Now Good Americans are actually happy about the deaths of Bad Americans during a plague

I don’t consider myself a particularly evil person.  I get angry, for example when I’m overpowered by somebody who grabs my arm and keeps slapping me hard in the face with my own hand, asking solicitously why I keep hitting myself.   I may have a lower threshold for being bullied than a more highly evolved earthling, but I do my best to remain as mild as I can, under circumstances that sometimes make mildness seem a very unappealing option.    Anger is a good warning system, it seems to me, not to give in the urging of righteous, enflamed feelings and do something outright evil.  And yet…

The other day I saw a piece quoting the evangelical minister of a mega-church, telling his flock, in a packed church, at a time when more reasonable people were “social distancing” all over the world, that faith protected him from COVID-19, that the Lord would protect all the faithful.  He added a nice underscore to the effect that AND YOU CAN TAKE THAT TO THE BANK, PRAISE GOD!   A couple of weeks later this man of God was dead of COVID-19.   It immediately struck me as a rare instance of justice, a wonderful “good for you” joke on a pompous, influential, ignorant jackass.   I posted the short news item here.  

So a fellow citizen, as opinionated as any of us have an absolute right to be, died a horrible death in ironic circumstances and I took in his death only as a great punchline.   Never thought about it any other way.

Served the ignorant snake-oil selling motherfucker right, was my only thought as I posted it here, thinking myself wry, for the few and the misguided to read.   Good joke, no?   “God loves and protects righteous people like me, this so-called virus is God’s message to the accursed non-believers, ignore what these people of no faith are telling you… oh, shit, I … I … can’t breathe…. what in Lord’s name?   Ahhh, get me… to … the h-h-hospital…” 

Is it really funny?  Yes, and definitely also not funny at all.  Is it funny to laugh about a death sentence someone got just for being a fool or a blowhard?   Laughing about it reminded me of what I read years ago about the officially approved humor of the Third Reich, at a time when other humor was increasingly punishable by death [1].   Nazis were not without humor, many of them loved to laugh.  What made them laugh?   A good, spicy Jew joke was surely a winner at the old brauhaus. A joke about Hitler being a little nuts?  The weakest penalty for that was referred to as the “Hitler Cut”– castration.

Hoo, boy, right away, a bee line to that dark place with the Nazis…

Am I saying it’s wrong to laugh when a bully of some kind, while berating you and brandishing a club to beat you with, slips on a banana peel and lands wrong, cracking his skull and spilling his brains out on the sidewalk?   Of course not.  I’m just saying… what have we come to as a species when we “wise apes” celebrate the actual deaths of people who espouse views repugnant to our own?     Put the shoe on the other foot, picture a death sentence for someone you agree with for expressing what you both believe, it’s easy to see the sickness of it.    

Hypocrisy is not a crime, though, in the absence of all other sports and most entertainments during this plague,  it’s become something of our national pastime here in our gruesomely divided states of America.

 

[1] Richard Grunberger had a chapter on Nazi humor, if I recall correctly, in his The Twelve Year Reich, A Social History of Nazi Germany 1933-45.  

About the tome, from Jeff Bezos’s ad:

“In chilling detail, this social history brilliantly demonstrates the awesome power of a brutal government to corrode the human spirit.”–Wall Street Journal
 
“Invaluable for every student of the Nazi era.”–New York Times Book Review
The 12-Year Reich, the first comprehensive social study of the Third Reich, shows what the Nazi regime proffered as the “ideal” society and how the German people responded. Along with the violence, corruption, persecution, public extravaganzas, the ever-present Party, and the cult of the Fuhrer, a ghastly imitation of ordinary life went on.
How did people talk during the Third Reich? What films could they see? What political jokes did they tell? Did Nazi ranting about the role of women (no make-up, smoking, or dieting) correspond with reality? What was the effect of the regime on family life (where fathers were encouraged to inform on sons, and children on parents)? When the country embraced National Socialism in 1933, how did that acceptance impact the churches, the civil service, farmers, housewives, businessmen, health care, sports, education, “justice,” the army, the arts, and the Jews? Using examples that range from the horrifying to the absurd, Grunberger captures vividly the nightmarish texture of the times and reveals how Nazis effectively permeated the everyday lives of German citizens. The result is a brilliant, terrifying glimpse of the people who dwelt along the edges of an abyss-often disappearing into it.

