Sebelius Is Not Essential

If Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius really meant that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element," then what is reform for? Is President Obama really going to choose between abandoning either 17 million people (House bill) or 36 million people (Senate bill)? Given that the president has plainly agreed that a single-payer plan is the only way to cover everyone: why isn't he simply upping the ante and putting that on the table?

Because, for all the huffing and puffing and all the misspent millions by insurance, pharma and "health care providers" (that's a good one!), all the town hall meeting disruptions put together don't amount to a hill of beans. Just because some cranky, ignoramuses let themselves be fooled by the first snake-oil sales pitch the gougers lobby can throw at them, it doesn't mean they've won.

Democracy isn't about who screams the loudest nonsense.

Indeed, the health gougers have been using every anti-democratic tactic in the totalitarian playbook, contrary to the blathering of Big Lie artists on wacko right-wing radio and Fox television. Go back and look at how the dictators of the 1930s climbed to power and you'll see screaming white young men with short haircuts chanting "USA! USA! USA!" (only back then it was "Sieg Heil!").

All right, maybe Sebelius can be excused her weak knees because she was not on the campaign trail with Obama in 2008, when I distinctly remember being promised "change." Maybe she's the "fall guy," to use Chicago Mafioso talk, which seems appropriate given the high level of corruption involved in this whole pseudo-debate.

Let's not weasel out of campaign promises and go for the most expedient route, the one that helps people the least. Let's show some guts here and call the bluff of the Republicans and the health-industrial complex.

Don't want a moderate reform plan? Fine, let's create the U.S. National Health Service. Something modern and serviceable, such as I observed while living in Canada and the United Kingdom, that replaces everything that exists now.

What for?

An endless avenue of years
stretch before me:
bus, coffee, newspaper,
do, done, plan to do again
lunch on diet, lunch on wine
work and wonder
bus, kids, wife
then a book to curl around
at day's end; at week's end
books and movies,
baseball games and dinner feasts,
a trip when there's an itch.
Dear me, what for?

It will happen over and again:
Christmas tree and Lenten ashes
fireworks and All Hallows' masks,
sunshine or rain; house, office, and bus
fend off my lust,
my fear of nakedness, of pain ...
to be poor, lonely, old,
to grow weak and hear my body ceasing
to obey
all that can happen, all I dread,
some of it will come before I am dead.
Then I will ask my inner self: whatever for?

Once I thought
I was made so love could shine in winter
so God could be man again
to bless the creatures;
but that feature played to mixed reviews
that coin's been wasted on the beggarwoman
the preacherman's "Jeezus" is a broken record
and the creatures do not tell me what they want
nor can I guess, were I able to fulfill their dreams ...


Before all pleasure turns to rust
my desire pilfered from some others
as theirs is drawn from me till ennui,
I may yet ask the beggarwoman
what have I to give a life
simply to die each day,
to lie undead ...
or what else, and what for?

Writer's Blog

Rummaging through drawers I never go into, I found a couple of short stories I wrote in the 1980s that -- if I say so my fictionally unpublished self -- aren't bad. Why could I never convince a fiction editor to publish anything I wrote? I've had "faction" published in major newspapers all over the world -- well, in a few countries.

Recently I submitted a short story I had posted here. Had to take it down for that reason. Nothing. Maybe I misclassified it as a short, rather than a short story. Maybe I didn't sleep with the right people. Maybe it was lousy.

At one point long ago, when my writing was still unforgivably juvenile, I did send out a whole rafter of stories out. I had a file full of rejection letters, which I think I've since thrown out. I even composed a "form" rejection reply: "I regret that I am not able to reply to your rejection letter personally, but given the volume I receive, it is impractical. Thanks anyway for the opportunity to review yours."

By that time, I had given up submitting stories and thrown away two "novels," an act that probably did the most that was ever done in the 20th century to rescue western civilization -- which, as Gandhi noted, would have been a genial idea.