Category Archives: History and Politics

150 years since slavery was abolished

Slavery, at one time enshrined, in coded language, in our Constitution, was abolished by the 13th Amendment, apparently passed 150 years ago today.  The justice and mercy of Law, what can one say?   I am about to go on a bike ride before tackling other things, but thought I’d tackle this old chestnut briefly first.

l always love the racist complaint that when it comes to slavery American Blacks should “just get over it”.  It was 150 years ago! they will heatedly remind you today.  A brief survey of those 150 years may be in order.  American states seceded from the Union, took up arms to defend their rights, including the Constitutional right to hold humans as property, to do with such property as they saw fit.  Although today most people consider slavery inexcusably evil, it was Constitutionally protected, more vigorously protected than many rights enjoyed by American citizens.

Treatment of American citizens was, and remains, largely a States Rights matter.  Advocates of States Rights seem brazen about the fact that the states most loudly demanding their rights are the same ones who took up arms against the government they felt, with mixed justice, was interfering with their Constitutional rights.  Demanding unthinkable things like the end of our genteel way of life, sir!  Damn you, sir, I say, damn you!

After a monstrously bloody war slavery was abolished by a Constitutional Amendment, the thirteenth.  The defeated rebel states had to endorse this amendment or forfeit the right to Federal funds to rebuild their war torn infrastructure (most of the fighting was in the Confederacy).  “Reconstruction” was a short-lived project, it lasted about as long as Prohibition and, though it began with great promise, did about the same amount of lasting good before it was abandoned.  When federal troops were removed from the South, and the Supreme Court severely limited the scope of the other Amendments designed to insure rights to the freed slaves, it was time for States Rights again.

We had states ruled in many cases by outfits like the Ku Klux Klan.  Can’t be sheriff, son, nor mayor, nor governor, neither, unless you move up in the Klan.  Black Codes in these states made it a crime for a black man to be unemployed and walking the streets without a certain amount of money in his pocket  Wealthy white men with fields to plow could bail out imprisoned Negroes and have them work to pay off their bail money.  The repayment was structured to last a lifetime.  The arrangement lasted less than a century, but surely seemed longer to those freed slaves who, on paper, had the same rights as anyone else.

A war was waged steadily throughout the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s and the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s finally restored much of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, passed a century earlier.  Then it was only a matter of 50 years or so after that until the question of widespread poverty among the descendants of American slaves, and hopelessness, violence, racial profiling, killing by police and so forth would be back in the news.  

Malcolm X questioned why such barbarous conditions were considered a matter of Civil Rights when, more properly, they should be regarded as violations of Human Rights.  Let the U.N. decide whether America is still denying basic Human Rights to millions of its citizens, he demanded.   The ballot or the bullet, you know.  They chose, as they so often do, the bullet.  February 21, 1965.  Another big anniversary, less than a year ago, sir.

 

Freedom (and the Unthinkable)

Born free and in chains at the same time, it is written.  We are free to choose, within our choices, chained to things beyond our control.

“Good fortune, I have found, comes most often as the result of hard work.”  This was written by an industrious young man who’d inherited a thousand acres of fertile farm land and almost a hundred slaves.   History remembers him as one of our greatest geniuses.

Bad fortune, I suppose, to have been born one of this humanist philosopher’s slaves.  Hard work would not likely fix this egregious pre-birth planning mistake.  Your options are fewer than the boy landowner: you can complain, look for justice, or vengeange , you can seek to be the illuminating exception — but those don’t usually make for a felicitous pursuit of happiness.  

Once a prince left an opulent, pampered life in the palace, he renounced his wealth, the life of desire, searched for enlightenment, became the living embodiment of enlightenment.  Simpler, ironically, for the son of a king than for the son of a field laborer.

We are free and we are in chains.   Your government.  The policies and laws by which some live as philosopher kings while others lead lives of fear, violence and want.   Fairness and the world?  A grimly humorous idea.  Good social media skills in 2015?  Inspire a worldwide band of psychologically delicate people looking for a cause to rally to, convince them to create terror for that cause.  Stand back and wait for the internet to blow up.

