message from a pal of mine:
Here's a long rave from a good ole boy. Sometimes his folksiness gets a bit strained, but he's reaching toward an analysis that is way beyond ordinary liberal discourse. Most interesting is the passage below:
And being captives of spectacle and hyperbole, we friggin' love it. The idea of death panels plays to our childish attraction to the extreme and entertaining. Killing Grandma is far more entertaining to our imaginations than say, guaranteed access to chest screens and blood-pressure medicine. Two generations into this national infantilization, it's now the only national life we know -- the ideological spectacle made real.
To steal a page from Guy Debord, society has become ideology. We live in an anti-dialectical false consciousness, imposed at every moment on everyday life as spectacle. We are held in thrall.
Our faculty of ordinary encounter has been systematically broken down. In its place we now have our unique social hallucination. Never do we encounter anything directly, yet we get the illusion of encounter. This includes encounter with each other.
and:
Ideology has utterly triumphed. It has separated us from ourselves and built itself a home inside our consciousness, from whence it operates now as our reality. There is no going back, only forward.
He is using the term 'ideology' in a way familiar to fans of the Frankfurt School, as a pejorative that refers to social control. See 'A Dictionary of M.'s Thought,' edited by Bottomore, p. 247, for a brief definition. Also see 'The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,' by Jurgen Habermas, p. 118-130, for a discussion of Horkheimer and Adorno's use of the term 'ideology.' Bageant begins:
Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the health care fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the Internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress.
Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes.
There ain't any health care debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn't in ole Jim's impoverished purse.
The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of health care to human beings. It's simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need -- health care.
Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state's purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long that they've been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question: If insurance corporation profits are one-third of the cost of health care, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to health care providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all?
Answer: Because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. And nobody messes with the Wall Street Mob (as the bailout extortion money proved). Better (and worse) presidents have tried. Some made a genuine effort to push it through Congress. Others expressed the desire publicly, but after getting privately muscled by the health care industry, decided to back off from the idea. For instance:
Franklin Roosevelt wanted universal health care. Harry Truman wanted universal health care. Dwight Eisenhower wanted universal health care. Richard Nixon wanted universal health care. Lyndon Johnson wanted universal health care. Bill Clinton wanted -- well we can't definitely say because he made sure that if the issue blew up on him, which it did, Hillary would be left holding the turd. Is it any wonder that woman gets so snappy at the slightest provocation? First, getting left to hold the bag on health care, then the spots on that blue dress. So why did American liberals believe Barack Obama would bring home the health care bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land. It's a big neighborhood, a very special place where "Your vote is important" and "by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation."
Most of America lives in that neighborhood, even though they've never personally met. It's a place where the shrubbery and flowerbeds of such things as "values" and "hope" bloom. Hope that our desires coupled with the efforts of a good and decent president can affect "change." Evidently these voters never heard the old adage, "Hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one fills up first."
The slaughter of the innocents by the health care lobby has pretty much extinguished the political usefulness of the word hope. Nobody, especially Obama, uses it now.
The first on-stage scuffle of the Obama administration, government-assured health care, quickly settled down into the accustomed scenario of very rich and powerful people in expensive suits "finding middle ground," otherwise known as the status quo.
Single-payer health care soon became "a consumer government alternative to private insurance," and is now "a system of health cooperatives. Next comes "slightly better health insurance (but not medical services) than before, from the same insurance companies but at twice the price; don't worry though, we're increasing your tax load so you can afford it."
The televised screaming matches, having served their purpose, are over now. The presidency and the nation have settled back into the normalcy of the officially sanctioned state consciousness and its curious non-language, one modified and shaped daily by corporate and government symbiosis.
Over generations we've come to internalize this imagistic language, which is quite theatrical when heated up for public consumption and dully bureaucratic when attention is to be avoided. But always it is void of content and any sort of truth.
In the corporately managed theater state, it's not whether a thing is true that matters, but how it sounds and looks and what you call it. Call end-of-life counseling a "death panel," and you've just turned mercy and choice into one more Great Satan.
In the end though, health care American style comes down to the preferences of two elite castes, Congress and corporate powers, neither of which can exist without the other.
Corporations need the government to sanction their methods of extracting wealth from the public. Congress needs corporations to finance its campaign chariot races. Right now, members of Congress have an excellent chance of putting the arm on health care industry lobbyist for some real cash:
Sen. Smedley Heathwood: "Oh, I dunno, I'm sort of liking Obama's alternative."
Godzilla Health Care Inc.: "Here, take this suitcase full of gold bullion, call me if you run short. And remember, we've got that ‘Life is a pre-existing condition' bill coming up in the Senate soon."
Siamese twins, joined at the hip, they share the same goal, preservation of control -- the government's social control and the corporations' economic control. And you cannot have one without the other.
Obama got elected on hope of reform, despite that one cannot reform a mafia, only pay increased extortion moneys.
full:
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/142120/
Salud, Mike B) *********************************************************************** Hwahwa hahuna ndashanya. Beer has no regard for a visitor. http://wobblytimes.blogspot.com/
__________________________________________________________________________________ Find local businesses and services in your area with Yahoo!7 Local. Get started: http://local.yahoo.com.au