LUNACY & RESPECT: THE BECK CASE

I have to admit I am not accustomed to see raving lunacy on my telly. Extremes, yes; but insanity? However yesterday afternoon, at the appointed hour, there was Mister Glenn Beck, a misplaced Isaiah to Tea Party America, literally foaming at the mouth. While I am accustomed to his rant, as I am to the general Fox/Murdoch bias, I cannot recall ever having seen such extreme, frothing-at-the-mouth disrespect of an American president.

There, behind the president, was Mr. Obama himself, explaining his policy on the stimulus package; nearer us, was Beck, his head obscuring the president -- at whom he gesticulated wildly and very personally. Did Obama really believe all the guff he was putting out? Was he a conscious liar or just an ordinary cheat? This went on for several minutes before, mercifully, we reached one of Fox's many breaks.

Now, when I came to America from Europe in 1939, one of the first things I learned was that an elected leader was, whatever one's own opinions or whether one had voted for him, entitled to some respect for his position as president. I had to learn this because in the British parliament, frontal attacks on the prime minister of the day are common; they are a part of the severity of debate in parliament. But even there, there are rules, and a Speaker to enforce them.

So far as I know, or until Mr. Beck unveils himself as a candidate for public office (alongside Madame Palin?), he is a private citizen. As such, he is entitled to have his opinion stated in public. That is free speech. But is he also entitled to incendiary opinions? to direct physical challenge to the President? Not, I think, in the crowded theater of our politics, in which crying 'Fire!' can lead to panic.

Is the majority of the country, which voted for Mr. Obama, a worthless bunch of dolts for so doing? Has anyone yet elected Mr. Beck?

I do not say this as one who believes that our president has divine right on his side, such as kings could claim to have; I say it as someone who believes that the man has a right, while in office, to our respect: because, for better or worse, he represents all of America. Many have been the presidents for whom I had scant respect, but I would not, ever, have thought of assaulting any of them phsyically: not even on a screen. If they were elected president, the people had spoken; and if he turned out to be a rotten president, the people was in a position to remove him.

Without that inherent respect for the office, whoever the incumbent, democracy quickly falls into mob rule. This Mr. Beck encouraged -- indeed lampooned. Awful as the 'left' channel is, it not show a desire to punch a president in the face, or impose its own talking heads on Obama's. That may be especially important when the president is the first black to hold the office and is also transparently -- whatever his failures -- a decent and intelligent human being. That does not merit to be dissed, for it is also as dangerous as crying 'Fire!' in a theater can be.

STATE OF THE DISUNION

The man -- his smile, his rhetoric, his ease, his obvious superiority to the ruck -- is unfair to the Union of Snake-Oil Salesmen. Selling ice-boxes to Esquimaux (or whatever we´re supposed to call them in these days) is all in a day´s work for our pesident. That is because there are Esquimaux out there. He can sell his message to the public because we are there. But the great amphitheater he daced last night is a Great Void. True, you see the Hairy One (that´s what her name means in Italian) leaping up and down with applause, but trust me, she is just an Illusion. She is not there and she certainly is not listening to the Message, somewhere in her crafty little invisible head a machine goes round and round tallying what this elegant man is saying in terms of what it means to her Job. This will advance those desperate to have an Armenian genocide, for their cyber-votes are here; that will do well with the homosexual ¨community¨ which is also part of her constituency. Oh, I can use that one against him in November says a hoary senator from the Tea Party. Yum yum say those whose legislative wages are paid by lobbyists, that´s worth a few mill. Bingo! shout within their incorporeal selves the sales reps from states with defense industries. But don´t worry. None of them are really there. They live in Elsewhere, a marvelous country populated exclusively with professional politicians. It´s what Obama says there that speaks to such souls as they have left. For is Obama not, also, the President of the PPs, a class apart?

That there is nothing worse than democracy except every other form of government is an adage tested and true, but it is irrelevant to the State of Disunion address we heard last night. Once ´elected´these people no longer have anything to do with democracy, they are a Governing Class, a classical corporate oligarchy, which deals behind doors and lives on the Free Lunch. Bit by bit, day by day, they recede from reality, devoid of meaning and any importance save to themselves. Too bad, for it was a good speech and given by an almost good man, that is: he might be entirely good were he not one of them.

