12/7/24

 Saturday, December 7,  2024

D+32

1941 Imperial Japanese Navy with 353 planes attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii, killing 2,403 people

1965 Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously lifted the mutual excommunications that led to the split of the two churches in 1054 during the Great Schism

1972 Apollo 17 was launched, the final manned lunar landing mission where the crew took the famous "blue marble" photo of the entire Earth

2015 Time Magazine readers named Bernie Sanders their ' Person of the Year

The Blue Marble

In bed at 8:45, awake and up at 2:30.  Geri went to bed very early last night after falling asleep on the sofa, and she was up and reading her papers around 2:45, back to bed at 4:15.   I dozed off in the recliner at some point and woke up at 6:50.

Prednisone, day 207, 7.5 mg., day 22.   Prednisone at 5:00 with Irish soda bread.  Morning meds a few minutes later.

Capitalism, racism, American politics, sickness, and death.   Yesterday I wrote: "The American healthcare system is the WORST in the developed, industrialized world, and in large measure though not exclusively it is because of health insurance companies like United Healthcare."  I was responding to the assassination in NYC of the CEO of United Healthcare on Wednesday.  This morning I read the op-ed by Zeynep Tufecki, a Turkish-American sociologist at Princeton University and regular contributor to the New York Time   She's one of my favorite reads, along with Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB, Margaret Renkl in the NYTimes, and Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post. .  Tufecki's piece in this morning's paper carried the headline "The Rage and Glee That Followed a C.E.O.’s Killing Should Ring All Alarms."

But this was something different. The rage that people felt at the health insurance industry, and the elation that they expressed at seeing it injured, was widespread and organic. It was shocking to many, but it crossed communities all along the political spectrum and took hold in countless divergent cultural clusters. . .  I’ve been studying social media for a long time, and I can’t think of any other incident when a murder in this country has been so openly celebrated.

Her essay compares America's current economic, social, and political era with its Gilded Era after the Civil War with its profound technological, economic, and social changes and its great inequality of wealth and income. 

Today’s business culture enshrines the maximization of executive wealth and shareholder fortunes, and has succeeded in leveraging personal riches into untold political influence. . .

The vast inequities of the [Gilded] era fueled political movements that targeted corporate titans, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist tried to assassinate the industrialist Henry Clay Frick after a drawn-out conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on 

As the historian Jon Grinspan wrote about the years between 1865 and 1915, “the nation experienced one impeachment, two presidential elections ‘won’ by the loser of the popular vote and three presidential assassinations.” And neither political party, he added, seemed “capable of tackling the systemic issues disrupting Americans’ lives.” No, not an identical situation, but the description does resonate with how a great many people feel about the direction of the country today.

I also read Nicholas Kristof's essay in the NY Times on August 16, 2023, "How Do We Fix the Scandal That Is American Health Care?" 

Cost is often the argument against expanding access to health care. But it’s hard to understand how just about every other advanced country can afford universal care and the United States can’t. And consider that 94 percent of Americans with substance-use disorder do not get treatment, even though this pays for itself many times over. Our policy often seems driven less by cost considerations than by indifference, even cruelty. (My italics added)

That led me to pull out of my bookcase Stuart Stevens' 2020 book IT WAS ALL A LIE, subtitled 'How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.'  His answer: racism.

In my first race [as a professional political consultant] I had stumbled onto a truth as basic and immutagle as the fact that water freezes below 32°F: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of Southern politics is played. . .  Since 1964 no Republican presidential candidate has broken 17% with African American voters, and by 2016 only 3% considered themselves Republicans.

What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to White voters and treating non-White voters with, at best, benign neglect?  You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to White voters.  That is the truth that led to what is famously called "the Southern strategy." That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican Party now proudly embraces: a White grievance party.

Why are so many White Americans against welfare measures generally and Universal Health Care specifically, measures called "Socialism" or even "Marxism" by many Republicans?  Because it takes money from 'hardworking, deserving' Whites and spends it on 'lazy, undeserving' Blacks (and Browns).  Why the tremendous Republican (read 'White') opposition to Obamacare and even greater opposition to a "single-payer plan"? It's all wrapped up in the kind of thinking that people who don't have the resources to buy whatever it is they need have only themselves to blame.  Some of that is surely true in some cases but it ignores all the social, economic, and political contributions to the unequal availability of resources throughout the society, including "the lottery of birth."  Surely no sane American with a modicum of intelligence believes the constantly repeated Republican Big Lie that the country they brag about as 'the richest in the world' can't afford Universal Health Care, a single-payer system without a need for health insurance companies while virtually all of the less wealthy nations can afford some variation of such a system.  Nicholas Kristof says "It's hard to understand" but I'm sure he understands quite well that we can afford but choose not to create such a system.  In large part, it is because of our racist opposition to general welfare programs (other perhaps than Social Security and Medicare) but also because of the powerful entrenched opposition of vested interests"special interests", i.e., the medical and health insurance interests who profit greatly from the current system.

Facebook posting today: The War that would affect my family so devastatingly started 81 years ago this date with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  I was 105 days old, 3 and 1/2 months.  My father was 21 years and 3 months old.  My mother was 19, still a teenager.  The war that started that day affected their lives and their marriage and their children's lives in ways they couldn't have imagined that day.  They had been married for 16 months.  Two years and two months later, he would be drafted into the Marine Corps.  Thirteen months after that he would be on a volcanic island in the Western Pacific Ocean, trying to stay alive, probably wetting and shitting his trousers for the first time since he was a baby, 24 years earlier.  There were no urinals and commodes for Americans on Iwo Jima.  When he came home in November of 1945, he had a bathroom and a head full of the sights and sounds and smells of Death. He was 25 years old.  His wife was 23.  His son was 4 and the daughter he had never seen before was 15 months old.  All of them carried emotional wounds from that war for the rest of their lives.  Only the son still lives and he recoils at the description of the war, of any war, as a "Good War."

. . . .  (End of post)

The photograph was taken at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot (i.e., boot camp) in San Diego.  The dress blue uniform he wore was not his.  It was temporarily provided to him for the photograph which would be sent home to his wife.  He was told to smile and he smiled, like a good Marine. He was a private E-1 when the photo was taken and a private E-1 when he was discharged after service on Iwo Jima, not even a PFC, private first class.  This tells me he had disciplinary or other problems before he was discharged.  He was discharged from the Great Lakes Naval Base north of Chicago shortly before Thanksgiving, 1945.  He told me that "They didn't want to discharge me" because he 'wasn't ready' to return to civilian life.   He rarely talked of the war or of Iwo Jima.  He never asked me about Vietnam.  He had no love for the Marine Corps though I suspect he took some pride in my service and my rank, especially when he spoke of me to his friends at the VFW Post in North Port.  I'm sorry that we were so distant during most of our lives, indeed until he was 75 and I was 55.  I am thankful that we became friends in the last few years of his life.

Quaere:  Why is it that I take great delight in looking at dead oak leaves that I picked up from the grass last month and saved and that I want to scream in finally re=reading this letter I received from our car and home insurer company?

May 06, 2024   Dear Mr. Clausen:  

We are excited to introduce an incredible new feature that adds convenience while enhancing your account security when you call us -- Voice ID. . . .  Embrace the peace of mind that comes with knowing your account is protected with state-of-the-art security measures.  Voice ID uses enhanced algorithms to analyze your unique vocal patterns.  Feel confident in the knowledge that your voiceprint and your account are in safe hands -- yours.  Opt-in now by . . .   Aaarrgh!!!

Comfort me!  Protect me from algorithms!