The late comedian Bill Hicks once said "We all pay for life with death, so everything inbetween should be free". Americans are often good at obeying instructional pedagogy handed down from institutional power. Instructions on how to live are supported by corporate sloganeering and so-called folksy aphorisms tell us that Americans are becoming weak and whiny. We're an unproductive lot, lazy and obese, given to easily to sin. We should be penalized for buying all that shit they sold us when we couldn't afford it. No mercy for those who couldn't spot a government-sponsored sham deal on a mortgage. We need to live in the "real" world.
But the world most of us live in is as real as it gets, despite our delusions, confusions, and passive addictions. And there's nothing more real than the fact that each and every one of us is on a sinking ship, bound for death.
I meet people at my job who have been through this rotten life, who've faced the worst of humanity's demons, witnessed the dreary absence of God. I don't meet them in person, though. I read them on a page where it's easy to break down their disorders into functional systemic data. Despite this distantiation, it's hard not to feel the pain oozing out of their medical records. It's difficult not to note that it's this same distantiation that put them in ther position to begin with.
One guy has had 15 years of traumatic brain problems after getting hit in the head with a baseball bat. Another woman dislocated her nose after her husband punched her in the face. Another man, poor guy, was unable to maintain an erection for years due to his misshapen penis. The inciting incident for his disfigurement was only described in the documentation as "penile deformity for several years= vaccuum cleaner accident X girlfriend".
People heap mountains of misery onto one another because for some reason they can't just communicate their frustrations. But is this any better than the insurance company that denied all of these people services in their time of need because it did not fit the terms of a pre-negotiated contract. When you sign an insurance contract, you're consenting to future abuse. In fact, more than that, you're paying for the privelege of that abusive relationship. The thought is that the alternative, having no coverage at all, is far worse than facing these vultures when you're most vulnerable.
Does this argument sound familiar, the lesser of two evils? It's the same one used to keep us voting, and to keep us voting for a system that would gladly allow this to continue. It's no surprise then that the democratic party's health care argument is that everybody should have the honor of being a member in the dysfunctional clan of large insurance groups. The Republican plan, by contrast is to suck it up, get a job within the infastructure, or die. If you can find no place in the world we create, the rest of us slaves are better off without you. Both groups want us to get the virus. Only which strand is up for debate. There's no third way. No remove for sublimation unless we shut down these vile companies and start from scratch.
Then there was the woman whose thumb got caught up in a dog chain while trying to stop her pet from fighting another dog. The thumb was cut so severely that it sliced through the bone and was essentially hanging off the side of her hand. After amputating the thumb in the hospital, doctors discovered that the woman had a rare condition called hypercoagulation where the blood clots too much. They way they treat this is- I shit you not- by leech therapy. She would sit in bed all day getting sucked by leeches and when the leeches were...full or dead or...whatever, the doctors would bring in new ones. After a couple days, the insurance company got tired of paying for the leeches and put a stop to it. Leeches don't like competition, I guess.
When I get pediatric cases, you can trace the whole life. You can see when the kid was born and when they first started noticing something was wrong. You see that he was developmentally slow and had all sorts of health problems associated with this delay. Then they started calling it severe mental retardation and as the years peddled on; 3 years old, 4 years old, 5 years old. The kid gets to be six years old and he still can't walk. He still can't speak. He can't even crawl. You think about the difficulty this kid has just trying to be human, the struggle to push through every day, and the struggle his parents face with someone who requires so much extra help. When the doctor requests something, perhaps a useless treatment, perhaps a waste of money, perhaps something that just plain won't kill the kid, you want to scream to the monsters who deny him coverage GIVE THEM EVERYTHING THEY WANT. THEY'VE BEEN THROUGH SO MUCH. JUST GIVE THEM ANYTHING THEY WANT. We all pay for death with life, so shouldn't everything else be free?
Friday, November 6, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Less Human Than Human
My line of work is medical appeals. I work on the administrative end of outsourced case file reviews. Despite what you may think, it’s endlessly more fascinating than it sounds. What I do is facilitate utilization management (perhaps the most Orwellian health care term coined since “health care”) for internal or external appeals of carrier (insurance company) denials. I, along with more qualified medical professionals, examine these case files for content that may determine whether a treatment is/ was/ is going to be medically necessary or appropriate.
