jude folly

‘We’ll have no one to blame but ourselves if healthcare reform doesn’t include a public option.’ So read the subheading to columnist Robert Reich’s piece ‘The Public Option’s Last Stand,’ featured recently at Salon.com. It appears a Salon editor took some liberty with Reich’s article in response to the real possibility that the Obama administration had winced over the battle to reform healthcare.

Though it might invite the accusation of ‘blaming the victim,’ our culpability strikes me as quite reasonable. So what if there’s been plenty of passionate and urgent venting about healthcare reform; no voter consensus has emerged to force even a committee majority in Congress to thoughtfully consider providing a single payer system like Medicare for U.S. citizens under age 65.

Given the career paths of former staffers for Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) – whose campaign has received  insurance and pharma industry millions – a single payer plan never had even a meatball’s chance on Rush Limbaugh’s dinner plate.

Opponents of healthcare reform have stirred up a hornet’s nest of outrage by plying all manner of lies and pathetic exaggerations about the government option offered in a health insurance exchange along with private carriers.

There is a big disconnect in the thinking of the town hall hecklers about what really is at stake for them and the country. They’ve allowed themselves to be seduced by visions of unaccountable government control over healthcare while believing, as coordinated voters, they have no means to check abuses of power. The Right has been able to exploit this assumption, distracting their kool-aide drinking followers from realizing the possibility of governing this nation as ‘we the people’ or ‘by the people’.

Consequently, they express a paralyzing cynicism or jaundiced view of the U.S. government. Such was illustrated in a Facebook dialogue I had recently with members of my extended family. What follows is an excerpt from an opinion piece by the Washington Post (culled by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society) commenting on the Affordable Health Choices Act’s favorable treatment of the pharmaceutical industry:

[T]he bill includes a provision that would create a 12-year market exclusivity period for brand-name biologic drugs. This would drive costs to consumers above even current levels, making the title little more than a mockery.

So one member of the family responded:

Great . . . we knew this bill was crap . . . guess only if you are healthy and NEVER need a doctor and don’t need money either. I am so glad we are used [sic] failed patterns to imitate when creating our system.

And I was not above playing the devil’s advocate: ‘So you’re in favor of the single payer plan?’

She responded:  ‘Actually, for massive de-regulation. Gov’t seems to mess up what they touch. The letters IRS come to mind. . . .’

Then her sister chimed in:

It’s never good when the government plays ‘god’ with people’s lives . . . like our good friend and illustrious leader BO. ‘Single Payer’. . . hm-m-m-m-m-m-m. . . catchy. Too bad it can never work.

While neither thankfully invoked any Hitler comparisons to President Obama – like the loon who recently faced off against Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) – I do share the congressman’s befuddlement. I consider it the highest form of irony for one to complain about cost of medicine and then assert the need for its ‘massive de-regulation.’

What’s far more troubling is the unspoken assumption that they bear no responsibility to hold decision makers accountable for government’s lapses in judgement or abuses of power. I would characterize the disconnect as an accountability gap; between government policy and an alert and engaged electorate.

The business of governing this country requires far more inclusive and attentive participation than election day vote casting and the odd phone call or letter to elected representatives; far more involving input than signing petitions and waiving signs at town hall gatherings.

What’s required is each voter’s willingness to compromise somewhat on his or her ideological latitude so that he or she might be a part of the  united consensus that will be necessary to take back governing; to really embody the meaning of e pluribus unum.

menacing, slithering beneath dark waters, wielding a tidal force. The thought occurred to me as I absorbed the news that the private equity firm I work for was letting me go. Having paid close attention to the dismal job market news and the whithering US economy, at least the event of my dismissal wouldn’t shock me, I reasoned all along; and it didn’t.

Still, I gave in to moments of panic as I considered how to rearrange my financial obligations and wondered what kind of severance I might count on. Being aware of the growing masses of the unemployed, I admit, gins up the fear. I couldn’t imagine there being much of any comfort in numbers, especially such figures compared over and over again in superlative terms to the Great Depression.

While I experienced the physical sensation of dread, I imagined a squid’s inky cloud billowing through my innards. How useful it’s been to conjure or project images for the anxiety that can rear up suddenly.

Of course, I’ve not yet been turned loose and and have yet to endure the peril of depleting funds and diminishing job prospects.  I know that whatever happens it will be in my best interest not to panic. It requires committing self-affirming belief to a situation I don’t fully understand in the heat of its unfolding.

A new politico-economic order is emerging that we have yet to see fully manifested. I am grateful for times like this that expose the American myth of the independent, self-sustaining individual. Since our economy has evolved into an intertwining entity that binds most of our financial destinies together, it stands to reason that we learn to lean on one another, at the very least for ideas, encouragement and hope.

Now that this scandal has been beat to pulp, we should move the conversation beyond any further details of the South Carolina governor’s infidelity and skip the talk about his mental well being.

The particulars of the story bear a striking resemblance to a novel called Damage (by Irish writer Josephine Hart), a tale narrated by an unnamed protagonist – an English physician and up-and-coming Member of Parliament – who, by all appearances, had possession of a wonderful life. Like Mark Sanford, his rise to prominance as a capable and admired elected leader inspired talk of his potential as a head of the nation.

The novel’s opening passage presents themes about the human condition – what I would liken to pangs of an undernourished soul - that play out with dreadfully regrettable effect.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. . . .

For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. . . .

And in my own life, I have traveled far, acquiring loved and unfamiliar companions: a wife, a son, and a daughter. I have lived with them, a loving alien. . . . and tried to be what those I loved expected me to be – a good husband, a good father, a good son.

Had I died at fifty I would have been a doctor, and an established politician . . . . One who had made a contribution, and was much loved. . . .

But I did not die in my fiftieth year. There are few who know me now, who do not regard that as a tragedy.

The promising politician finds his ‘imprint’ in a dark, mysterious young woman (French, of course, for full fatalistic effect) who happens to be his grown son’s romantic companion. As if powerless against the collision of greater forces, they commence an affair whose calamitous arc ends with the death of his son.

While the Mark Sanford saga doesn’t feature a taboo element like incest, judging from the weepy press conference he held to admit that he had cheated, and from the emails he exchanged with his lover, the affair was no frivolous fling. At the risk of implying that Gov. Sanford’s behavior should be excused, I think it worth considering that, like the novel’s central character, the magnitude of his misdeeds reflects a great spiritual longing or hunger of the soul; requiring a moral catastrophe proportional to the unfettered becoming (or metaphysical fulfillment) that contemporary culture has few resources to accommodate.

Well, then he should not have sought public office, would be the common sensical response. True; and I would observe that in order to serve our republic, we require candidates to submit to somewhat extreme contortions of image and soul in order to appeal to a rule of the majority.

Yet how easy it is to disparage elected officials for the chameleon qualities they adopt and not recognize our complicity in the compulsive ‘costume’ changes (a.k.a. flip flopping) politicians must make to remain politically relevant. Yes, voters play a significant role in all this madness – though in Mark Sanford we witness the implosion of one political career that could not conceal the impassioned, vulnerable and utterly human qualities that far too many in the United States would prefer to deny about themselves.

Adulterers or not, absconders of duty or not, we are Mark Sanford.

After months of abscence and seemingly useless deliberation I am pleased to be writing here once again and anticipate more frequent posts in the near future, offering hopefully more thoughtful content. In the mean time, have a look at a review I’ve composed covering Robert A. Burton’s exploration of belief and the brain in a book called On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.