The Town Hall Health Care Meeting Here.

Yesterday Tom Periello, Democrat, Congressman, whose bailiwick is the 5th District of Virginia, located just east of the Blue Ridge in the western part of Virginia, held a town hall health care forum in the county in which I live, Nelson, at a formerly threadbare elementary school now converted into an attractive community center. And, along with my wife and a great many of our acquaintances around the county, I attended. But I am pleased to report that the teabaggers, whose contemptible antics elsewhere had prompted me to attend, didn't show. Or if they did, they kept a very low profile and limited themselves to clapping loudly at every weak point that offered itself.

I am certain that what happened there was that nearly all the dissenters lived in the county, and there was probably no one present who wasn't personally acquainted with a bunch of the other attendees, so that they had no taste for being spotted and recognized while acting in an unseemly way. Good manners matter around here.

The occasion was only marred by a character who seemed to think that the forum was being held solely to allow him to debate Periello at length, after he announced that he would run for the Congressman's seat next year, and he did a great job of dumping his electoral chances in Nelson straight into the toilet by displaying his intense greed, not only by insisting on asking a large number of follow-up questions but also by lining up to present his points a second time, when there were so many others who also were waiting to speak but hadn't had a chance yet.

Otherwise there were no pictures of President Obama doctored to make him resemble Hitler, no swastikas to be seen anywhere, and not even even one heckle, so that at the end of the occasion, Periello gratified everyone there by pronouncing that meeting to be the best-behaved of the 12 town hall health care forums that he has held so far this month.

But that's Nelson County, a nearly unknown place that is still in many ways the epitome of the way in which Virginians like to see themselves. And did the excellent behavior have to do with this county being such small potatoes, so that there were no media crews present?

Aware that teabaggers are instructed to get to the forums early and, among other things, to monopolize the front row seats, we had arrived an hour and a half early, and that enabled us to grab two of the best seats in he house, in the second row, to serve, if need be, as a quiet liberal counterbalance. Behind us the hall ended up absolutely crammed, with a great many people standing in the back and along the two sides, and maybe others standing outside the hall but still able to hear, and I estimate the crowd to have amounted to close to 500 people.

Right on ttime the Congressman, a short, stout, friendly-looking guy in yellow shirt sleeves, rolled in, and without introduction of any kind he asked those in line to come on with their questions, though invariably these were comments instead, with a question thrown in at the end almost as an afterthought.

No two Democratic Congressmen seem to have adopted exactly the same strategies in their attempts to discuss health care reform that the teabaggers and their like have made so interesting for them. Periello must have decided that the format that works best for him is to have people launch inquiries at him, hopefully in not many words, first come first served and five at a time, using mikes set up on both sides of the hall at the front, with the speakers on our side being only about four feet away from where we sat. He didn't answer each question right after it was asked. Instead he would jot down something, until five people had spoken, one after another. Then he would address all the questions in one bunch, and after that he would allow another set of five questions to be asked from the other side of the room, and so on and back and forth, in a session that lasted close to two hours.

Now what was said?

Sorry. The whole health care business involves such a large and bewildering array of concepts that, as with the stuff I read on the Internet, I was unable to get a comprehensive grip on things, making me glad that I don't have to read the thousands of pages involved, much less be expected to expound fluently on any idea that the public could throw at me, as Periello was quite able to do. Maybe 50 or 55 years ago I could have managed it. Today, no way! So I contented myself with trying to take pictures but with little success (because I have put off getting serious about learning the many intricacies of my still nearly new digital camera), trying to make whatever sense I could out of what was said, and clapping as loud as my hands allowed at any good points that struck my fancy, and there were many.

And that was how it went, a model of the democratic process for the whole country, and therefore fated to be witnessed by no one outside those high, blue walls. So sad.

Actually I plan to say more about what was said, later. First I have to get over a day in which at least five of our friends made a special point of coming up to us and expressing their amazement at my presence, so complete has been my practice of being a hermit, so that I had seen none of them in years, though my wife sees them regularly. And most of them made the same comment, to the effect that this really was an important event, to be able to finally pull me away from my home sweet home, and it was that.

Should I really give those absentee varmints, the teabaggers, the credit?