Author Archives: oinsketta

The World is Just the World

“I’m going to finish that book I started,” he said resolutely.

“Not ‘Bird Wins’, I hope.  You’ve learned so much since the days you carried a piss bucket for pompous jerks too lazy to walk down the hall to the urinals,” he said hopefully.  “Besides, you realize now what it takes to sell a book idea, to get an advance.  You have to give them something positive, a fantasy they will enjoy, something uplifting and inspirational that can be made into a movie people will plunk down $20 to see.  Nobody wants a book where everybody dies, where the character we’re rooting for gets brutally screwed and there’s not even anybody to get revenge.  Tell me it’s not ‘Bird Wins’.  For the love of God, please tell me that’s not the book you’re talking about.”  He smiled at his old friend hopefully.  

“I hear what you’re saying.  The only trouble is, the fucking bird always wins,” he said.

“You realize it’s confusing to anybody reading this that you’re referring to us as ‘he’ and ‘he’,” she said, suddenly.  

“Oh?” he said, raising a single eyebrow, “you is a woman now?”  

“Not at all,” she said, “I’m a beautiful cat-faced female cat who can talk.”  

“You really are,” he said, taking her in with a nod and a smile.  

“Now that that’s settled,” she said “tell me you’re not talking about ‘Bird Wins’ again, or that soul-crushing book about the narrator’s doomed battle with the fascist Minnie Frego,” and as she looked at him it really was remarkable how cat-like her sweet face was.  

“Are you really a cat?” he asked.  She smiled and rubbed her face against his, her tail caressed his arm.

He petted her soft fur.  “The ceiling is still leaking.  Yesterday the super promised to come by.  I told him to come by today any time after 1:00.  He said he’d be working in the building all day and would stop by.  There is a bucket in the living room and one in the bedroom.  Both leaks are intermittent.  One begins to go ‘drip, drip’ while the other is silent.  Then they drip together for a while.  Then the second one goes ‘drip, drip’ while the first says nothing.”

“Hmmm,” she purred, “slightly troubling, but not very interesting.”  

“Right,” he said, “exactly!  That’s the deal with all of this shit, the accumulated drips and dribbles of a hundred leaking orifices, each one a nuisance but all together a demonic symphony that will not stop til the audience is howling.  It’s Bukowski’s swarm of trivialities that are always there and kill quicker than cancer.  One drip doesn’t get you, you can deal with one leak.  But as you turn your attention to that one, the other starts, and then another, a robot calls on the phone to tell you about some mysterious debt you owe, another week’s delay on something you were counting on, suddenly a jet of hot steam you don’t have a tool to stop, or if you did, you don’t have the heat resistant suit to avoid getting scalded, something flies into your eye, the eye is lost, down to one eye, you step backwards, the rake flips up with brutal self-caused force and opens a gash on your forehead with a mule-like kick.”  

“Did the super come by this afternoon and take a look at the new leak?” she asked, trying to rein in the torrent of his real and imagined troubles.  

“Of course not,” he said.  

“Well, I hope you called him,” she said, hoping gamely to get to some kind of resolution.  

“Yeah, I called him at 4:29.  He said ‘we knocked on your door at ten to one,'” he aimed a glob of spit and expertly dinged the spittoon, “I was sitting five feet from the door from noon onwards.  He never knocked on my door.  Then he promised to come by this evening, around nine.”

“He didn’t come by around nine,” she said, licking her paws and rubbing them over her face, cleaning herself.  

“No,” he said, “so I called him a bit after nine, and he was drunk.  Said he’d be by at ten, between ten and ten thirty, ten thirty the latest.  He’d call when he was on his way.”  

She continued grooming herself.  

“Have no fear, though, I am confident the early-rising lying sack of shit will be banging on my door at 7:30 a.m.,” he predicted bitterly.  “I’ve already told him I won’t be around tomorrow morning.  Of course, I’ll be in my bed cursing him, the useless prick.  And why shouldn’t he be a useless prick?   I’m sure they don’t pay him, yet he’s up at 6:30 every morning banging the garbage cans under my windows.” 

She curled up and rested her cat face on her soft paws.  She looked at him with a mysterious expression.   Her eyes said “you don’t really expect me to say anything, do you?”

