACs and lobbyists in Washington, D.C. and the media.
“If you look at the ebb and flow of human history, sometimes governments can get too far out of control,” he says. “Today, we have a real threat to democracy. You see disturbing evidence in our country that we’re evolving into a two-tiered society of the rich and the poor.”
He sees dangerous parallels to the Gilded Age of the 1890s, in which a few robber barons who owned the railroads, mines and key industries controlled the majority of wealth in America, while millions of farmers and working people struggled at near-starvation levels.
“The economic data of the division between the wealthy and the poor in America is proceeding apace,” Seifert says. “In the Gilded Age following the Industrial Revolution, there were tremendous advances in wealth to a very small group of people, similar to what we’re seeing today.”
Governmental reforms which broke up monopolies and the rise of labor unions helped prevent a second American revolution in the early 1900s, but today, Seifert notes, the U.S. government itself seems to be in thrall to corporate powers.
“If you pull out the Constitution, you don’t find anything about lobbyists and PACs being able to have influence over our government. But we’re heading into a time when reform may be more difficult because of established special interest political groups and entrenched lobbyists.”

A PHYSICIAN’S VIEW
As a physician who practiced and taught internal medicine in the Detroit area before moving north, Seifert has seen the rough side of life, courtesy of the indigent patients he once treated for free at Oakwood Hospital.
Originally from Dearborn Heights, he earned his medical degree at Wayne State University in Detroit. Rather than going into private practice, he decided to teach both at WSU and at the hands-on Oakwood Hospital. At Oakwood, he and his interns treated many poor, uninsured patients who were unable to pay for their care.
The experience reinforced his view of the inequity of life in America.
“I’m a capitalist, not a communist, but I have a lot of concerns about our health care system,” he notes. “I think that under the current situation, if nothing is done to reform it, we’re going to have two-tiered health care in our country for the rich and poor. Health care is becoming out of reach to many people because of the cost. Health care catastrophes are the number one cause of bankruptcies in America today.”

A NEW HOME
A teaching career meant that Dr. Seifert didn’t reap the monetary rewards of his colleagues in private practice. To cuts costs, he and his wife of 47 years, Roxanne, lived on a 38-foot sailboat, the “Anna Livia,” for nine years. Married young, they also raised five children and at one point were spending up to 85% of their income putting their kids through college.
“Because I was in education, I had a fair amount of time off in the summer,” he recalls. “We circumnavigated all of the Great Lakes and of all the ports we visited with that lifestyle, the Harbor Springs-Petoskey area stuck out as the place we wanted to live.” The couple moved to Petoskey in 1999 when Seifert retired from medicine.
Being a sailboat-living medical professor was no obstacle to Seifert’s ambitions as a writer.
“I’m a frustrated English professor,” he says. “I’ve tried writing fiction many times through the years and probably would have stopped if I’d been rejected by publishers, but I had success with my stories and have won awards. I always had favorable rejections or critical success, but never broke through to commercial success.”
Such is the case with “The Certification of America,” which is the first of a trilogy of books published by iUniverse. Although the book is a finalist for this year’s independent Norumbega Fiction Award, Seifert admits that sales have been slow. He currently has four books for sale on Amazon.com and his latest is available at local bookstores; but it’s a tough market, given the deluge of self-published books flooding bookstores these days.

THE REAL ISSUE
On this outing, Seifert has chosen to exercise his views on social inequity and injustice, and he’s had a good time in the process.
“It’s been a lot of fun writing it, but it’s obviously a book that’s not going to be of much interest to people who think that everything is going pretty well in our country,” he says. “Certainly, I’m more liberal than conservative-leaning, but it is a fast-moving story and whatever your political leaning, it’s certainly likely to generate some discussion.”
Seifert feels that America has tipped too far toward a selfish “me first” political philosophy that could be our undoing.
“We’re willing to accept a lot of human unhappiness in our society and that’s not right. All of the emphasis on things like tax cutting allows a certain callousness to creep into how we look at the poor. Today, people have a lot of askance for the plight of the poor in our country that you didn’t used to see.”
Unfortunately, the middle class itself is increasingly slipping down the same slope. “The real issue in our country is that the top one percent of the population is accumulating more and more of the gross national product. We’re getting into a situation where parents have to ask if a family of four can afford to take their kids to the ballpark anymore. And in so many areas such as health care, we’re headed that way.
“We’re developing an economic aristocracy that’s so powerful that we’re in danger of losing our democracy.”

For more on Paul Seifert’s fiction, check out www.seifertpaul-md.com.

The Plot:

Part satire, part dire warning, the plot to “The Certification of America” leads off from the following scenario:

“Jack Salinger is a cynical pot smoking psychiatrist who practices on-line in a radically altered America of the future. He lives in a hermetically sealed penthouse in one of the American cities that survived a devastating war against foreign and domestic terrorism.
Brutal class warfare between the rich and the poor has resulted in ihe overthrow of America’s representative democracy. An economically based aristocracy has been in control of the government since Second Independence Day, the anniversary ot a domestic coup that brought the wealthy to absolute political power.
Miranda Lee-Weston, the appointed figurehead President of the United States logs on to Dr. Salinger’s web site. The president is attempting to recruit 56 psychiatrists willing to become signatories to a strange document. Resembling the original Declaration of Independence, the president’s Certification of America will declare the sitting government no longer competent to rule by reason of insanity.”