The final decision, you’ll be glad to know, does not rest with a faceless bureaucrat like me, but with a board-certified doctor in the same or similar specialty as the providing doctor requesting coverage for the treatment. These are tough decisions, sometimes life and death decisions. Even though our determinations ultimately only affect coverage by insurance, it’d be naïve to argue that it is anything other than that which keeps us alive. What insurance we can get, how well we can be covered, and how much we’ll be screwed if for some reason we’re not covered is all dependent on capital, that which aerates our lungs with breath, especially the sickest among us, on a day-to-day basis
The paperwork industrial complex behind modern medicine is massive. Any single case that crosses my desk can range from a prescription slip to a thousand or so pages of historical hospitalization records. From a clinical standpoint, my company is required to consider every single slip of recycled tree, every X-ray, every blurry photograph, every radiological impression, every indecipherable scribbled note, every bizarre semiotic gesture and shorthand. Suffice to say, individual words make a huge difference and overworked, underpaid doctors are notorious for lousy copyediting.
To make their judgments, doctors want to see cold, hard clinical facts. Therefore, one of the most glossed-over documents in these case packets is the letter of appeal from the individual whose care is being denied. Since these “members” of a health plan (the preferred terminology- like they’re a part of a special club) are not doctors themselves, and therefore not as acute diagnosticians as their treating providers are, the patient’s words don’t hold nearly as much stock as the words of the clinical professionals.
Yet, what’s lost in the hard science of objective rationality is the human drama on display in these letters. Every story is a tragedy, though some are more dismal and pathetic than others (the girl who wanted orthotic surgery so she could wear normal shoes like the rest of her friends).
The letters of appeal can range from sensible to desperate to rightfully agitated and bloodthirsty. In the fallacious game of doctors versus insurance company, where each side tries to persuade the same objective science to serve the needs of either the marketplace or the human OS, the sideline observer- a bureaucrat like me- can find the abject antihumanist rhetorics to be as pathological as the patient’s workup. It’s hard not to sympathize then solely with the patient, he or she trapped in a feedback control loop, not only biologically damaged but emotionally and institutionally powerless. In these letters, you can find the debilitating, dehumanizing, and quite possibly pathogenic/carcinogenic results of an anguish economy strengthened by human suffering. All of this paperwork serves to weaken human functionalism, which would, under normal circumstances, resist a cybernetic parasite/ vampiric ideology seeking to strengthen itself through the subservience of its host creators.
One of the most common phrases I see in these letters of appeal is the expression “I finally felt human”, as in “after I had that surgery, I finally felt human” or “I’ve been taking experimental drug Y for a month now and this is the first time I’ve felt human in a long time.” There’s no reason to mistake these statements for hyperbole or metaphor. Ask any one who has ever been really sick how his or her identity becomes appropriated by disease. Better yet, think of the last time you had a bad head cold or flu and how it made the world around you seem like a hypnagogic blur. Now imagine going through the world this way, making important decisions and struggling through once-rote tasks. Imagine the disgust of being unable to celebrate when celebration is in order or forcing those you care about to stress when they should be relaxing. Between the everyday mediation of the id and the superego, between the common conflict of cultural norms and bestial naturalism, between the schizophrenic quotidian cognitive dialectic that tries to reconcile the way things are and the way things ought to be, now lies disease first and foremost, destroying the body and then taking down the mind.
A sick person in America is a bit like an automaton. It’s no mistake that automatonism in medicine is a condition in which someone will forget they took pills and reflexively take them again, often resulting in overdose. When not constantly looking for a baseline, your every biological move is not only bound to the chemistry of a drug or the rehabilitation schedule of a procedure, but also particularly to the parties that make the decisions as to what treatment you’ll be permitted to get. Your sense of identity becomes buried under a sea of distress and paperwork.
Hostages of insurance jargon are no less dehumanized than Gitmo inmates, stripped of their integrity, assigned a number, and made to endure preventable physical and psychological harm for irrational aims. Thankfully, most people get well or stay well and don’t have to deal with this cycle. Others don’t even have the luxury of being a part of this cruel medical experiment (about ¼ of the population according to recent studies. As job creation declines and a bunch of rich experts with jobs and health insurance say that the economy is getting better, one has to wonder if our schizophrenic health care system would have even registered as a political issue had it not begun to affect the upper middle class (the caste system from which I descend).