When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

Wednesday 2-18, downtown A train

“Oh, happy fucking day,”

said a bitter old face

like mine

ceiling sprung a new leak

drip, drip

onto my last nerve

woman at Obamacare

didn’t know much about benefits

but read my 1099s to me,

including the one I received yesterday

“Do you still work at EVCS?” she asked

teeth and eyes not

needed for our health

not here

in the land where we no longer

tolerate

the lynching of former slaves

here

in the land of the free

and the home

of brave

corporate personhood  

“Whoa! calm down, man…”  

“Don’t you fucking

call me ‘man’, man,

don’t you fucking call me ‘man’!”  

There was a time

my hand would become a fist

where humans

forced to wear signs saying

“I am a man”

would have made me want to holler

arms hard,

ready to strike  

“Who is there to strike?”

a voice asks,

reasonable, kindly.  

“Those who benefit

from the murder

& enslavement of others,”

I say.

 “Ah, yes,” the voice says,

sadly,

“but one can never touch them.”  

ii

“When were you wont to be so full of songs, fool?”

the king asked me  

“Since every sweet lake, sire, receded to shoals of piss

a cool drink not sold by the bottle

living now only in fond nostalgia

while the priapic, tireless

thrusting, twisting, plunging

forms the rhythm section,

the recoiling cringe replacing dance.”

“There is more hope

for a dog returning to his vomit 

than for you, fool,” noted the king

“Yes,” I said,

“another song, sire?”

date forgotten

Had we not

bullet in the head  

been forced on top

of our neighbors’ corpses

in that festive

Ukrainian evening  

Had we not  

willing ourselves to forget

plunged

bottle deep

in spirits not our own  

Had rape

not been the law

but mercy instead  

Imagine

the songs we would have sung

the happy noise

scattered over bright chords

ecstatic leaps

and skiing madly

down the perfect slopes

of upturned breasts

under the thinness of silk

Shining the Light of Reason

It turns out there is a good reason I am responsible for a few hundred dollars in connection with a preventative procedure 100% covered by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  Once it was explained to me, it became perfectly understandable.

The procedure is 100% paid for (with only a token $100 payment required from me), a $4,050 colonoscopy that was paid, on my behalf, at the contracted price of $852.  In consideration of this deep discount, the PPACA also protects the interests of doctors shorted by insurance company payments as well as the insurance companies themselves.

The PPACA requires a pre-colonoscopy office visit, something not previously required.  This visit with the specialist is subject to a $50 copay.   The doctor may charge up to $250, but the patient will only be responsible for the difference between the copay and the contracted price for this required visit, $131.   So the bill for the additional $81 is correct and the full responsibility of the patient.  The $131, which goes toward the $1,750 deductible, reflects another deep discount, almost 50% off the sticker price.

The diagnostic code 2113 was properly entered by the doctor’s office, even though no diagnosis was involved.  It’s called a diagnostic code, sir, and you chose a plan with a deductible, even if it was the only plan offered at your income level.  Pay the bill.

Procedure code 88305, level five, means that the patient, and not the insurance company, is responsible for the other half of the pathology charges related to the colonoscopy.  If the preventive procedure had not discovered any abnormalities requiring a pathologist, the patient’s preventive care would have been completely without additional cost, except for the $131 deductible and the $100 pre-colonoscopy fee.

As my father so often reminded me, I’d complain if I was hanged with a new rope.  The main thing is– what a great step forward Obamacare is for every American patient everywhere and how generous the discounts it affords.   And as President Barack Obama himself would say:  what are you going to do about it anyway, bitch?

Fatigue and the difficulty of recharging the batteries

Long have they urged us, originally in hoary Latin, not to let the bastards grind us down.  The bastards constantly and tirelessly grind.   Grinding us down is their only goal.  They do a hell of a job and it takes a fresh, happy energy not to be ground down sometimes.

Of course, it is supremely fatiguing, this death by a thousand abrasions.  It’s impossible to energetically engage every one of the many outrages that are paraded by us every day.  We have outrage fatigue, in this world where they are hatching one outrage after another, using devilishly sophisticated machines to crank them out faster and faster.  

Some days it is not possible to energetically engage even the smallest of these outrages.   The question I ask myself today, as my wheels spin so far in the sluggish air: how do I recharge my spirits?