 

 

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NY Times on Federal Judge Jay Bybee

Not that I am a huge fan of the Grey Skank, but I did have to applaud this editorial bit on the Torture Memos and their author, life-tenured Judge Jay Bybee (the article I read it in, linked below, is also worth a read):

Their language is the precise bureaucratese favored by dungeon masters throughout history. They detail how to fashion a collar for slamming a prisoner against a wall, exactly how many days he can be kept without sleep (11), and what, specifically, he should be told before being locked in a box with an insect — all to stop just short of having a jury decide that these acts violate the laws against torture and abusive treatment of prisoners.

In one of the more nauseating passages, Jay Bybee, then an assistant attorney general and now a federal judge, wrote admiringly about a contraption for waterboarding that would lurch a prisoner upright if he stopped breathing while water was poured over his face. He praised the Central Intelligence Agency for having doctors ready to perform an emergency tracheotomy if necessary.

These memos are not an honest attempt to set the legal limits on interrogations, which was the authors’ statutory obligation. They were written to provide legal immunity for acts that are clearly illegal, immoral and a violation of this country’s most basic values.

source

Collateral Damage, yawn

This will no doubt seem a peevish time, an ill-timed time, to bring this up, days after the hideous terrorist carnage in Paris, and Beirut.  There is never a good time to bring things like this up.  Why is it that I cannot help but bring things like this up?  It’s just a government policy, after all, mostly secret, designed to kill those who hate us, why the necessity to fuss over it like a bone caught crosswise in the craw?

When someone who is objectively evil, driven to do evil things, like Dick Cheney, or his bully lawyer David Addington, or generously rewarded torture justifiers tenured law professor John Yoo and Federal Judge Jay Bybee, authors of the secret Torture Memos; when someone sees the world in simplistic terms and is seemingly gullible, like George W. Bush, well– it is understandable that to them a bit of “enhanced interrogation” or “collateral damage” would mean little in the general scheme of things.

Who but a pussy, after all, would worry about the rights of people who are quite likely guilty of the most unthinkable crimes?   Or even if not guilty, nothing like a little brutality and a decade or so of detention to weed out the true haters from the ugly fuckers who just look like true haters.

In the case of evil people, or true believers, insisting that their actions are decent and morally justified, all you can really do is clench your jaw, in all but the rarest case you can’t stop them.

But what is one to do when the person ordering daily murders by remote control, from a kill list, and referring to murdered children as “collateral damage” is an excellent salesman who has made of himself the most likable product, an articulate and winning expression of our highest democratic ideals?    The quick-witted, cool exemplar of human decency?

This is, of course, a purely rhetorical question.   Candidates lie.  Presidents spin, conceal their worst acts.  Some give stirring speeches about government transparency that make lovers of participatory democracy tingle and then have a worse record on state secrecy and the concealment of government crimes than Mr. Cheney.   If Israel is condemned for “extra-judicial” killing of its enemies, so be it.  If it then becomes our national policy, secret kill lists, body counts, any dead, dismembered male over 18 presumed to be the enemy, who the hell are you to get all self-righteous about it?  

An excellent question, sir.  You are nobody to get all fucking self-righteous about it.   Better a thousand innocents die over there than one of us be murdered by them over here.  End of story.  

Any other questions, jerk-off?

 

 

 

 

 

Truculence in Human Affairs

I had originally thought of “vehemence”, but truculence, which has none of the better associations of vehemence and contains all the violence, cruelty, heartlessness and unyieldingness, conveys it better.   Once you see truculence on someone’s face, it cannot be unseen.

I think of my father, whose mother affectionately called him “Sonny”. I picture looking at her through his indescribably colored eyes– hazel, maybe, a diffuse, pale greenish color like the sea in a certain stormy light, but always guarded so it was hard to make out any color at all.  Those eyes, as an infant, had seen, too many times to forget, this little red-haired woman rising suddenly from her chair as a savage, whip-brandishing maniac.  Not only did she brandish the whip, her face turned merciless as she vehemently brought the whip down on his babyish face, grunting and cursing and acting out an insane and unslakable rage.  The pain of the whipping was only half of the pain, the other was that the mother who was supposed to be protecting and nurturing you was, instead, attacking you violently and as only an insane person could.  

How could my father ever unsee this when he looked at his mother? He could not.

