I’m not sounding a call for the legal profession although such an alert might be warranted. No, my dismay is with our elected representatives in Congress and with the usual obtuse behavior we American Yahoos so energetically embrace. We spend so much time and energy posturing how important health and education are to us as individuals and as a nation; however, our actions betray our true intentions: the tyranny of appearance–shallow and superficial–in whose thrall we remain.
If a health care bill is signed into law and does not include the popularly dubbed public option, we may well have to edit The New Colossus–huddled masses cower with the tired, poor, the wretched refuse crumbling from foreclosures, the homeless, and the tempest tossed abandoned and alone beside a darkened door. So soon have bankers, hedge fund managers, the rank and file of financial investment firms returned to their old practices: bonuses as entitlement, excessive profit taking and the resumption of the use of derivatives, which are still unregulated despite the governments best pantomime of posturing to the contrary; the stigma of greed has become once again a badge of honor–at least among certain classes of thieves– while men of power opine and do nothing except hint that somewhere, somehow, they will staunch the flow of executive bonuses.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, almost as persistent as the practice of bloodletting, which finally faded from our lexicon of medical treatments after an ignominious run of 2000 years. Want money for health care? Withdraw our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan–it is a given that we should not send more. We have a splendid history of supporting corrupt governments: Saddam Hussein, Musharif, Karzai, Reza Pahlavi, Fugencio Batista. How can we ever doubt our leaders’ perspicacity to evaluate the motives of foreign governments when there are such fine skills exemplified by our own beloved W looked into Putin’s soul and thought he saw the heart of the man but unfortunately we learned later that it was only a reflection of Dick Cheney. Sadly, the rubric now being bandied about is that any decisions regarding Afghanistan will be determined, at least in part, by the outcome of the run-off vote following an egregiously corrupt election orchestrated by the even more egregiously corrupt Karzai family and its hegemony of cohorts. Every drop of blood is precious regardless of national origin; however, our actions suggest that we are willing to sacrifice our way of life and values to maintain the façade of a democratically elected government in Afghanistan.
Following our government’s policy in Afghanistan, it should come as no surprise that the same indifference is manifested in the area of healthcare and education. Certain members of Congress pontificate about the pitfalls of the government’s involvement in the administration of healthcare insurance yet none decline the healthcare our tax dollars purchase for them–As far as I am aware no one has volunteered to pay for their own insurance–it comes with the work, if you are lucky enough to get it! There is no ignominy in broadcasting misleading advertisements sponsored by private insurance companies or the conspicuous and unrelenting pressure powerful lobbyists exert upon every elected official at every level of government.
Less becomes the new more, especially in education. Titillation has supplanted effort reducing learning to a state of tingling and jangling nerves. Everyone succeeds, in his own mind; however, all too frequently, failure is a matter of national tragedy. The success of Plato’s Republic was based upon a noble lie about our fundamental nature, the categories into which each of us are bound. Whether we repair our aging Republic or build a new one, perhaps we will reveal our true selves by our penchant for or our aversion to deception regardless of its lineage.