I have been musing on the scam that is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the seeming impossibility of getting out of paying hundreds of dollars I do not owe, in addition to hundreds in monthly premiums I do, feeling myself frozen in place, stymied, angry.  No outlet.  Go fight City Hall, asshole.  Has nobody granted me the serenity to accept the things that get to fuck me with no remedy and know the difference between the things I am right to actively engage?

Global warming, the organized, vociferous denial of fact, a government whose corruption is surpassed only by the insatiable, murderous greed of those who corrupt and control it, poverty, war, lack of civility, humility, gentleness, creativity in our public discourse.  The war of each against all that is thrust upon us every day.   We are living in a mined out coal mine where the air has turned noxious and it doesn’t take a coughing canary to tell us which way the toxic wind is blowing.

How do I recharge my batteries today?  Yesterday I played the guitar for a few hours, an excellent thing to do.  But, while it did me a world of good at the time, did nothing to recharge my batteries.  

Going to work is the most widely practiced universal therapy out there.  That I do not go to work is a big factor, too much time to muse, since I am not hitting snooze, having coffee and dashing off to work.   If everything in one’s day is optional, a kind of haze can set it.   There is a good reason that many people fear leisure, dread retirement, the feeling of being unproductive, useless, if not working in some capacity.   I am on the other end of the scale with that one– if I could play productively every day I’d be a very happy boy.

A very happy old boy.

Here we go, the ACA, in a nutshell

Haven’t discovered how to enforce my right not to receive apparently fraudulent bills from health care providers (so far I’ve had a few hundred dollars for duplicative demands for payment dismissed, after calls to billers).  But part of the difficulty with the law is put in context by the following:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), codified as amended at scattered sections of the Internal Revenue Code and in 42 U.S.C. commonly called the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “ObamaCare“, is a United Statesfederal statute signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 23, 2010.  (Wikipedia)

When I wrote the other day that it was written by the health insurance and pharmaceutical industry to benefit those industries, I was lacking the name of the author of the ACA.  A friend found it for me in remarkably short order.   Her name is Elizabeth Fowler and she worked closely with former Senator Max Baucus between three separate stints in the industry.

Here’s a good article about Elizabeth Fowler, health industry insider and primary author of the PPACA, now back working for Johnson & Johnson — with a very worthwhile five minute video editorial by Bill Moyers at the end of the article.

(Thanks to JDS for sending link to article on Liz Fowler and her stinking ilk)

If you prefer an article in the New York Times, read this.

A bit more about Ms. Fowler and her former boss, Mr. Baucus:

Fowler’s career in Washington stretches back more than a decade, when she first left a private sector hospital group in Minnesota in 2000 to join the Health Care Financing Administration, a federal agency now known as the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

By the following year, Fowler had landed at the powerful Senate Finance Committee, working on health care issues for Montana Democrat Max Baucus. Lobbying records show that Fowler stayed until 2006, when she departed for a two-year stint at health insurance company WellPoint, only to return to the Senate in 2008, again working on health policy for Baucus.

When it comes to health care, and health lobbyists, Baucus isn’t just any senator. Since 1998, he has collected more than $5.1 million in campaign contributions from the insurance, pharmaceutical and nursing industries, making him one of the health care sector’s most heavily backed lawmakers.

 (the rest of the article is here —->)  yawn, yawn 

The Difficulty of Even Researching the ACA

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is one of those taunting, ironic names government sometimes gives to things.   That patients are not protected from billing practices that violate the law, that the rights that must be protected are not discoverable without massive effort (my own efforts continue, I’ll let you know when this lawyer discovers the section of the massive and complicated law that outlines these inviolable rights)  that there is no place to have a clear adjudication of the many violations of protected rights, and that the health care is not necessarily affordable add to this citizen’s sense of being taunted.

My frustration reminds me of how angry I felt, the day after millions gathered across the globe, and I was one of hundreds of thousands in New York City out protesting on an arctic day, threatened by NYPD on horseback and kept blocks from the U.N., when then President Bush announced that we would invade Iraq in a war based on endlessly repeated lies and the profit calculations of a few powerful corporations.

“Those stupid, cynical, Nazi motherfuckers!”  I remember thinking as Operation Shock and Awe began in my name.  That was just my frustration speaking.   The architects of that illegal war were not stupid– they made a ton of money whacking that hornet’s nest and destabilizing an already volatile part of the global warming puzzle. Nobody whose actions lead to amassing a fortune can be called stupid, not here.   Cynical?  Perhaps, you could make a good argument there, but there is no law against being a cynic.  