The role this kind of savagery plays in human life, it seems to me, cannot be overstated.  How does a person kill another person (excluding self-defense situations)  without having experienced this overwhelming feeling of betrayal, abuse, humiliation?   It’s hard to imagine.  Having seen the truculence of someone determined to do you harm, it’s easy to imagine why people buy weapons, insist on their right to carry them around, have no moral problems with war, torture, or any policy designed to kill, injure, starve or weaken potentially truculent enemies.

I was reminded of this truly vicious cycle by a dream I had the other night.   In the dream a former friend was resolutely determined not to apologize, too niggardly, he admitted, though he also allowed that he owed me an apology.   He told me that, considering he was being such an unyielding jerk about it, it would not be wrong of me to punch him in the face.  I was unable to do so, each time I tried my fist would stop right before the moment of impact and just touch his jaw lightly.

Seeing me unable to punish him he laughed, mockingly, and began over-acting, the way a weak man goes about demonstrating what he thinks of as superiority.   He may have said something unkind about me trying to be fucking Ahimsa-Boy, but whatever he said, that and the satisfied, sadistic expression on his face finally did the trick.  I saw that merciless, unrepentant, provocative face and no thought or effort was involved– I punched it.  Hard.   The moment of impact was satisfying, but the moment after, quite bad.

It wasn’t so much that I had departed from my vow to remain mild, or that I’d given vent to a violent impulse.   I saw I’d given him a black eye, and he was glaring at me, afraid and enraged.  I pictured a likely outcome– an assault complaint, being fingerprinted at the police station, fees to lawyers, a long bureaucratic hassle for doing something I’d felt completely entitled to, had, in fact, been invited to do.   I was angry at myself for letting my anger put me in this vulnerable position.

Think of human history.  It is, as often as not, the story of armed bands of men attacking, starving, brutalizing other groups of people, taking their land, their livestock, raping, pillaging.  How do people do this?  It’s easy, it turns out.  

We took a walk to a beautiful nature preserve built on the site of an ancient city and a fortress.  The signs told the story eloquently.  People lived here, built these walls to live in peace within them.  In 490 BCE a violent group came, besieged the place for 36 days, sacked it, killed everyone they didn’t enslave and renamed it after their glorious leader.  Next to indications of the year, perhaps a dozen or more times over the centuries, descriptions of the who and how the place had been besieged, sacked, inhabitants killed or enslaved, the name changed: glory to the victors.  Romans, Crusaders, Muslim warriors, men of God killing for peace, paving the road to heaven with the bones of their faceless enemies, painting the signposts with their blood.

Hard to understand, any of it, unless we make it personal.  Picture the implacable face of someone who has hurt you.  Picture it trying to stare you down, make you turn your eyes away.  It is a face you will not forget soon and, among all the faces you can imagine, probably the most likely to make you forget your vow to do no harm.

Why My Mother Loved Jon Stewart, but Hated Stephen Colbert (Draft 1)

It’s easy to understand why my mother loved Jon Stewart, what Jewish mother could not love him?   My mother was a secular Jew from the Bronx, raised to believe in equality, human rights and social justice.   I recall her telling me when I was young that she didn’t think much of Howard Fast as a writer, but that the idealistic man who’d been blacklisted as a suspected Communist had his heart in the right place.  As an old woman she was discouraged by the many signs that our country did not always have its heart in the right place.  She would clench her teeth every time President Bush came on TV.  

“How an obvious imbecile like that got to be president… every time I see him it makes me sick.”  

She regarded him as the worst American president, definitely the worst of her lifetime.  One of the last things she said to me on her deathbed at the hospice, and she said it urgently:  “please promise me Sarah Palin will never be president of the United States!”  

I promised her, thinking to myself “certainly not in your lifetime, mom.”  

She watched Jon Stewart every night.  Whenever I was in Florida with her she’d call me in to watch when his show was about to start.  She found him adorable, as, of course, he is.  He made her laugh, with his trenchant insights, facial expressions and overall comic brilliance.  He, almost alone among the media in the years of her widowhood, gave her hope that not everyone in the world was insane.  She was doubly delighted when Bill Moyers interviewed Jon Stewart and the discussion quickly became an intelligent hour long mutual admiration society between two of her favorite media personalities.  

