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It was amusing
to see the Republican party inveigh against health insurance reform as if
they were a synod of Presbyterian necromancers girding the nation for a
takeover by the spawn of hell. This was the same gang, by the way, who championed
the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003,
then regarded as the most reckless giveaway of public funds in human history.
Along the way, they enlisted an army of nay-sayers
representing everything dark, disgraceful, and ignorant in the American
character. If the Republicans keep going this way, they'll end up with
something worse than Naziism: a party that
hates everything but believes in absolutely nothing.
The most striking elements of so-called health care in America these days is
how cruel and unjust it is, and in taking a stand against reforming it the
Republican party appeared to be firmly in support of cruelty and injustice.
This would be well within the historical tradition of other religious
crusades which turned political -- such as the Spanish Inquisition and the
seventeenth century war against witchcraft. Whatever else the Democratic
party has stood for in recent history, it has tended to oppose institutional
cruelty and injustice, and notice that it has also been the party for keeping
religion out of government.
Now a health care reform act has passed and there's some reason to hope that
insurance companies will be prevented from doing things like canceling the
coverage of policy-holders who have the impertinence to actually get sick,
which has been their main device for revenue enhancement, and we'll see how
they cope with the idea that being alive in a treacherous world is the
fundamental pre-existing condition.
I
surely don't know if the nation can afford to pay for what this law requires,
but then can we really afford to pay for anything? -- including the salaries,
retirement benefits, and health insurance of congressmen, not to mention two
wars, bailout life support for banks, rising unemployment benefits,
shovel-ready stimulus projects, et cetera, blah blah?
Probably not.
My
guess is that the health care "industry" will unravel in the years
ahead under the weight of its own hypercomplexity
just as all the other hypercomplex systems of
normal American life (such as it is) groan and collapse under their own
unworkable immensities -- and I speak here of industrial-style farming, Big
Box "consumerism," Happy Motoring, too-big-to-fail finance,
centralized public education, and the pension racket. All the activities of
daily life in this country have poor prospects for continuing in their
current form.
At
least this once a workable majority in the government has stood up to the
forces of cruelty and injustice, and whatever else happens to us in the
course of this long emergency, it will be a good thing if the party of
fairness and justice identifies its adversaries for what they are: not
"partners in governing," or any such academical-therapeutic
bullshit, but enemies of every generous impulse in the national character.
I
hope that Mr. Obama's party can carry this message
clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition
for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking
pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid
of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant
breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the
current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really
memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to
create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of
the public interest.
This is exactly what the Republican majority on the Supreme Court did
earlier this year by deciding that corporations -- which are sociopathic by
definition in being answerable only to their shareholders and nothing else --
should enjoy the same full privileges in election campaign contributions as
human persons, who are assumed to have obligations, duties, and
responsibilities to the common good (and therefore to the public interest).
This shameful act by the court majority only underscores the chief defining
characteristic of Republicans in their current incarnation: an
inability to think. And so, naturally Republicans gravitate toward
superstition and the traditional devices of improvident religious authorities
-- persecution of the weak, torture, denial of due process, and dogmas
designed to spread hatred.
I
hope the American public begins to understand this, because they have been
manipulated in their own pain and hardship by these dark forces, and their
thrall to the likes of John Boehner, Sarah Palin,
Glenn Beck, Rush, Hannity, and the rest of these
vicious morons could easily increase as their economic hardships deepen.
We're facing a comprehensive contraction of wealth and economy that is going
to challenge every shared virtue in our national soul, and we're not going to
meet these difficulties successfully without a sense of mutual obligation and
sympathy for each other. The Republican party is just itching to turn a giant
thumbscrew on the US public -- that is, before they try to start burning
their enemies at the stake. We understand that the Health Care Reform
Act is a first stand against that.
James Howard Kunstler
www.kunstler.com/
James Howard Kunstler’s
new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is
available at all booksellers.
James Kunstler has worked
as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a
staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write
books on a full-time basis.
His latest nonfiction book, "The Long
Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the
21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic
crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive
dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the
American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of
the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller
places and eat locally grown food.
You can purchase your own copy here
: The Long
Emergency .
You can get more from James Howard Kunstler -
including his artwork, information about his other novels, and his blog - at
his Web site : http://www.kunstler.com/
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