Nazis?  Well, to put things into perspective, the Nazis started a war that killed tens of millions while deliberately exterminating many millions in specially designed death camps.  The Bush Administration killed only about 500,000 Iraqis, many of them, undoubtedly people who hated America.  Moreover, not one of these Iraqis was killed in a death camp, there simply were no death camps.  Perhaps 1% of that number of Americans were killed liberating Iraq from a monster, so already comparisons with the Nazis seem a bit strained, don’t they?  

The Bush Administration, as President Obama finally admitted “tortured some folks”, but even a quick comparison makes one realize how unfair it is to call them Nazis.  They really believed they were doing the right thing!

Maybe Max Baucus, whose committee wrote the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act so reviled and attacked by the President’s legions of bitter enemies believed the same thing.  The health insurance industry, and the pharmaceutical industry, two huge supporters of the long-time senator, would be badly hurt by a single payer system that would allow a few hundred million Americans to bargain for health services that could be fairly regulated by the federal government.  Where is the freedom in that?  Stinks of Socialism and restraint of the free market, don’t it?

Don’t believe me, here’s what Wikipedia says about Mr. Baucus  and the practical conflict of conscience * he endured while overseeing creation of the immensely dense Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  In a five year period prior to beginning his work on Obamacare he took in almost $5,000,000 in campaign contributions from the industries the new law would either make much more profitable or rob of a good share of its profitability.  Doesn’t take a genius to put the sad facts together.

What I’m looking for, and haven’t found yet, in addition to a clear cut answer on whether I should pay bills for hundreds of dollars for a covered preventive service, on top of my $471 monthly premium, is the name of the woman, one of the primary authors of the grotesquely tangled ACA,  who went through the revolving door President Obama announced would be closed, and returned to work for the health insurance industry at an annual salary in the millions.   Can you say “job well done”?   Good thing Mr. Obama closed that revolving door, as important as his closing of Gitmo.   Ask the prisoners there who are being force fed with tubes down their throats how that closing of Gitmo thing worked out for them.

Sarah Palin winks atcha.

 

 

* Baucus has been criticized for his ties to the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and was one of the largest beneficiaries in the Senate of campaign contributions from these industries.[40] From 2003-08, Baucus received $3,973,485 from the health sector, including $852,813 from pharmaceutical companies, $851,141 from health professionals, $784,185 from the insurance industry and $465,750 from HMOs/health services, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.[49][50] A 2006 study by Public Citizen found that between 1999 and 2005 Baucus, along with former Senate majority leader Bill Frist, took in the most special-interest money of any senator.[51]

Only three senators have more former staffers working as lobbyists on K Street, at least two dozen in Baucus’ case.[51] Several of Baucus’s ex-staffers, including former chief of staff David Castagnetti, are now working for the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries.[52]Castagnetti co-founded the lobbying firm of Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, which representsAmerica’s Health Insurance Plans Inc, the national trade group of health insurance companies, the Medicare Cost Contractors Alliance, as well as Amgen, AstraZeneca PLC and Merck & Co.Another former chief of staff, Jeff Forbes, opened his own lobbying shop and to represent thePharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America and the Advanced Medical Technology Association, among other groups.[citation needed]

A statistical analysis of the impact of political contributions on individual senators’ support for the public insurance option conducted by Nate Silver has suggested that Baucus was an unlikely supporter of the public option in the first place. Based on Baucus’s political ideology and the per capita health care spending in Montana, Silver’s model projects that there would be only a 30.6% probability of Baucus supporting a public insurance option even if he had received no relevant campaign contributions. Silver calculates that the impact on Baucus of the significant campaign contributions that he has received from the health care industry further reduces the probability of his supporting a public insurance option from 30.6% to 0.6%.[53]

In response to the questions raised by the large amount of funding he took from the health care industry, Baucus declared a moratorium as of July 1, 2009 on taking more special interest money from health care political action committees.[54] Baucus, however, refused to return as part of his moratorium any of the millions of dollars he has received from health care industry interests before July 1, 2009, or to rule out a resumption of taking the same or greater health care industry contributions in the future.[54] His policy on not taking health care industry money reportedly still allowed him to accept money from lobbyists or corporate executives, who, according to The Washington Post, continued to make donations after July 1, 2009.[54] A watchdog group found that in July 2009 Baucus accepted additional money from the health care industry in violation of his own self-defined moratorium terms, reportedly leading Baucus to return those monies.[55]

source

A Lady With Style

I passed by the Improv after a day of bicycle messengering.  World-weary woman smoking a cigarette at the door, clearly worked there.  I asked what I had to do to get on stage and do my bit.  

