The heading of this post* is the summation of all objections to any public social insurance program, be it unemployment compensation, social security, day care supports, family leave and even education. Now that the congressional debate over health insurance reform has ended, perhaps we ought to ask, why indeed should I pay for you?
The first answer, of course, is that if a law says I must pay for you, surely it also means you must pay for me. That's what social insurance means, joining forces as a society to share the essential risks and challenges in human life, such as illness, unemployment, bearing and rearing children, acquiring necessary knowledge and old age.
They've been doing that for 60 years or more in the part of Europe that was never Communist.
Secondly, and seldom acknowledged, because someone has already paid for you. When you were 3 years old, say, even if you were born wealthy on paper, were you handling your investments, let alone buying and preparing all the food you ate, the clothing you wore, the housing you had? Weren't you a net recipient of everything until, at a minimum, your adolescence?
If you started your own business, did you build the transportation infrastructure that allows you to ship goods to customers? If you are now retired, do you think for a moment that you contributed every last penny that is being spent on you while you produce nothing at all?
There are no utterly self-sufficient individuals. Not even you. That's why you should pay for me when I get sick, in fairness, to make up for my paying for you when you get sick.
* A phrase stolen from Kel, the blogger of the Osterley Times.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Tonto TV on Mundovision
My recent encounter with an NPR reporter's misuse of the image of a telenovela made me think of the shudders U.S. Spanish TV in general induces in me, given its obsessive pandering to the lowest common denominator among the least educated rural immigrants in this country. Bad enough that they have that crap in "Latin" America!
Telemundo and Univision, two Spanish-language television networks in the United States, broadcast South American telenovelas to distract their mostly female, low-skilled, low-wage daytime audience from the notion of being accorded respect with better pay and a healthier balancing of work and family demands -- and immigration reform.
Their other shows feature Chaliapin-bass announcers that scream out "SAAAAAAAAAbado!" like late-night Anglo TV fire sales and fake blondes in bikinis coochy cooing their buttocks and breasts at the audience. Ay, mamita!
Mama eu queiro, mama eu queiro, mama eu queiro mamar ...
And when it's not year-round carnival, there's always sports: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!
The world of Spanish-language mass media entertainment rarely departs from swimsuits, "fútbol," and absurdly maudlin dramas with romance and a pastiche of superstitions and magical thinking. It's the equivalent of the minstrel show, only put on by Hispanics with no shame.
Every once in a while I stop while channel surfing, try to give it the umpteenth chance, but my brain explodes inside my head within three minutes.
Forget religion. Tonto* TV is the modern opium of the masses.
*Tonto: Spanish for "stupid" or "dumb," hence the insult that The Lone Ranger represented to American Indians. (Yes, they prefer "Indians" these days.)
Telemundo and Univision, two Spanish-language television networks in the United States, broadcast South American telenovelas to distract their mostly female, low-skilled, low-wage daytime audience from the notion of being accorded respect with better pay and a healthier balancing of work and family demands -- and immigration reform.
Their other shows feature Chaliapin-bass announcers that scream out "SAAAAAAAAAbado!" like late-night Anglo TV fire sales and fake blondes in bikinis coochy cooing their buttocks and breasts at the audience. Ay, mamita!
Mama eu queiro, mama eu queiro, mama eu queiro mamar ...
And when it's not year-round carnival, there's always sports: GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL!!!!!
The world of Spanish-language mass media entertainment rarely departs from swimsuits, "fútbol," and absurdly maudlin dramas with romance and a pastiche of superstitions and magical thinking. It's the equivalent of the minstrel show, only put on by Hispanics with no shame.
Every once in a while I stop while channel surfing, try to give it the umpteenth chance, but my brain explodes inside my head within three minutes.
Forget religion. Tonto* TV is the modern opium of the masses.
*Tonto: Spanish for "stupid" or "dumb," hence the insult that The Lone Ranger represented to American Indians. (Yes, they prefer "Indians" these days.)
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Pedophilia Spatters the Pope
They couldn't get Karol Wojtyla (aka John Paul II), but reporters of the Süddeutsche Zeitung have finally nailed Joseph Ratzinger (aka the sitting pope) with conspiring to hide sadistic child rape when he was in the Archdiocese of Munich.
Everybody is guilty of something, Joseph Stalin was wont to say when the arrest of someone without evidence of a misdeed troubled the top dogs at the NKVD -- a rare event, to be sure.
But how many people knowingly accept the transfer of a now-imprisoned priest from another diocese (Essen), where he had raped an 11-year-old boy? The priest in question was no misdirected man: he engaged in rank acts of sadism to compel the boy to perform sexual acts. This is proven as a matter of law.
Then there is the question of the stormclouds gathering over the pope's brother, also a priest. The role of Msgr. Georg Ratzinger in allegations of abuse when he was master of the boys' choir at Regenburg, which ran from 1964 to 1994, is currently under investigation in Germany.
But the Vatican already claims to know that nothing happened there under the sibling Ratzinger. How does the Vatican know for sure before the investigation has been completed?
Perhaps this is a case similar to that of Wojtyla who, when similar allegations arose about his tenure as Archbishop of Krakow, dispatched a Rasputin-like figure who controlled all of Wojtyla's papers, to gather up whatever had been left behind in Krakow. A Polish reporter who had begun to ask questions on this matter was then roughed up, according to a Washington Post report in the late 1990s, and nothing more was ever heard on the subject.
Everybody is guilty of something, Joseph Stalin was wont to say when the arrest of someone without evidence of a misdeed troubled the top dogs at the NKVD -- a rare event, to be sure.
But how many people knowingly accept the transfer of a now-imprisoned priest from another diocese (Essen), where he had raped an 11-year-old boy? The priest in question was no misdirected man: he engaged in rank acts of sadism to compel the boy to perform sexual acts. This is proven as a matter of law.
Then there is the question of the stormclouds gathering over the pope's brother, also a priest. The role of Msgr. Georg Ratzinger in allegations of abuse when he was master of the boys' choir at Regenburg, which ran from 1964 to 1994, is currently under investigation in Germany.
But the Vatican already claims to know that nothing happened there under the sibling Ratzinger. How does the Vatican know for sure before the investigation has been completed?
Perhaps this is a case similar to that of Wojtyla who, when similar allegations arose about his tenure as Archbishop of Krakow, dispatched a Rasputin-like figure who controlled all of Wojtyla's papers, to gather up whatever had been left behind in Krakow. A Polish reporter who had begun to ask questions on this matter was then roughed up, according to a Washington Post report in the late 1990s, and nothing more was ever heard on the subject.
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