A Vision of Heaven

As a child I had a picture of heaven as a place of eternal peace.   I’m sure this came from my father, who, though angry and embattled while he was on this earth with the rest of us,  is living in such a place now.   My child’s image of heaven was of old enemies meeting on a cloud, embracing and laughing off their old, earthbound enmity.  Their old reasons for hating each other now delicious jokes to be shared and laughed about together in the ever-after.

I was reminded of this today, when I had a wake up call from Elaine at Healthfirst, the health insurance company that has done so much to impersonally fuck me over lately.  Apparently my DFS complaint, which I had attempted to revoke by email on Tuesday, had been quickly assigned to an investigator who contacted Healthfirst.  Good to know that process still works so quickly, anyway.

The last time Elaine and I spoke, things had not gone well.  I had asked her pointedly several times if she was drunk.  I eventually hung up on her after one too many incoherent, drunk-sounding answers from the Resolution Specialist.  That was back on March 7, I think, the last, and ugliest, of several long conversations we had.

She began our conversation cautiously, as you might imagine.   I immediately informed her that I’d contacted DFS to retract the complaint (I believed I had finally successfully done that last night on their website).   I told her that this time Healthfirst was not to blame for the termination of my health insurance.   I told her I wished Healthfirst had contacted me on March 11, when they were informed that they needed to terminate my insurance effective March 31. I could have prevented the cancellation of my health insurance if I’d had a heads up from them in time to stay insured.

She explained that the March 11 notice Healthfirst got contained the same claim my on-line, inbox-posted version had — that I’d received two notices to remedy my easily fixable error, one the day after I re-enrolled and the March 11 notice I was never notified of.   Healthfirst was in the same boat as I was, it seemed.   No other notice had been sent to anyone, I never got the March 11 notice in any form, until after my insurance was terminated and it was too late to do anything about it.  Unlike Healthfirst, only I had had my health insurance interrupted for a month during a plague, but that wasn’t Healthfirst’s fault.  

The odd thing is how gentle our conversation was.  I had no animus toward poor Elaine, a native Russian speaker doing her best in a difficult language.   Her promised written summaries had been the best she could do, subject to redactions from “regulatory”, I grasped that now.   It was not her fault that NYS does not provide consumers with the laws that protect them from, for example, termination of health insurance without notice.  

“Did you call the New York State of Health?” Elaine asked sympathetically.  I explained to her that on a good day one cannot easily get through on the phone, during the pandemic wait times are much longer.  The reps one eventually speaks to there are as limited in their knowledge and their power to help as the ones at Healthfirst, they cannot see the entire picture or explain difficult things that are difficult, or even impossible, to explain.  She seemed to understand this.   I told her I’d found and fixed the mistake easily on-line.  If only I’d had notice to do it sooner!

Thinking about the surprisingly pleasant call afterwards (she’d been palpably relived to get no fight from me), and how we wished each other well, and spoke for the first time without defensiveness or anger on either side, two humans in very similar little boats, I was reminded of my childish view of heaven.   From the minds of children…

 

Inner Dialogue, Pandemic installment #1

I used to have frequent conversations with the skeleton of my long-dead father.  I did this for about two years, almost every day, sitting at the computer, taking dictation to the steady beat of my tapping fingers, thumb adding off-beats on the space bar.  Once in a while I read one of these chats, often out of curiosity after I see someone has clicked on one (as somebody did yesterday) and realize I miss talking to my witty lifelong enemy, now that he is dead and full of self-knowledge and empathy.

“Who are you talking to, motherfucker?”  