“Singer or comic?” she asked.  

“Matter of opinion,” I said.  

“Comic,” she said. “You don’t get to do your bit.  You get to do two minutes of your bit. Get here by 6, sign the list, wait with fifty others, see if you’re called.  They like you, you can come back and do more of your bit.”  

Never took her up on it, but I liked her style very much.

Obamacare 101

If you receive health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), Obamacare, you already know that it has all of the elements of a corporate scam.  If not, the jury would seem to still be out.   I’m here to tell you that the verdict is in.

I have a politically progressive friend who reads the Wall Street Journal every day.  He argues that the ACA has been a great step forward.  It covers millions more uninsured Americans than ever before and is beginning to rein in runaway medical costs.   As a participant in the ACA, and no fan of the Wall Street Journal, I can tell you from direct experience how closely Obamacare resembles an insurance industry scam.  

On the plus side first, it can’t be denied that eliminating the loophole of “pre-existing conditions”, the term that enabled American health insurance companies to deny insurance if you were ever sick with a particular disease, was welcome, and long-overdue.   There are other good features, no doubt. The perfect should never become the enemy of the good, as the president has said, but for the most part the ACA, that great free market compromise with comprehensive health care reform written primarily by and for the insurance industry, profits mainly that industry.   Like many other boons applauded by the Wall Street Journal, it involves large profits for the canny few at the expense of the clueless many.  

The opacity of the 900 page ACA is one of its most notable features.  If your rights and remedies are hard to discover, most people pay the bills they are sent and kiss their rights and remedies goodbye.

New York State set up a Health Care Marketplace at the earliest possible date.   We were all in for Obamacare.  Visit the New York State of Health website and you will marvel at the opacity of the consumer-friendly system.  From the difficulty of signing in (that’s called Get Started, by the way, no matter how many times you’ve already gotten started), to the lack of easily navigable plan details, to the absence of a clear statement of what the ACA is, or what it guarantees, to the almost completely useless help number (“we are experiencing more than the usual volume of callers, your business is very important to us”) you will see enough to discourage the casual seeker of health insurance from persisting there.  Also, enough to deter anyone looking for the rights guaranteed by the law in clear, unequivocal language.

“Preventative services are 100% covered,” the helpful woman at the NYS of Health assures me, after only 35 minutes on hold.  I ask her where I can see a list of these covered services, since I’ve already paid $150 in co-pays towards my recent colonoscopy and am being dunned, and threatened with collection letters, for an additional $281 connected with this preventative service.   She isn’t sure where I can find that language, the NYS of Health Marketplace only sells the plans, they don’t actually administer them or oversee the individual insurance companies.  

This particular woman is great, sympathetic, smart.  I kick myself that I did not get her name.  We look together for language that says I’m entitled to have my colonoscopy paid for 100% under the ACA, for my $471 monthly premium.  I find, several screens later, in only 4 or 5 clicks, this page, under Resources, and on the pull-down menu there’s a link for Using Your Plan, that eventually takes me to this, at the bottom of that page:    

Sep 26, 2013

Covered Benefits and Out-of-Pocket Costs for 2014 Standard Health Plans

And I read, under What Are Essential Health Benefits, number 9, the closest I will find to any kind of confirmation of this seemingly simple yes or no fact that preventive services are not subject to any deductible, to wit:  

Prevention & wellness services and long-lasting disease management

“You are entitled to be repaid that $150 you already paid for a covered service.  If your insurance company is making you pay any fee in connection with a colonoscopy they are not in compliance with the ACA and you should hold their feet to the fire,” this bright woman, a former health insurance industry appeals expert, tells me firmly.  

She informs me, in answer to my question, that the Department of Financial Services (“DFS”) is the state agency that holds insurance companies accountable for compliance issues.  She gives me their 800 number (800-842-3736  M-F 8:30-4:30).   I ask why there is no information about that on the NYS of Health webpage. They are discouraging frivolous complaints, she explains, since so many people are having problems with the ACA.  Not publishing the complaint number reduces the amount of angry callers making unfounded complaints before they have followed up with their individual insurance plans to make sure the insurers are out of compliance before calling DFS to lodge a complaint.

