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Does anyone
know exactly how the Winter Olympics got hijacked by the Canadian Hotel
Housekeeping Employees Union? Every time I turned the damn thing on,
there were these ladies uniformed in manual labor casuals shoving teakettles across
the floor while other ladies madly polished the forward path of said sliding
kettles with Swiffer© sweepers. At least this
was the first Olympiad to be dominated by Proctor & Gamble instead of
some obnoxious Great Power nation with a political agenda. The NBC execs must
have loved this weird new sport, because it was practically all they put on
the air.
My
own interest in tea kettle shoving waned over the days, and a good thing too,
because along came President Obama's Health Care Reform Summit Meeting on
Thursday to engage the whole nation in a rousing Olympiad of mind games,
including a round-robin version of The Spanish Prisoner, a mixed set of
the Republican Pigeon Drop, and variations on the Nigerian Lottery scam, with
touches of the Madoff Ponzi
Gambit here and there. After a few hours of that, one longed for the simple
mindless bliss of tea kettle shoving, if only to relieve the headache.
I wish I could fetch up something like the glowing false authority of
Paul Krugman to pronounce on the fantastic bundle
of conundrums, riddles, and fathomless mysteries that is health care reform
but I was left far more confused about it after the summit. All I can offer,
really, are observations: for example, that Congressman John Boehner
(R -Ohio) needs a set of steel ball bearings to roll around in his hand to
perfect his otherwise dead-on impersonation of Captain Queeg,
the paranoid villain of that 1950s movie The Caine
Mutiny. I kept wishing that President Obama would reach under the table
for a fungo bat every time the miserable Mr.
Boehner opened his Midwestern pie-hole to drone out a new lie, and split his
fucking head open like a Crenshaw melon -- but perhaps my fantasies are
excessively baroque.
My feelings toward the rest of the Republicans ran along similar lines.
Even that ole Teddy bear Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn)
managed to put over a line of insolently mendacious
bullshit in the Republican effort to support the status quo at
all costs. It brought to mind that curious incident from 1856 -- another era
of inflamed passions -- when Congressman Preston Brooks (D - SC) stepped into
the Senate chamber and flogged Senator Charles Sumner within an inch of his
life with a gold-headed gutta-percha cane. Brooks had originally entertained
the idea of a duel with Sumner, but was persuaded by friends that duels were
correct only between social equals, and that Sumner was more deserving of
treatments more usually prescribed for drunkards in the gutter. A horsewhip
probably would have sufficed, but Brooks himself was a cripple from an
earlier duel who happened to walk with a cane. Sumner was never quite same
afterward, perhaps to the nation's ultimate benefit. Anyway, I would have
enjoyed seeing the entire Republican side of the Health care Reform summit
table swarmed and beset upon by cane-wielding crazies -- and all those
golf-obsessed, grift-fattened, hypocritical
gentlemen from those backwater districts in the Heartland begging for mercy
as they cringed on the floor. Perhaps a bloody spectacle like that is
yet to come. Based on how we seem to be doing things in this Republic, I
wouldn't count it out.
Of
President Obama's performance, I confess I came away disappointed. His speech
throughout the long day seemed halting, wan, lacking in conviction, as though
he had been assigned some thankless interlocutor's role in an embarrassing
and hopeless political minstrel show that history had cruelly mandated to
demean him. (Or maybe he just needed a cigarette.) Of all people, the
rascally Charles Rangel (D -NY) far outshone the President both in stylish
verve and substance in laying out his version of what was at stake late in
the day. And though I am generally not a Pelosi fan, House Speaker
Nancy (D - Cal) rather effectively called out the opposition as a claque of
lying motherfuckers in her concluding remarks.
We
are left, finally, with a so-called health care system so cruel and unjust
that the Devil himself in consultation with the most demonic lobbyists, and
perhaps a little input from historical politicians such as Caligula, Ivan the
Terrible, Heinrich Himmler, and Pol Pot could not
construct a worse way of deploying the fruits of modern science. It has
gotten to the point for most of us where we dread a visit to the doctor more
for the bureaucratic consequences than the health issues themselves. Your
gall bladder may have to come out, but it's much harder to face the
booby-trap clause in your health insurance that will result in you getting
stuck with a $123,000 bill for surgery and attendant procedures (including
the $500 tylenols). Three months later, of course,
the re-po man is towing your car and the mortgage
"servicer" has foreclosed on your house, and your life (even
without that pesky gall bladder) has become a permanent camping trip next to
a drainage ditch.
I
am personally not confident that we will do anything to address the failures
and inequities of so-called Health Care. As a general thing, I have to say
that this recent exercise only seems to prove the now permanent impotence and
impairment of the federal government. In The Long Emergency we have entered,
real governance is likely to devolve downward to the community level, and it
may be unrealistic to expect any real action from on high. Things have just
gone too far at this point. We have blown past the thresholds of
hyper-complexity so that further hyper-complexity only make
things worse. At more than 2,000 pages, the current Health Care Reform bill
is surely an exercise in the diminishing returns of grotesque additional
hyper-complexity.
I am
confident in the "emergent," self-organizing capablities
of human societies. We are now faced with the task of emergently
re-organizing medicine downward to the community clinic level -- and sooner
or later probably toward a simple, straightforward pay-as-you-go in cash
basis with doctors you know, with all the bureaucratic barnacles scraped
away. Like a lot of other things in the years ahead -- education, retail
trade, transport, even banking -- medicine is likely to be much less dazzling
than the way it is practiced today. But when all is said and done we'll still
possess the germ theory of illness and the recipe for lidocaine
and a few other things that will make existence tolerable.
Oh,
one last thing. What I said about John Boehner also applies to that
miserable dissembling pinch-faced prick Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R- Ky). Someone, please, take
a cricket bat to him.
.
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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