I heard President Obama on the radio talking about education, and not about health care reform. Oh, Lord, not again!
My stomach has been acting up recently. The acid drips sickeningly and I'm slightly nauseous, diffident, depressed and off my feed. The lying sons-of-bitches have pulled it off again. I've seen the ads on TV, sponsored by big pharma, telling me to congratulate both my state's Democratic senators for the great job they've done selling out to the corporations. Everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, has been paid off to let this mockery of social justice transpire. The legislators sit on their hands and watch the health care reform effort die a slow, agonizing death. Then, they have the gall to act as if they have our best interests at heart and have not sold us out.
There is no lower bound to the incomprehensible, monumental stupidity of the lumpen proletariat. The ads on TV supplanting the usual infomercial fare state in no uncertain terms that good health care will kill you and is against God's law. Is anyone buying this crap? (To wit: Defeat Dangerous Health Care "Reform" Legislation!) Apparently, they are. The vile perpetrators of this scurrilous campaign wouldn't be so bold as to utter such lunacy if they lived in a country without a sizable segment of stark raving mad, drooling cretins who will believe absolutely anything you tell them as long as you drape yourself in the national colors and hold high the symbol of their religious sect. (Note the two juxtaposed motifs of the Coral Ridge logo.)
Am I being too harsh on our misguided brethren? I don't think so. We're dumb enough in the U.S.A. to let the evil, corporatist propaganda machine whip the idiot fringe into a frenzy and derail the establishment of an efficient, all-encompassing health care system. We're that stupid here, but elsewhere they most definitely are not. We have to cop to that, just as we had to cop to the sobering truth that we don't have the best health care in the world, and that, in fact, it's horrible, especially when you consider how much we spend on it. Reality is hard to swallow if you have been duped by mass delusion for your entire life.
What happens in a "normal" country when some jackass starts flapping his gums about health care and all that comes out of his mouth is atrocious lies? Recently, a Tory MP from Great Britain criticized their National Health Service, here, and on Fox News no less. (Idiots: NHS is the socialized medicine bureaucracy.) What happened? The leadership of his own party disavowed and censured him! Daniel Hannan rebuked by Conservative leadership for attacking British health care system The British Conservatives know that if they even say anything bad about the beloved NHS, the outraged electorate will turn their backs on them in the next election. Socialized medicine is a sacred cow there, even for the parsimonious, mean-spirited misanthropes who want to dismantle it. You don't badmouth the NHS, because, well, that means you must be, as the Brits say, "a bit off".
We obviously live in crazy opposite land. How else could some jug-eared Limey gets taken to the woodshed for spreading malicious lies about the British health care system on American television, but only in Britain? Why else would he think that he could get away with his assertions here, but not there? How else could American Faux News commentator Glenn Beck get his own show on cable TV, and a multi-million-dollar contract, for doing exactly the same thing? You can twist that objective reality around all you want, but it still leads to the same inescapable conclusion. We're stupid. The people who believe such drivel are fools. The people who allow slanderous lies to be used in what is supposed to be a serious, well-intentioned debate have been cowed by brazen, remorseless sociopaths into letting the discussion be hijacked by irresponsible hysteria. We put up with this silliness only because such frothing at the mouth by disingenuous vulgarians has crowded out rational thinking. Even the sensible news media organs, like PBS, have been bullied into letting slack-jawed, inbred genetic throwbacks have equal time to prattle on about the horrors of decent health care.
Actually, I seriously wonder if we have ever had any serious, cerebral, public discussions in this country. In my lifetime, it seems that the issue has always been dumbed down so that those on both sides did nothing but exchange broadsides of emotional hyperbole. That's all we seem to understand here.