You’re a droll one, doll-face.  You know goddamned well who I’m talking to.  I’m having what you might call an inner dialogue, something that becomes necessary from time to time to straighten out my unruly thoughts, if you know what I’m saying.  

“Talking to yourself…”    

I’m going to ignore these interruptions.   The nagging, niggling voice of the reflexive interrupter is not something to be interrupted by, if you seek clarity of any kind.  

“If you say so, Chief.”  

You can be 100% correct in your analysis, based on specific past experience and outside knowledge, your overall analysis can be dead on, and you can still, in an individual case, be wrong.  For example, you can be dealing with an inhuman bureaucracy, bent on saving money by cutting the eligibility of anyone it can, in a system brutally skewed toward protecting the privileges of the privileged; that bureaucracy can have twice or more arbitrarily fucked you, in excruciating detail, for reasons they later reverse — and in “the instant case”, as we are taught to say by law professors,  you may have simply been fucked by your own inaction or error, the inhuman bureaucracy in that particular case virtually, or at least legally, blameless.

“Seriously, man, who are you talking to?”

That is a disgusting and fake question.  You have a sickening smell.   You’re a disgraceful excuse for an interrupter!  

“Apologies, SIR!”  

As you were.  Now men, it is very important, and I say this to you as a role model and the steward of your morality, that you not be confused by these competing truths.   Both things can be true at the same time, even if one is more true at the moment than the other.  Do not doubt your essential analytical skills because you find yourself mistaken in one instance.   Yes, the enemy is brutal and sneaky.   Yes, sometimes you fall asleep at your post with your hand on your dick, mouth open, vulnerable to even the kindest, most considerate attack.  

“Sir, yes Sir!”

The exploitation of your vulnerability, even if done by the enemy in the most considerate possible way AT THAT TIME, does not mean that at any other time your ruthless enemy will not revert to character, not revert to the supremely inconsiderate beast it also is.  

Your faith in your fact-based analysis, men, should be as clear to you as a glass of pure water.  Be the water, not the glass.

“Bruce Lee, Jeet Kun Do, the Way of the Intercepting Fist.”  

Just so.

You can live on a low income, by choice, and not really be entitled to call yourself low-income, though why you would want to do that  is another question entirely.  You can be protected by someone who loves you, who has the means to protect you financially from the worst, and still be vulnerable to the same institutional cruelties that routinely kill many other people in your situation.   

Be self-effacing at your own risk, men.  Remember, the boy who cries “poison gas!” in a coal mine filled with odorless gas will still be killed by the poison gas he can’t smell.

It’s may be easy to view someone you feel has not worked as hard as you, at least not for pay, as a whiner complaining about the brand new rope being used to hang him.  

To consider me a pampered stuck pig screaming in pain from a self-inflicted wound I imagine is another of the thousand cuts freely given to anybody who speaks up, or stays silent, howling at unbearable, over-amped length, tediously advertising myself as the most learned and righteous of victims, giving pompous, imagined voice to the other, voiceless, real victims, is to paint only a corner of the larger picture.  I am also, potentially, with the right marinade and glaze, and slow-cooked to a turn, a very tasty rack of ribs.

“Sir, yes SIR!  Oh, yum! SIR!”

 

 

 

Seth nails the description

Marvelously descriptive opening:

“… threatening to make the same mistakes he made at the start of this crisis… when Donald Trump was elected in 2016 this was exactly the kind of nightmare scenario everyone was afraid of, what would happen in a global crisis if the most powerful man in the world was a racist game show host who’s failed at virtually everything in his life except for pretending to be a successful businessman on TV.   And he’s not even good at pretending, look at him pretending to be president — he just stares directly into the camera and can’t even be bothered to put some fake documents on his desk…”

 

 This British wit does  the full Monty Python job on America’s Greatest Winner, holy cow.  Bear in mind, though, only about 60% of Americans would agree with either of these “funny” guys.

The Boy Who Cried “Poison Gas in the Coal Mine!”