As much as she loved Jon Stewart, she had an almost visceral dislike of his gifted protege Stephen Colbert.  As soon as Stewart’s show ended, even before Colbert’s American eagle swept beak and talons first toward the camera, she had the remote in hand and was looking for something else to watch.  I never understood this.  She couldn’t explain it, she just couldn’t stand him.  

“You realize that the overbearing right wing blowhard persona is parody, he’s playing a character.  He’s hilarious, mom.”  

She shook her head.   “I know.  I don’t know what it is, I can’t watch him.  I know it’s a parody, I just can’t stand him.”

So it wasn’t that she was like President Bush’s team who’d hired Colbert to do the Correspondents’ Club dinner, most likely in the mistaken belief that he was a fellow traveler, a very funny, popular comedian who happened to be patriotic and believe in the unquestionable greatness of America, right or wrong.  In 2006 nobody in the media was saying too much out loud about Bush and Cheney’s muscular excesses.  It was as if they were all afraid of being shot in the face with a blunderbuss full of birdshot or something.

I showed my mother the video of Colbert fearlessly skewering the president at the Correspondents’ Club.  I recall at the time feeling great admiration for him, he was about the first person to publicly suggest the Emperor and those around him were naked.   He showed impressive sang froid by doing it, literally, in the president’s face.  My mother admitted it was a great routine.  He began:

Mark Smith, ladies and gentlemen of the press corps, Madame First Lady, Mr. President, my name is Stephen Colbert and tonight it’s my privilege to celebrate this president. We’re not so different, he and I. We get it. We’re not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We’re not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say “I did look it up, and that’s not true.” That’s ’cause you looked it up in a book.

Next time, look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that’s how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, OK? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.  (the rest is here)

Bush is still smiling gamely at this point, but his smile becomes more and more brittle until it falls off his face after a few moments.  Good sport and nice guy that I’ve often heard George W. Bush is, his politics aside, I’m pretty sure he shook Colbert’s hand at the end, told him he’d done a heck of a job.   But he clearly understood in pretty short order that he was being roasted by a merciless chef with a bullet-proof persona.  You can see that watching his reactions on the video.  My mother loved it.

I tried to get her to watch Colbert’s show a few times, but she never lasted through the opening, switching to an in progress re-run of NCIS, CSI or other murder mystery as I left, befuddled.   She loved murder mysteries, particularly NCIS.  Murder mysteries were increasingly all she read as she got older.  No less a mystery than any of these was her intense dislike of the brilliant Mr. Colbert.

One night I was going through a box of black and white family photographs.  I found a photo that made me feel like a great detective from one of her mysteries.   It was a shot of my uncle, my father’s younger brother, as a young man, dressed in a well-fitting suit.  It could have been a photograph of Stephen Colbert, in character as the rooster-like right-wing talk show host.   My mother strongly disliked my uncle.  She found him narcissistic, tyrannical, unreasonable, demanding and petty.   In  a word, Colbert’s character on the show.   She once desperately offered me a huge monetary bribe to spend a week in Florida when my uncle and aunt planned to visit her, after my father died.  She kept upping the dollar amount as I hesitated.

“Please,” she begged over the phone, “you can’t leave me alone with them!  For a week!  A week, Elie!  There will be bloodshed.”  

I rushed into her room with the photograph of my uncle.

“Is this why you hate Colbert?” I asked, handing her the photo.  

“Oh, my God,” she said, staring at the picture, “oh, my God!”  And then she began to laugh.  Another mystery satisfyingly solved.

 

Draft two is here, complete with a couple of moronic editorial improvements.

Epilogue to Childhood Memory

The ideologically driven filmmakers of “Let My People Go” (see previous post) certainly made their point to an eight year-old viewer, at least until the moment he was forced to make a dash to vomit.  In the fifty years since that visceral moment, history, like freedom, has been on the march.  

There were several wars in those years between the Jewish State and its neighbors including a decisive one, in 1967, when the virtually indefensible 1948 borders of Israel were expanded to include the buffers of the Occupied Territories of Gaza, the Golan Heights, the West Bank and Sinai.   Since that time, various Israeli governments have put permanent, strategically placed settlements in some of those territories.  There has been a shit-storm of controversy, with violent fanatics on both sides having way too much say over the outcome.  No doubt, given the choice, most people on each side would prefer peace to endless war.  The tragedy is that the voices of modest, decent people are rarely as loud and persuasive as the voices of violent haters ready to kill, everybody and anybody.  Take no chances, don’t trust their words, kill them!  Make them pay!