Makes me think of President Obama’s laudable campaign promises about transparency in government, protection of whistle blowers, and robust protections for consumers. Clear knowledge of one’s rights, after all, is a precondition to exercising them.   Few things are more important to the proper functioning of a just and accountable democratic republic than government transparency.   Few things are more useful to exploiters, despots and profiteers than the secret concealment of devilish details that might galvanize righteous opposition.

I recall the president’s campaign rhetoric and think of the Obama administration, the most opaque in our history, whatever else one might say about it, and my jaws clench. And I have to say, between Obama and Bush, dealing with the latter is much less soul crushing to an idealistic citizen than listening to the glib eloquence of the Equivocator in Chief, great lover of justice and defender of the common citizen that he is.

 

 

Being Invisible Hurts

Making one’s life’s work a project to make the children of the invisible feel visible for a few hours a week:  sheer idiocy.  I realize this, and how developing this project flows naturally from my own childhood experiences.   I was not born invisible, did not slip off until I disappeared during high school and kept out of sight, and the workforce, for a few decades.  I had great potential and was reminded of it often by many as I slipped silently into the night.  

We live in a corporate society, just accept it.  Virtually everyone I know is employed by a corporation, paid by a corporation.   The success or failure of everyone in our society is measured by their prosperity or lack of prosperity.  To dream of an unpaid program that has no measurable path toward prosperity?   Sheer idiocy.  

I do not castigate myself, or seek to belittle what I have managed to achieve so far, even as I mock myself in the voice of the larger society.  A program that allows young public school children, working together, to make all esthetic and technical decisions as they produce group animation?   Priceless, truly.  They master a host of skills and reap huge, unquantifiable benefits from this communal play with its ingenious balance of free imagining and technical demand.   Even just the isolated element of adults witnessing and applauding kids’ creativity and achievement for its own sake is invaluable.  That I lack metrics to prove this?  A fatal flaw in the design of the program, from a corporate funder’s point of view.  

I have felt in my body the pain of being invisible.  It doesn’t come from a lack of fame, or envy of celebrity, or the want of some validation.   It comes from that fundamental human need not to be seen as a fungible widget in a school uniform, a tiny data point, but as an individual containing an entire universe of imagining and potential.  The corporation does not place any value on this fundamental human need– it has no such need itself, being a legally constructed monster, a single-minded, all-consuming predator given all the natural rights of a human being.   “I’ll believe that corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one of them to death,” said Bill Moyers, national treasure.  Me too.  

A thought experiment:  consider your feelings on a subject you care about greatly. Express them as cogently as you can to a close friend.   Hear your close friend express almost zero understanding of why you feel so deeply about the subject.   Experience the existential moment where you weigh all the other good qualities of your close friend against their inability to understand your deep engagement with this subject.  This part is a conversation, largely with yourself.  

Now, experiment part 2:  express the same thing, in written form, and send it to the friend.  Hear nothing in return.   Is a neurotic person the only type who might find this silence troubling?  

The world is just the world and there is a certain wisdom, I suppose, in lowering one’s expectations about what can be done.   The myth of the individual who, by force of intellect, will, talent and determination, changes the way people think about the world?  It is seen now and again, usually in the context of people who achieve great wealth and celebrity along with their influence.  Luck is also a factor, the accident of birth first among these fortunes.  

Then we have someone like Malcolm X, pointing to another path, following one’s beliefs without thought of personal gain like recent world-changers who spring to mind, amoral corporate geniuses like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.  Of course, Malcolm’s fame arose while speaking for a large, ignorant movement– he stood for years before a loud megaphone where his genius could be honed and displayed regularly.  He underwent moral transformations during his life, was willing to revisit his deepest beliefs, refine his moral stance.  And he was willing, although not anxious, to die for those beliefs.  The shots that ripped him apart in the Audubon Ballroom that February day fifty years ago this week were earned by telling threatening truths many had an interest in not hearing expressed.   Several parties who hated each other were united in their desire for his death, played essential parts in his murder.   Not exactly a role model for action, perhaps, unless one feels he has no choice.  I suppose I feel that way.