Slippytoad has a wide range of interests. One of those is music.
I've played for 26 years now. I started by learning Beatles songs. I picked up the bass because the band I wanted to join had two guitar players already. Not long after that, someone handed me a Rush tape. I decided I pretty much had to be able to play like Geddy Lee, and spent 5-7 hours a day for the next two years doing just that. There isn't a lot I can't do with a bass.
If you listen to me play, I can be very picky about how I sound, and exactly what notes get put where, and how hard they are played, and just precisely which part of my finger I use to pluck, and precisely where on the string I do so. But I am not a perfectionist. I know people who are. And I've noticed that perfectionists have a hard time getting things accomplished. There's a reason.
This diary started as a reply to one of the "Kill the Bill" folks from the left. The bill isn't good enough, as we've heard ad nauseum, ad infinitum, ad absurdum. We should be pushing for a single-payer bill.
So, it's not perfect. We should kill it and start over, right? If we want it to be perfect, that is.
I record music. Recording is a daunting task because unlike live performance, your mistakes don't disappear into the wash of the reverb. They are painfully highlighted. With today's technology, even a dilletante like myself can create a very high-fidelity reproduction of my music. So you have to do it over, and over, and over again.
Years ago, before I started doing home recording, I read an interview with Joe Walsh about the process. He had a sidebar about how doing take after take after take of the same song would, after a point, not continuously produce better and better results. He said "it's not going to be better, it's just going to be different." So sitting there making myself sick to death of a song for the sake of a "perfect" take is actually not going to get me one. Rather, I'm going to waste hours and hours looking for something I can't get, and in the end not get it at all.
Another musician I admire, Kate Bush, is known to be a perfectionist. She's been writing and creating beautiful music since the late 1970's, but she's only done one tour. She had such a terrible problem dealing with the imperfections of a live show that she decided not to do it at all. Now to me, live performance of music is consummation of your intent as a composer. You can record all you like in a studio but it isn't a living piece of music until you shove it out onto the stage to quiver in the full light of day. So to me, Kate Bush is denying herself the completion of that circuit (and her fans of her talents) by letting her impossible-to-reach standards literally prevent her from doing the thing that she is on this earth to do. To me it's a tragic waste.
Which brings us to health care/insurance reform.
The bill before Congress right now is certainly not perfect. It could definitely be better. But there is an irresistable vice-grip of circumstances surrounding the bill that make it clear that this is the best bill we can get. In the short term it doesn't seem to help all that much, although the facts are clear that it will have an immediate impact. The teabaggers and insurance lobby wouldn't be trying to kill it if it was a meaningless bill.
But if we kill the bill, we will have nothing. The insurance lobby, right-wing nutjobs, and Village idiots will have won. Without their signature accomplishment to show to voters, Democrats will lose a lot of influence in the coming elections, and we will have to wait. Waiting scares me because the current system has started accelerating all of the trends that make it undesirable in the first place. Healthcare will eat itself in another few years, and it's a toss-up as to which out-of-control trend will kill it first, but on its way down the healthcare insurance industry will ALSO eat a significant chunk of America's economy. Recovering from that will be no picnic. I do not want to go through this shocking, reeling kind of recession again. I don't wish it on my fellow Americans, even the Douchebaggers, bless their blackened little racist hearts.
So if we insist on a perfect bill, we'll get no bill.
If we accept the bill that is before us now, we will establish two things: #1, we will redress the worst of the suffering among the uninsured. #2, we will establish for the first time EVER in America's history that health insurance SHOULD be regulated, and that health care is a RIGHT to which all citizens are entitled.
#1 is the short-term goal. #2 is for the service of the long-term goal. With #2 as a foothold, we can press for incremental reforms until we get either the Public Option, Single Payer, Medicare for All, or whatever it is that works.
But if we refuse to accept winning #2 because we aren't satisfied with #1, we will get neither our short-term goals, nor our long-term goals. Failing to deliver our party's signature legislation in the midterms after a truly transformational presidential election will rob our party of power. We will turn the megaphone of our national discourse over to the teabaggers, who are nothing more than useful idiots for the corporatocracy they claim to oppose. Ergo, we will remove the possibility of controlling the conversation, we will NOT establish that healthcare is a RIGHT, and we will be at the mercy of the teabaggers who will elect more Republican idiots into power, who will further shift America's political landscape to the right.
A perfectionist who is unwilling to accept small victories can never reach the goal. In fact, some perfectionists are so anal they can't even get onto the field.
So, that's in a nutshell why I support the current bill. In the ideal world, I would punitively strip all the health insurance companies of their assets, federalize them, federalize our hospitals and doctors' offices, federalize our medical schools and lower the financial cost of achieving a doctor's education by main force, and tell all those greedy ceo's to go fuck themselves sideways.
But that's unrealistic. The Democratic Party isn't that liberal. We don't have time to dick around trying to get to that perfect composition of the party because believe it or not folks, our politicians are expected to product results NOW, not when they have the perfect bill negotiated.
Much has been made of Dennis Kuchinich's recent grandstanding with his one vote in the House, and I just have to say that if Dennis had ever had anything to offer other than an unrealistic bill that was never going to go anywhere, he might have been able to actually involve himself in the conversation. But as it stands he's actually irrelevant because he offered NOTHING to the conversation. He had no power, no coalition, no compelling alternative.
When you have an alternative of a small victory, or refusing that victory, it's a fact that there is no third option. Refusing a small victory because it's not good enough is accepting defeat. We could re-run the last 18 months a dozen times and still not get a bill good enough for some folks. That is the definition of defeat.
I'll take one little victory, thanks. Especially since it's a victory that can be built on. A defeat cannot be built on, and letting this bill fail is a self-pwning act of defeat that we would only be able to gnaw on bitterly.