Intellectual understanding only goes so far.  I can understand why powerless people living in hopeless camps for generations, subjected to curfews, checkpoints, searches, rough treatment, detention, torture, would feel desperate enough to resort to and celebrate violence.  I can understand why peaceful citizens on the other side would demand curfews, checkpoints and heavy-handed tactics in order to avoid being killed by people desperate enough to blow themselves up.   Like I say, understanding with the mind only goes so far.   Certain things, in the word of one peace-loving Israeli I once knew, are un-understandable.  

In hindsight, as they say, many things snap into the old 20/20 focus.  If you think of a handful of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, determined to take some Nazis with them to hell as the Nazis were ‘liquidating’ the ghetto, you have a clue how this rear-view moral vision works.

There is no real choosing which was worse, the killing of millions during the Middle Passage over the course of three centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, or the killing of millions during a frenzied three or four year industrialized killing machine fueled by German ingenuity and efficiency.   I could not say, generations later, that either atrocity gives anyone a right to kill anyone else over it.

I’ve got no answer, propose no equivalencies, no justifications, nada.  It’s a horrible situation over there in Palestine/Israel, Israel/Palestine, as in many parts of the world, many of them in the immediate neighborhood.  Violence and brutality are always passionately justified by the practitioners.   History shows that the violent and brutal often carry the day while voices of reason usually get their brains blown out if they speak clearly enough and get enough attention.   I’d like to believe that in the long run human decency and our eternal longing for peace win out, but, looking around, I realize I may be with Anne Frank there, and Jesus, and right before he got shot, the Gandhi I was cursing just the other day.

Childhood Memory (flashback to 1963 or 1964)

My mother, seeking to protect her sensitive, fearful oldest child, urged me not to see the movie scheduled for the hotel ballroom that evening, “Let My People Go”.   I knew nothing about the film, except that all the teenagers at the convention would be seeing it.  I was seven or eight, and curious, and I wanted to see the movie, which was the only thing to do that evening anyway.

“You’re too young to see these things,” my mother told me tensely, “when you had nightmares about Tarzan I could show you pictures of the actors, assure you it wasn’t real.”   Which was true, she’d gone to the library and found books that proved her case.  After her photographic proof that the actors who played the savage cannibals wore regular clothes, drove cars, laughed, played with their own kids, spoke English, the nightmares in which my mother, like Jane, was struck down by a cannibal’s hurled spear, stopped.  

That strategy had also worked a few years earlier when terror of another flood like in the time of Noah, vividly depicted by a children’s book illustrator with an Italian name my mother always recited in connection with this story — ah!  Tony Palazzo!– kept me awake at night.   She drove me past rows of houses on the beach and my fear succumbed to Reason.  

“But these things in the movie really happened, and not that long ago, and they were horrible, and I don’t think you’re ready to see them.”   And she was right, but having been told many times by my childish, blustering father that I was not too young to start acting like a man, goddamn it, I was determined to see the move come hell, high-water or spear throwing cannibals.

The movie started innocuously enough, woodcuts and old paintings, mosaics, pictures of ruins, a narrator detailing the ‘lachrymose history’, as I’d later come to know it, of the tireless persecution of the Jews.  There were the pyramids, built by Hebrew slaves, a familiar story to me, nothing shocking there.  The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians, not a trauma to me, I thought smugly to myself.  The subsequent exile, I was young to grasp how traumatic this might have been.  The Romans destroyed the rebuilt temple, OK, that’s a shame, but I didn’t like going to temple anyway.  

The movie was clearly building to something, I was not too young to miss the terrible foreshadowing as the persecution and exile of ancient times became a steadily heavier drumbeat.  Now some crude depictions of Jews put to the sword during the rise of warlike Islam, pretty bad, but just drawings.  In Christian Europe, meanwhile, the Dark Ages had descended, harsh, brutal lives lived under the pall of monkish ignorance and superstition, and the Jews to blame.  By the Middle Ages the Jews were entrenched in collective Christian consciousness as the crucifiers of Jesus Christ, the son of God and the Christian Messiah.   That we were blamed for killing the Messiah came as a shock to me, I’d always thought the Messiah hadn’t come to earth yet, that once the Messiah arrived the hearts of children would be returned to their parents, forgiveness would be universal and there would be no further violence or cruelty, no death.