Things are bad right now, we all know it.  If it was only this relentless pathogen we were up against, we’d be up against it.   Of course, it’s much worse than that.  The inhabitable earth, our natural world, is also in immediate and irreparable jeopardy, as demagogic strong men around the world ignore the approaching catastrophe, appealing to unifying ethnic and racial hatreds instead.

My mother, when I was a hyperbolic young boy (I got that poetic trait from her) used to warn me about being The Boy Who Cried Wolf.  She told me the story of the scaredy-cat shepherd boy who would yell “WOLF!” whenever he was scared.  The men from the village would come running with axes.  After a while the village just started ignoring his cries and, of course, one night, real wolves came and ate him and all of the sheep.

Then there is Kurt Vonnegut’s “canary in the coal mine,” a bird that (in human form) can also cry wolf, I suppose.    Vonnegut said that artistic types, being more attuned to and easily distracted by odd smells than most people, were society’s canaries in the coal mine. Miners used to carry these small birds into the mine shafts in cages.   The birds have tiny lungs, which would quickly fill with any odorless poisonous gas the miners might have accidentally tapped into.   When the canary fell off its perch, dead, it was time for the miners to quickly get out of the mine.   Writers and sensitive types, according to Vonnegut, serve this same warning purpose for society at large.

I felt like one of these tiny-lunged bastards the last few days, not that I am a writer or a sensitive type, officially.   If I hadn’t had the call from the doctor, I’d have never learned my health insurance had been cancelled weeks earlier.   Apparently no law requires more than… nothing.   Once my immediate problem (no health insurance during a pandemic) was solved, I found I could breathe again.  I now only need to hold my breath until May 1, assuming no other hidden hassle lies in wait for me.

AND I AM ONE OF THE VERY LUCKY ONES.  I know this very well.   My feet never touch the ground, I am carried gently from place to place and set down carefully on soft, clean pillows.   I am loved and cared for, like a beloved pet.   I realize this and am very thankful for it.   I don’t know why I keep thinking about the millions and millions who are perpetually doomed to unthinkably grim fates.  

What about those millions of Americans who lost jobs recently — along with employer-based health insurance —  with no chance for affordable health insurance during a public health emergency?   Some, with savings,  can rely on the expensive, aptly named COBRA, but, seriously, your best hope for comfort, while unemployed in America during a world-wide plague, is COBRA?

The chaotic federal administration’s bungled response to this massive public health crisis illustrates the need for strong laws to protect programs that protect lives.   The human right to health care, for example, because it’s a human right, should be guaranteed by the government of the richest nation in human history to all of its citizens, so that none need fear death due to insufficient income.   And so forth.  

Instead, taking this crisis in the sense of the Chinese ideogram that also, famously (and probably falsely) means “opportunity,” long-sought radical right-wing programs that benefit the very wealthiest and most unprincipled are jammed through the moment the time is right — while we are all in terror for our lives.  No need for the EPA regulations, fuck Nixon and the Commie horse he rode in on! Protecting the “environment” like a bunch of tree hugging pansies!  Drop dead, job killers!   And so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo-yeah.

Being summarily thrown off health insurance, particularly during a plague, is objectively terrifying and infuriating.  It should not happen to anyone.   Odd to say, my overheated, anguished screams of the last few days, before I heeded sensible advice and checked the website of the public agency that provides my health insurance, are as alien to me now as the last chirp of countless dead canaries who, having served, are forgotten, as all flesh must eventually be.   I feel a bit abashed to have been the canary boy who cried “DEATH!!!” during the plague when it was his own easily fixable error (even if he got no reminder to fix it) that tried to come back and kill him.  What a cry baby!

 

retracting DFS complaint number CSB-2020-01351366

As I emailed the New York State Department of Financial Services earlier today:
I have been unable (last night and so far today) to log into the DFS portal where I submitted this complaint yesterday.   I was told to email your agency here.
I withdraw complaint CSB-2020-01351366.  Healthfirst had nothing to do with this termination of my ACA health insurance.   They might have informed me of the impending loss of my insurance, which they knew of for three weeks before it was terminated, although they likely had no legal duty to do so and every business reason not to.   My complaint should not go to Healthfirst.
 
