The mind is a terrible thing. I should never play Call of Duty 4 and read the Huffington Post right before bedtime.
In my dream, I was an undercover reporter. My job was to infiltrate a new prison built in secret right here in the good ole US of A as a replacement for Guantanamo Bay Detainment Camp. I was able to get inside and tour the facilities. It was cavernous, like a warehouse, but it was still under construction and yet to be populated with the prisoners it was intended for. The McCain team was crawling all over the place. What I didn’t expect was the first detainee. Sarah Palin had been taken there, tied to a pole and presumably beaten. She still looked great, all things considered. The rumored rift between McCain and Palin was worse then I thought, but in the end, cooler heads prevailed and Sarah Palin had been released. Spunky as ever, she winked at the men and women who’d fought so hard for her freedom, telling them “you’ve got to exercise your right to torture”.
I’d seen enough. It was time to go. I left through the front gate, just barely getting clearance to leave from the commanding officer. Fortunately for me, an explosion disturbed the uneasy peace. The enemies of freedom were on the offensive. As I made my way to the awaiting driver, a helicopter began circling overhead. I noticed the laser site as it danced on the ground around me. I’d seen this movie before–I was the target. I ran to the car and we made our escape. The helicopter joined us in hot pursuit. As I tried to get a shot out the car window, I saw a group of Hispanic men in work clothes packed into the helicopter. It was a crack squad of undocumented assassins. I’d been mistaken as a Republican operative. We made our way into the Hollywood hills, where we finally arrived at the lair of one of the Liberal Hollywood Elite, Peter Fonda. As I tried to explain the imminent danger we were in, the helicopter found us and began circling overhead. Despite my urgent pleas, Peter Fonda just couldn’t accept that he was being targeted by the working class. It was up to me. I fled to the basement, readied a rocket launcher, and stepped outside. I took aim at the helicopter and fired…direct hit. The world was once again a little bit safer for democracy.
Mammatus clouds over Salina, Kansas.
William F. Hatke aka. Bill, a long time resident of Lawrence Kansas, reportedly died September 7, 2007 at the age of 61. I’ve heard that he’d been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer, and that he died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Bill Hatke played by his own rules. When I was in my twenties, I heard about a man who lived in Lawrence off the grid, independently of city services like electricity, gas and water. I had to meet him. Through friends, I set up an interview, went to his house and taped a long conversation on a borrowed tape recorder. My expectations were that Bill would be a strident advocate for environmental stewardship. What I came to realize was that Bill wasn’t a zealot, living a life of self-sacrifice in order to serve the greater good; but that he treasured autonomy and worked hard to have it. He got up when he wanted, and lived off the fruit of his own labor - beholden to nothing and no one. He was a hermit in a crowd, and had a rich social life. Many people knew him through playing games–chess, scrabble, bridge, raquetball. He was an active participant in the community, regularly participated in the Peace Vigils in front of the courthouse in Lawrence. He had a doctorate, had been in a seminary, and apparently was a military veteran, eligible for Veterans Affairs benefits.
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We went to see Michael Moore’s Sicko. It’s an accessible look at the dysfunctional American health care system. The film points out problems with the system in real human terms. Despite spending more per capita on health care then any other nation, health care in the U.S. doesn’t compete with outcomes achieved in other industrialized nations. This shows up in how long the average American lives, the numbers of infants and children who die, and even how tall Americans are.
Why do Americans put up with it? Maybe we’re suckers. Maybe we’ve been led to believe that having the government provide decent health care to everyone somehow threatens the American way of life. Maybe we’ve fallen for a market-driven fantasy that would have us believe that one glorious day, everyone will be really rich and able to get the same nip and tuck jobs reserved for Paris Hilton. The price for preserving our hopes? The uninsured line America’s overcrowded emergency rooms. Meanwhile those in the insured middle class can be just an illness away from bankruptcy and destitution.
If you’re lucky enough to still have medical insurance, you probably have had first hand experience with the red tape that keeps our system free. If you get sick, you probably have to make sure to see a physician that your insurance company approves of. Make sure the insurance company approves of your doctor before you get sick. They can provide you with a list. If you’re really sick, and need to see a specialist, you may have to get a doctor’s note to see another doctor, if your insurance company preapproves. Of course, the insurance company has to approve the treatment and the medication. At every step of the way, be assured that insurance company bureaucrats will keep their watchful eye on the bottom line. If you get well, you can look forward to letters from the insurance company which will let you know if they’ve shelled out ridiculous amounts of cash for the treatment you received, or if you have to spend the rest of your life paying off the debt you may have accrued in the few hours of surgery you had to get from, say the car accident you were in while dashing off to work. Not to worry, you can rest at ease if you just keep $100,000 or so in the bank. Best to start at birth.
Compare this with other countries with national health care. If you’re sick, just go to the doctor. Need medicine? Go get it. No complicated bureaucracy making relatively arbitrary decisions about who gets their care paid for and who doesn’t. With single payer systems, taxpayers also benefit from collective bargaining power to get better deals from the giant pharmaceutical companies. The numbers are in. American health care is a ripoff. We pay too much for too little and it shows.
“My last words? ‘Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse.’
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From a I Love You, Madame Librarian, Kurt Vonnegut, In These Times, August 6, 2004.
I’ve spent a good portion of today feeling angry. It must be a coping mechanism. At the beginning of my day, I was angry that I can’t ride a bicycle to work without being terrorized by people completely oblivious to their surroundings aka. me. I’m angry that the state agency that I love working for is, from what I’ve been told, paying twice as much for the same services that we’ve been providing inhouse to a multi-national corporation due to a mandate by our mostly republican state legislature. With all due respect, to hell with ya’ll. By that I mean our state legislators and the multinationals that are lining their pockets and funding their campaigns. I’m angry that the President of the United States of America has been responsible for the killing, maiming, and torture of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of human beings not much different from me. I’m even more angry that I have to pay for it through my taxes. Despite all the lies I’ve been told about what America is supposed to stand for, we pay for crimes against humanity through the force of law.
The entertainment industry is completely out of control. In a misguided attempt to increase their profit margin, they ruin their own business. They’ve already destroyed the movie-going experience, wasting our time with advertisments for products I boycott on principle. The industry needs to get a clue and take a look at the popularity of Tivo, home theatre, internet video and other homegrown mediums that let consumers take control instead of letting the industry take control away. I don’t buy fewer CDs because I listen to music on the radio, I buy more as I get exposed to new music that I like. As if losing habeus corpus, the right to a free trial, freedom from torture at the hands of the state, and any privacy that once were my American birthright weren’t bad enough, now corporations that I choose to give money to are exercising their monopoly powers to take away what remains of the American freedoms of intellectual consumption, one by one.
It’s winter solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. It might get colder yet this winter in the northern hemisphere, but it will only get brighter.
Show #202 of WNYC’s show, Radiolab, really messed with my head. The “Behaves So Strangely” segment, in the first 6 minutes of the show, lets you hear as ordinary speech is transformed to music in your mind. The whole show covers the blurry distinctions between language and music.
This is a picture of the sunrise this morning over the little Colorado River in Austin, Texas, United States.
You have to get up really early.