The torturers and hooded Klansmen of the Spanish Inquisition stood out to me, the auto de fe, trial by being burned to death, was truly horrible.  Things quickly escalated from there, pogroms, the music got more tense, and soon there were some black and white photographs.  In Russia, blood libels against Jews, claims that Jewish monsters killed Christian children to make matzoh on Passover.  This made no sense to me, even an idiot knew that matzoh was basically flour and water, where did the dead Christian child come into it?  A photograph of a grim French military man, falsely accused of treason against France and executed, though everyone in France, and everywhere else, knew he’d been set up because he was Jewish.  Theodore Herzl’s photograph, with that beard practically begging to be carved in marble, the dream of a Jewish State and now the filmmakers kicked into high gear.  This is what they’d been building up to.

Centuries of persecution of a small, decent people, driven from their homeland, vilified and hated everywhere they settled, expelled from Spain and every place else, murdered with impunity– there was only one solution: a return to our homeland.  This would not be without struggle, in part because those on the land that would be our homeland considered it their homeland, not ours.  Deals were made, land bought, proposals made, unmade, snags hit, navigated, more snags.  Nobody, it was clear by now, was in any hurry to help the Jews.  

Meanwhile, more killing of Jews in Europe, persecutions in the Arab lands.   Suddenly, oh boy, there’s a familiar Jew hater– Adolf Hitler.  I had a feeling he’d show up in this shit show.  There he is, dancing a mad jig after the fall of Poland.  Turns out this ‘jig’ was the creation of Allied propagandists using a technique I myself would use decades later, repeating a sequence of frames over and over and speeding them up to achieve a desired effect.  These propagandists took a one second sequence of Hitler laughing and stamping his jackbooted foot and repeated it enough times to create a convincingly mad, cackling dance.  I knew nothing about this trickery, an insignificant detail in context, as I watched in rising horror.  

The violins on the soundtrack began weeping more emphatically.  Then, as I looked around me at crying teen-aged faces in heavy cigarette smoke, there was the footage, shot by the Nazis themselves, of exactly what my mother had cried to try to stop me from seeing.  A terrified boy my age with his hands up, savage beatings, Jewish corpses lying on the sidewalk.  This was terrifying imagery.  Then there was the guy with the wheelbarrow, on grainy black and white film, moving resolutely forward.  The giant wheelbarrow was filled with jiggly, rubber looking skeletons.  He was wearing a cap and smoking a cigarette.  He came to the edge of a huge pit, upended the wheel barrow and dropped the corpses down a chute.  They wriggled down the ramp, landed on top of hundreds more naked dead skeletons.  

I ran up the aisle through the crying audience, got to the elevator, to the room, saw my little sister’s shocked face as I burst into the room and, a second later, projectile vomited.  My mother hugged me, crying, and said “I told you….”

Feeling Powerless?

Don’t worry, there are hard-working, brilliant idealists at work standing up for you.

A few years ago the commonly cited number was 45,000 Americans a year dying deaths that could have been prevented had their illnesses been detected before the fatal stage that brought them to an Emergency Room.   My father, though he retired with excellent medical insurance and was on Medicare, though he saw an endocrinologist, hematologist and cardiologist regularly the last two years of his life, as his energy and life force deteriorated, was first diagnosed with liver cancer by an ER doctor, six days before he died.  

My father’s case was, hopefully, unusual in a nation with the most advanced medical technology in the world.  Most of the 45,000 annual American deaths that could have been prevented by earlier intervention (a few seconds of diligent google research shows this recalled number is a fraction of annual preventable American deaths) were died by poor people, people without health insurance, people too frightened, by disease and the specters of unaffordable expense, bankruptcy and pre-existing conditions, to see doctors.  Many who died needlessly probably had serious warning signs they should have heeded.    