My insurance was terminated by the NYSOH, for my own oversight, which remained uncorrected for lack of effective notice of the mistake by NYSOH.  I have since been able to correct this oversight and my insurance will be restored effective 5/1/20.  
Please terminate this complaint.  

Low-Income Funnies, Pandemic Edition

Because I get my low-cost health insurance through Obamacare, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), I am required to re-enroll every year.  I do this, along with every other low-income New Yorker without employer-based insurance, during the relaxing weeks just before Thanksgiving to just before Christmas.   The ACA is administered in New York State by an overwhelmed agency called the New York State of Health Marketplace.  ACA health coverage is, as we learn, an easy-come easy-go form of health insurance.

The “entitlements” our government generously extends to people of low income are precious, sometimes matters of life or death.   Oddly, such benefits can be instantly clawed back with little or no notice to those who benefit from the programs, if the poor sucker makes a simple but inexcusable mistake.  I used to see this all the time when I represented some of the poorest and most desperate New York City tenants, most of whom I was able to save from homelessness.  

A wheelchair-bound double amputee got a late notice of a “face to face” meeting she was required to attend to keep her housing voucher intact.  She was unable to schedule Access-A-Ride on one day’s notice.  I spent over a year, thirteen times in Brooklyn Housing Court, trying (and in the end succeeding) to restore her housing benefits and prevent her eviction.  The government’s attitude was that this lazy bitch should have found a way to be at that meeting if she wanted continued assistance paying her rent.

So it was for me, years later, that the New York State of Health decided that the fatal December 6 mistake in my 2020 application had gone unaddressed for long enough.  On Good Friday (I’ve had better Fridays) I was informed that my health insurance had been cancelled on March 31, 2020.  I had no notice of the cancellation until I tried to use my insurance again in April.  

From a legal point of view, it is debatable whether I had notice from NYSOH before they terminated my health insurance.   I had the scantest fig leaf of legal notice of my original oversight and what action I needed to take to correct it; two letters in the inbox of New York State of Health’s website, a place otherwise uninsured New Yorkers visit once a year when we are forced to log in to reapply.  

True I had no emails from NYSOH telling me to check the inbox on their website on pain of losing my health insurance during a pandemic (I had several emailed ads for the handy new NYSOH phone app during this time), or any notice by regular mail (as their web-posted letters claimed I’d had) but NYSOH inserted both long, detailed legal warning letters right there in my on-line inbox, on December 7 and March 11, to be used as conclusive proof of notice in the event of a lawsuit by the disgruntled former recipient of government-subsidized health insurance.

I finally learned of my easily fixable mistake, after 74 hours of life-shortening stress and anger, while talking about my legal options with an old friend from law school (an online Article 78 to challenge the arbitrary and capricious cancellation of my insurance without reason given, or notice). Once I discovered it (tip of the hat to you, Jon) it was a matter of about 20 minutes on-line to fix my December 6 omission, re-apply and have my health insurance restored effective May 1, 2020.  [1]

My December 6 omission, by the way, was failing to include proof of income I didn’t receive until several weeks later.  My insurance was, I was informed in the first of these on-line letters I didn’t see, conditional, its continuance beyond March 31 depended on me fixing this mistake before that date, and I simply, willfully, refused to comply with the part of the law I’d forgotten about this time.

If I’d had actual notice of the problem, on the date of their second notice, I could have easily updated my application, fixed the fatal problem in March and avoided any interruption in my health insurance coverage.  

You have to admit, it’s funny as plague-infected shit, in a certain sick and deadly way.  May you and your loved ones never know from such hilarity.   God bless the child that’s got his own and God bless these United Shayyyysssssh.   

 

[1] Fortunately I discovered what I needed to do and re-applied before April 15.  If I’d re-enrolled after the 15th, my insurance would not start until June 1.