If these sick people, these fractured and distorted people, are not really people at all- less human than human- what does that make them? Mutants? Robots? Zombies? Aliens? Or just depersonalized non-humans? If you were to aggregate all of the people that felt less than human in a culture than makes money corrupting the corporeal and creating the new flesh, wouldn’t it be the humans themselves who were the minority? Take all the sick whose bodies don’t feel right. Add those whose jobs make them feel 2/5 a slave. Combine with those whose consent to slavery has rewarded them with financial ruin, foreclosed homes, exorbitant medical bills, and mountainous credit card debt. Couple those with the ones who, as Andy Warhol famously quipped, feel more like they are watching television than living life. Integrate with those whose legality, love, or overall legitimacy is constantly called into question. Throw in those who are indentured to passive addictions or impervious to active addictions. Incorporate those who are constantly left out of the network or chronically lost in the paperwork. Remember those who cry invisible tears and die invisible deaths. The grand sum of all this dispiriting and dehumanizing is trillions of dollars in capital and a febrile nation who’s been forced out of the mammalian gene pool.
None of these people feel human, because they’re not. The disease has transformed us into mere carrier cells, operating solely to propagate our disease. To not do so would be to lose insurance and invite more disease. To resist insurance is to boycott our health. The only alternative to the current system is death. Make no mistake, the goal of the parasite of capital is the elimination of the human race and the replacement of the species with viral agents of toxic dissemination.
It’s important than to ignore the pleas of those who can still feel their humanity rush in, such as those writing the letters of appeal. Focus on the objective data. Language never lies and the dogma of written word can only serve one master, eh?
To be human is a privilege, not a right. Put somebody in a room and beat them with sticks and they’ll begin to fight back. Prolonged mistreatment though only breeds lower expectations. So after considerable privation, the hand comes around to throw us a few scraps. We thank the hand and watch it as it pats itself on the back for practicing bipartisanship when we should be biting that fucking hand right the fuck off. It’s not cannibalism. It’s non-human self-preservation.
Without proper health care, the survival of the species is at stake. To disguise this fact from us, the parasites on our backs have mutated us into something less human than human, uncaring and unfeeling, distracted and distraught, unable to resist for fear of death. Yet it’s death that approaches. Humans and non-humans. Covered or not. The hour draws nearer.
The final decision, you’ll be glad to know, does not rest with a faceless bureaucrat like me, but with a board-certified doctor in the same or similar specialty as the providing doctor requesting coverage for the treatment. These are tough decisions, sometimes life and death decisions. Even though our determinations ultimately only affect coverage by insurance, it’d be naïve to argue that it is anything other than that which keeps us alive. What insurance we can get, how well we can be covered, and how much we’ll be screwed if for some reason we’re not covered is all dependent on capital, that which aerates our lungs with breath, especially the sickest among us, on a day-to-day basis
The paperwork industrial complex behind modern medicine is massive. Any single case that crosses my desk can range from a prescription slip to a thousand or so pages of historical hospitalization records. From a clinical standpoint, my company is required to consider every single slip of recycled tree, every X-ray, every blurry photograph, every radiological impression, every indecipherable scribbled note, every bizarre semiotic gesture and shorthand. Suffice to say, individual words make a huge difference and overworked, underpaid doctors are notorious for lousy copyediting.
To make their judgments, doctors want to see cold, hard clinical facts. Therefore, one of the most glossed-over documents in these case packets is the letter of appeal from the individual whose care is being denied. Since these “members” of a health plan (the preferred terminology- like they’re a part of a special club) are not doctors themselves, and therefore not as acute diagnosticians as their treating providers are, the patient’s words don’t hold nearly as much stock as the words of the clinical professionals.
Yet, what’s lost in the hard science of objective rationality is the human drama on display in these letters. Every story is a tragedy, though some are more dismal and pathetic than others (the girl who wanted orthotic surgery so she could wear normal shoes like the rest of her friends).
The letters of appeal can range from sensible to desperate to rightfully agitated and bloodthirsty. In the fallacious game of doctors versus insurance company, where each side tries to persuade the same objective science to serve the needs of either the marketplace or the human OS, the sideline observer- a bureaucrat like me- can find the abject antihumanist rhetorics to be as pathological as the patient’s workup. It’s hard not to sympathize then solely with the patient, he or she trapped in a feedback control loop, not only biologically damaged but emotionally and institutionally powerless. In these letters, you can find the debilitating, dehumanizing, and quite possibly pathogenic/carcinogenic results of an anguish economy strengthened by human suffering. All of this paperwork serves to weaken human functionalism, which would, under normal circumstances, resist a cybernetic parasite/ vampiric ideology seeking to strengthen itself through the subservience of its host creators.