In part to address this intolerable death toll in our extremely wealthy nation, in part to rein in the runaway cost increases of the most expensive medical care in the world, President Obama passed the landmark compromise medical insurance bill that bears his name.   I haven’t seen the statistics since Obamacare went into effect, but I’ll guess that the number of annual preventable American deaths has come way down, maybe by as much as a third.  

Progress on an institutional level is at best incremental and the perfect must not become the enemy of the good the president, a man with millions of determined enemies, reminds us.   Malcolm X, in his posthumous autobiography, remarked that sticking a knife ten inches into someone and pulling it out six inches is also considered progress.  But tell that to the guy with the knife stuck into his body.    

The unregulated inflation of the world’s most lucrative medical insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and obscene loopholes like ineligibility for insurance coverage at any price for people with “pre-existing” medical conditions, screamed for regulation.  Obama’s team, headed by medical industry insider Liz Fowler, working for industry financed former Senator Max Baucus (now Ambassador to China), struck a compromise — price increases for medical insurance would be regulated, American health care would become more outcome and prevention-based, there would be no more exclusions for ‘pre-existing conditions’, industry-wide cost saving measures would be introduced over time.  

The private insurance industry got something in return for giving up all this power and potentially some of its profit.  Americans of sufficient means would be mandated to buy private insurance or pay penalties for not buying it.  

Medicaid eligibility would be extended under Obamacare.  Although millions of Americans would remain uninsured, millions who’d been previously unable to afford health insurance could now purchase and even, in most cases, afford it, under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  

Somehow, along with the industry consenting to be regulated, forced to justify regular, generous increases in insurance premiums, paying out for sick people whose conditions pre-existed their purchase of medical insurance, the law provides that patients have no right to be informed of actual costs prior to any medical visits or treatments.  I kid you not.  

You make an appointment to see a physician’s assistant about a stomach ailment.  Nobody anywhere, not at the company you pay your premium to, not at the doctor’s office, can tell you in advance what that twenty minute visit will cost.  

“We have to wait until the doctor’s office bills us, there’s no way to tell you in advance,” the insurance company will say.  

“We have to be told by the insurance company what the price will be,” the doctor’s office will tell you, “the insurance company sets the price, then we are allowed to bill you.”  

Then, since all plans in your income range might be high deductible plans, you will have to pay the entire cost, whatever it might be, “out of pocket”.   That’s the law.  There is what’s fair and there is law, and the two are, regrettably, not always the same.  

If you went to a store where there were no prices on the items, where no sales person could tell you a price until after you signed a blank credit card statement to buy something, with no chance for return or refund, you would not shop in that store.   Picture a restaurant with no prices on the menu, smiling waiters assuring you that everything was delicious and not to worry, the prices were as low as possible for such amazing food.  

Assume the dinner was fine, or even if it wasn’t, here comes the friendly waiter with your check.  Dinner for two without wine: $507, coincidentally the same as my bill for seeing that physician’s assistant who was so clueless and unhelpful.  The manager is not able to hear an appeal or make any changes to the price.  The owner will not speak to customers under any circumstances, and he’s not in, anyway.  If you try not to pay there is a policeman at the door to inform you lawyers will be called to garnish your wages, and make the collection.   Don’t believe it?  Wait a few weeks, the lawyer’s letter will be in your mailbox informing you of your obligation to pay a legal debt.  

In fairness, and it’s always important to be fair, the $507 total for my visit with the physician’s assistant turned out to have been billed in error.  My next set of bills, which I confirmed the accuracy of with my insurance company, informed me I should have only been charged $457.   And much of that was my own fault.  I’d agreed with the nurse that it was reasonable to do a blood test, to rule out something serious our internet research hadn’t suggested.   The price of the blood test I had to pay was $327, discounted by my insurance company from the sticker price of $642.  Instead of being grateful for the almost 50% discount, here I am bitching and moaning.   Just goes to show, some people are never fucking happy. 

But, if you will excuse me, I have to figure out who else to call to find out how to avoid a similar expense to have a dermatological body scan done by a physician’s assistant I was misinformed yesterday is a doctor.  My concern is not only the cost of the visit and exam, but if anything has to be sent to the lab, that can add from $179 ( to sky’s the limit)  to my out-of-pocket expense, in a addition to $131 for the required pre-procedure office visit, as in the case of my 100% covered preventive care colonoscopy a year back.