Mass death helps the right-wing anti-government crusade, y’all

Graph from yesterday’s New York Times:

Screen shot 2020-04-14 at 2.04.54 PM.png

The graph speaks eloquently for itself.  Two nations are hit, on the same day, by the same pandemic.    In a nation whose federal government is led by a party that believes government is the enemy of freedom, the results are fairly predictable, a radically multiplying death count.

Total deaths in South Korea, where prompt govenrment response flattened the curve effectively:  about 220.   America, no longer a laughingstock, is number one in the world in coronavirus deaths at (as of 4/13/20) 22,000 and climbing.  source

Those of us who want to survive this plague are up against two formidable enemies: a highly infectious virus and a racist, right-wing political movement dedicated to the concentration and protection of vast wealth for the few.  

That the poor are disproportionately dying in this pandemic is a great boon for these Nazi-admiring patriots.  “Fewer votes we need to suppress!   If all these angry fuckers survived, and managed to vote, our people would be voted out instantly.   Fortunately, that won’t happen, because we live in the greatest nation Jesus Christ ever created.   USA!   USA!!!”

Education and Clarity of Language might not help you

Yesterday’s attempt at an Op Ed for the Grey Lady ended with this now deleted paragraph about the seeming impossibility of getting my improperly terminated health insurance back during a raging plague.  Observe the plangent notes of heroic  self-pity:

So I am left to accept my punishment and practice mindfulness.  I sit here lowering my blood pressure, and my heart rate, by thinking of the miracle of communication — how I can sit and convey these deeply fearful things to a stranger, merely by arranging the words properly on a page.  I hope someone will remember I did this when they are lowering my body into a mass grave.   My murdered ancestors would want no less for me.

Admittedly, useless — DELETE! — though I do still greatly appreciate the miracle of written communication, as far as it goes sometimes.  Nothing like writing the situation out clearly when you are in great trouble or danger.

Today I wrote this concise complaint to the NYS Department of Financial Services, the NYS agency that regulates all insurance, financial houses, hedge funds, banks, etc. in New York State,  My latest attempt to take a flying fuck at a rolling donut (though their on-line consumer complaint form immediately fixed a similar insurance termination without notice problem back in January):

I was informed Friday afternoon, when I called my insurer after being told by a doctor that my insurance came up “inactive,” that my Healthfirst health insurance, prepaid through June, had been cancelled, effective March 31 by the New York State of Health Marketplace. According to Healthfirst, no reason for this termination was given by NYSOH.

NYSOH, I was told, had sent Healthfirst notice of their intent to terminate my ACA insurance on March 11.  Neither Healthfirst nor NYSOH provided me any notice of this termination, not prior to the effective date nor since.

I am instructed to call NYSOH, an overwhelmed and unresponsive agency on a good day, where one hears this recording:

New York State of Health is experiencing high call volume.  Because of the public health emergency we are extending the due date for people who are expected to renew before April 15.   You will receive another notice of the new due date before any changes will be made to your coverage.   You do not need to take any action at this time.  

Also, because of a new federal law, no person who currently has Medicaid coverage will lose their coverage during this emergency.  If you are enrolled in Medicaid and get a notice from New York State of Health telling you that your coverage will end after March 18, 2020, you can disregard this notice.  You will have no gap in coverage.  If you have Medicaid you do not need to report any changes to your account except a permanent address change.

I have to assume that termination of prepaid health insurance without notice violates some NYS law, administrative rule or something, in addition to the due process protection of the US Constitution and the PPACA.  One searches for New York’s legal answer to this question in Titles 10 (Health) and 11 (Insurance) of the New York Codes, Rules and Regulations  in vain, there is no chapter on point. 

(I was wisely advised to follow my hunch and delete this line:  I am still waiting (since early February) to hear back from your office for a citation to the text of the controlling law.)

Can you help me get my improperly terminated insurance back during this worldwide plague? I’d be eternally grateful.

Alternatively, can you direct me to the nearest rolling donut?