Health Care

Imagine that the health care reform (reform? We don't have it to reform!) was for white people only.

Well, aside from the gasp that would have gone up, I think cradle to grave would have been passed in about fifteen minutes. Everyone forgets that all politics in this country begins with race. Why call it "Obamacare" so frequently and with such a delighted sneer? Maybe to connect it to a black president?

What if the Tea Baggers were folks of color? The National Guard would have been recalled from killing people in the Middle East, and pointed toward our own people.

I sent an email to the National Rifle Association suggesting that I would be glad to fund a program to train young black and Hispanic men in gun safety, and buy them their first gun. I waited a long time, then they apparently recovered from their laughing fits and told me they weren't interested now, but, by golly, if they became interested, they would get in touch. I'm guessing that my time in the nursing home will have passed before that will happen. And my great-grandchildren's time.

Why is that a funny story? Why is it so easy for us to accept that the country's largest and most effective lobbying group, by a big margin, has been in at least the last 50 years so clearly a bunch of virulent race-baiters?

I'm not advancing the fund of human knowledge to make this guess: A majority of white folks would be just as happy if slavery had continued. Maybe a close minority. Way fewer than half of whites voted for Obama running against an incompetent bozo and a smiling baboon. If it were just white folks, the bozo and baboon would have won handily.

What are we to do, then? Social Security was started because Roosevelt was worried about the Commies taking over if the white working classes weren't thrown a bone. Medicare was started because white people got sick of paying granny's hospital bills. And so on. But both to buy off the white folks.

The real progressive of my time was, unexpectedly, Lyndon Johnson. A Texan, born of nativist stock, he breathlessly gambled all his political capital, all his arm bending skills, and just plain bribery to get the Civil Rights Bill passed in the mid-sixties.

The Civil Rights Bill would not pass today -- it wouldn't even reach a vote. Johnson was aware of what he was doing. He knew that he had lost the South to the mouth-foaming, howling right for at least a generation. Turns out to be at least two generations, and probably three.

I don't think, though, that he gave weight to two things: one, that the Vietnam war would lose him the support of all those who didn't hate him already, the other that the progressives were a smaller bunch in the rest of the nation than he originally thought.

Toward his death he did realized some of what he had turned loose. Bush the Younger was the best and brightest (heh!) of the products of the Johnson era, at least until 2012, when the Baggers and their bagmen will come to power. Reagan was the most subtle, using his smiling senility to disguise mass murder in numbers that hadn't been reached in, well, a decade. After Vietnam (casualties: 5 million, at least), Guatemala, El Salvador, and all the rest of the benign 80s were a drop in the bucket. A big drop, maybe half cup. Surely not more than, say, two million. Staggering.

I will say, in Johnson's defense, and I don't much like defending him, that the number killed in Vietnam only picked up speed after Nixon slithered into command. The republicans -- Nixon, Reagan, Bush, have, by the nature of their virulent racial antagonisms, been just slightly more willing to murder the non-white. Just slightly.

In Massachusetts, remember that Baker is of this tribe, the know-nothings, the Baggers, the mouth-foaming racists, the folks who would have seniors begging on the street for food money. Impeccable swine, with innocent faces. Damn, how I loathe those people, the "we have too much debt" to pay for health care, but not the trillion-and-a-half bill for murdering Iraqis. As I said before, though, only slightly worse than the others.

It gets personal when I'm the one who could be eating the cat food, and crawling over the bodies of dead elders to get to the clinic. Miles the Cat better get used to being on short rations, just like the rest of us.

And that's where I started. Now that I think it through, since I'm white, the let-them-eat-cat-food advocates will always find a way to get me human food and get to the doc. If I weren't white, I'd be packing my bags and heading to Costa Rica, Canada, New Zealand, some places in Africa, some places in Europe. Keep those passports handy, folks. But, I am white.

I'll eat, I'm just not so sure about you about my darker-skinned fellow citizens

How humiliating for me to say that, in my country, in my lifetime.