Take civil rights. Those who resisted extending the full rights of citizenship to those with darker skin than their own had a patently absurd rationale. Whether they invoked spurious divine ordination, pseudo-scientific claptrap or execrable regional tradition, it was all malarkey. Not one coherent, intellectually tenable idea was ever presented in support of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. Still, these ignominious pipsqueaks were not bitch-slapped and told to shut up. Strom Thurmond could bolt the Democratic Party in 1948 to remain a segregationist and continue to represent South Carolina as a senator for several decades more. Why wasn't he removed from office and thrown into jail? Isn't it a crime to deny a human being his civil rights? Isn't it a serious enough crime to disqualify a person from holding public office?
Oh, wait. It wasn't then, but it is now. President Lyndon Johnson decided that the time had come for equal rights for all. He jammed the bill through Congress and signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It wasn't all that popular a thing to do at the time, even though it was, as we say now, a "no brainer". The rights were all there in the Constitution already, but there was no mechanism in place to ensure their universal application. More importantly, there had been no explicit penalty in law for denying civil rights to people before. We had to draft laws and deploy bureaucrats, lawyers and troops to guarantee that people would be treated decently, rather than being oppressed, subjugated and murdered. This would appear surreal and Kafkaesque anywhere else in the world, but here in crazy opposite land, it was necessary and made sense.
Reducing an issue to an emotional appeal was necessary, even for supporting basic civil rights. I remember how people who would state, in a matter-of-fact tone, that everyone should be treated equally, but such low-key, rational talk wasn't given much coverage in the news media. Reasonable, sane discourse doesn't carry much weight in crazy opposite land. To get noticed, you have to be a spell-binder, dramatic, charismatic or in some other way remarkable. We ignore talking heads on Sunday morning news shows who merely state facts and draw intelligent conclusions. It takes an audience of a million or so people on the Mall in Washington, D.C., and one of the greatest speeches ever made, delivered by a gifted speaker, for us to sit up and say, "He's right. Everyone should have the same rights."
Why does it take the spectacle of the march on Washington and Martin Luther King's oratory to make such a simple to point to us? Haven't we got enough sense to see the obvious? Don't we know how to weigh facts and do the right thing?
I don't think we do. Media efforts to sway public opinion toward universal civil rights tried everything and finally settled on what worked. The point was driven home best by dramas about how African-Americans were "just like us". Sidney Poitier had to play roles where he was a neurosurgeon who married a skinny white chick, or was an authoritative law enforcement officer, before it seemed reasonable for a black man to be either of those things. The white majority had to like black people before it was all right for "those people" to have the rights guaranteed to them by law. Being true or right isn't enough for Americans. We have to "feel it in our gut" before we accept anything.
Civil rights was the defining issue of the middle part of the 20th century. It's settled in public opinion now, at long last, so it's no longer an issue. Universal health care is the defining issue of the early 21st century. It's seen as an undisputed human right in every country in the world, except this one. Even where they don't have a public health system, it's always seen as something that everyone should have. Universal access to health care is not a controversial topic anywhere in the world except here, in crazy opposite land. Only here do we argue first about the cost and who should pay it. Only here do we not acknowledge that people should have basic health care.
The problem is that we are fundamentally anti-intellectual. Every once in a while, a U.S. President makes the mistake of showing a chart or a graph in a public address. The general reaction is always mockery, ridicule and a complete blocking out of the message. Americans are too stupid to absorb factual information. Worse yet, to know anything, to have command of facts, makes on a "nerd", and therefore undeserving of respect. Oh, no? If you don't think that's the case, think about how much mileage Republicans got out of denigrating President Obama's Harvard Law School education. Think about what it took to sway public opinion toward extending civil rights to all citizens in the 1960's and to ending an unjust, illegal war in the 1970's. Were those shifts accomplished by reasoned discourse? No, they were not. Popular sentiment changed because they started showing aluminum coffins with our young people's bodies inside. To sway public opinion, you've got to pull on the heart strings. That's just the way it is.
I've given up trying to convince irrational people using sober, reasoned discourse. Sending out broadsides of inflammatory vitriol seems to advance my assertions much better. And, those who agree with me take heart, rallying to the cause and cheering me on. It works much better than being nice, now, doesn't it?