To such an audience, how can one give a good speech or sell a program? If Saint Francis of Assisi, a saint mostly known for walking around shoeless and talking to the birds, appeared before the joint houses of Congress, what he said would fall into the same abyss -- Now listen, Frank, we have to stick together on this thing or you won´t have a habit to wear next time you want to convert people to your Better Life! Because what counts in PP-Land is staying there and not being exiled to America. That would be worse than the Gulag. Have you ever seen an ex-politician? What a sorry figure he cuts! Belly up, the catfish eat him rather than the other way around. Lawdy me! says Frank. Please Massa. Out there it´s Hell.

Hell it is. Even on the level of substance, the remedies offered seem pretty hokey. Take money away from the Big Banks and they´ll find out some other way to take your money and put it into their own pockets. Does the Great Leader really believe that to correct the Education Deficit in America (seven years, I calculate, from the days when I was in the Eighth Grade in Balboa, California, reading books that now puzzle Juniors and Seniors in our colleges) what is needed is a further expansion of educational opportunity, via community colleges? There was a time when a high school diploma did indeed fit you for a decent working wage, and if our high schools could be brought back to their 1939 levels, that would be a mighty reform. Like elects like is a rule in education as in government: giving more money to the best teachers would be great, if it weren´t teachers who chose them.

Quousque tandem abutere patientia nostra? flung Cicero in the court-room. For how long are we to stay patient, eh? With the Afghanistan farce? With the health care joke? It would be no bad thing, for instance, to make sure that hospital in America were not places where we get sicker. They could start with the world-famous Massachusetts General, whose general filth is not far off that available in Somalia. But will that happen? One thing our president got right: he knows that we know what´s wrong with our disunion. That´s visible and palpable to million upon million of us. As it is visible and palpable that nothing that is said in PP-Land is real. You can´t sue them, it costs a fortune to join them, and whatever we do, so long as PPs exist, nothing, nada, will change.

POLITICS AND HEALTH CARE

I have no intention of making an idiot of myself by joining in a health care 'debate' whose conclusion should be now be obvious to all. A handful of senatorial slurpers at the public trough, led by someone called Baucus, have determined that we, the public, should not have a single-pay system of health care.

I take the following as obvious:
(1) Such a plan takes many years to work out in detail. I was alive and well when it was introduced into the unhealthy, underfed, and grudging population of the United Kingdom. Nearly sixty years later that population is far better off and far healthier. It is not I who would benefit from a US equivalent, but my grandchildren.
(2) There is no such thing as a perfect Health Plan. Any will have its problems and its failures.
(3) It is unlikely that any could conceivably be worse, more ill-managed, more inequitable and more spendthrift than that which the United States now 'enjoys'. I paid a private doctor a goodly retainer each year, but 95 percent of Americans -- not exactly the healthiest nation on earth -- couldn't possibly have afforded this sort of 'private' care.
(4) I have a vague recollection that a sensible single-pay government-run universal health care was what we voted for and were promised.
(5) Anyone with the slightest knowledge of such plans in more civilized places, from Taiwan to Poland, knows that they work. Fall ill from Lapland to Cahuita, Costa Rica (where I live), you will be taken care of without a question -- or a demand for pre-payment when you knock at death's door. In Costa Rica it costs a family $38 p/m for full coverage, including any and all medications. Of course, the local system us not as 'advanced' as that in McAllen, Texas, which has the highest per capita costs in the United States, for the good and simple reason that its doctors and hospitals manage to make sure a scratch on your knee will have you tested for diabetes. In Europe, such health care is part of a government package that includes FREE education for as far as a student can go, FREE medical care regardless of who you are, where, or what your income is. (It gets abused, yes, but the taxes paid for the service more than make up for the abusers), and many other sensible services, such as socially-engineered local and national transportation costs, support for culture and much else.
(6) The bill for this is high: a tax-rate that is something like 38-40 percent of income instead out the American 31-34 percent. It is a tax which -- when every child gets some 300-500$ of go-to-school equipment every year -- does not seem exorbitant.

Since all this is crystal clear to anyone who has traveled, read about or studied how these health plans work (which varies greatly from country to country) one wonders how Baucus and Company have come up with the kind leg of a donkey. I likewise it is worth considering just how powerless we are to get our legislators to do the obvious. Just as clear is a much older story: don't dream for an instant that you live in a democratic society in which access is equal to all and your legislators are reponsive to your desires. Congressional eavesdropping on the national mood is like the pit-patter of distant rain compared to the thunder of Tea Parties, Drug Companies and the likes of Glenn Beck.

It won't do for you to say, 'Throw the rascals out!', for others will follow the present batch.

Did someone mention campaign promises: Health care, a withdrawal from war, transparency, no income tax for those on Social Security, and Yadda-Yadda?