One of the most common phrases I see in these letters of appeal is the expression “I finally felt human”, as in “after I had that surgery, I finally felt human” or “I’ve been taking experimental drug Y for a month now and this is the first time I’ve felt human in a long time.” There’s no reason to mistake these statements for hyperbole or metaphor. Ask any one who has ever been really sick how his or her identity becomes appropriated by disease. Better yet, think of the last time you had a bad head cold or flu and how it made the world around you seem like a hypnagogic blur. Now imagine going through the world this way, making important decisions and struggling through once-rote tasks. Imagine the disgust of being unable to celebrate when celebration is in order or forcing those you care about to stress when they should be relaxing. Between the everyday mediation of the id and the superego, between the common conflict of cultural norms and bestial naturalism, between the schizophrenic quotidian cognitive dialectic that tries to reconcile the way things are and the way things ought to be, now lies disease first and foremost, destroying the body and then taking down the mind.
A sick person in America is a bit like an automaton. It’s no mistake that automatonism in medicine is a condition in which someone will forget they took pills and reflexively take them again, often resulting in overdose. When not constantly looking for a baseline, your every biological move is not only bound to the chemistry of a drug or the rehabilitation schedule of a procedure, but also particularly to the parties that make the decisions as to what treatment you’ll be permitted to get. Your sense of identity becomes buried under a sea of distress and paperwork.
Hostages of insurance jargon are no less dehumanized than Gitmo inmates, stripped of their integrity, assigned a number, and made to endure preventable physical and psychological harm for irrational aims. Thankfully, most people get well or stay well and don’t have to deal with this cycle. Others don’t even have the luxury of being a part of this cruel medical experiment (about ¼ of the population according to recent studies. As job creation declines and a bunch of rich experts with jobs and health insurance say that the economy is getting better, one has to wonder if our schizophrenic health care system would have even registered as a political issue had it not begun to affect the upper middle class (the caste system from which I descend).
If these sick people, these fractured and distorted people, are not really people at all- less human than human- what does that make them? Mutants? Robots? Zombies? Aliens? Or just depersonalized non-humans? If you were to aggregate all of the people that felt less than human in a culture than makes money corrupting the corporeal and creating the new flesh, wouldn’t it be the humans themselves who were the minority? Take all the sick whose bodies don’t feel right. Add those whose jobs make them feel 2/5 a slave. Combine with those whose consent to slavery has rewarded them with financial ruin, foreclosed homes, exorbitant medical bills, and mountainous credit card debt. Couple those with the ones who, as Andy Warhol famously quipped, feel more like they are watching television than living life. Integrate with those whose legality, love, or overall legitimacy is constantly called into question. Throw in those who are indentured to passive addictions or impervious to active addictions. Incorporate those who are constantly left out of the network or chronically lost in the paperwork. Remember those who cry invisible tears and die invisible deaths. The grand sum of all this dispiriting and dehumanizing is trillions of dollars in capital and a febrile nation who’s been forced out of the mammalian gene pool.
None of these people feel human, because they’re not. The disease has transformed us into mere carrier cells, operating solely to propagate our disease. To not do so would be to lose insurance and invite more disease. To resist insurance is to boycott our health. The only alternative to the current system is death. Make no mistake, the goal of the parasite of capital is the elimination of the human race and the replacement of the species with viral agents of toxic dissemination.
It’s important than to ignore the pleas of those who can still feel their humanity rush in, such as those writing the letters of appeal. Focus on the objective data. Language never lies and the dogma of written word can only serve one master, eh?
To be human is a privilege, not a right. Put somebody in a room and beat them with sticks and they’ll begin to fight back. Prolonged mistreatment though only breeds lower expectations. So after considerable privation, the hand comes around to throw us a few scraps. We thank the hand and watch it as it pats itself on the back for practicing bipartisanship when we should be biting that fucking hand right the fuck off. It’s not cannibalism. It’s non-human self-preservation.
Without proper health care, the survival of the species is at stake. To disguise this fact from us, the parasites on our backs have mutated us into something less human than human, uncaring and unfeeling, distracted and distraught, unable to resist for fear of death. Yet it’s death that approaches. Humans and non-humans. Covered or not. The hour draws nearer.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Silent Sneeze
Yesterday, I went to Trader Joe's as it opened to pick up some groceries. Trader Joe's is a grocery story that's like a smaller version of Whole Food's except it's actually affordable and its CEO isn't a merciless plutocrat. They also have great frozen meals that are perfectly suited for two-person homes. Though the quality of its products should appeal to all people, TJ's clientele mostly consists of lefty types, seemingly polite and open-minded by way of their politics, though their awareness of the world immediately around them may not be quite equal to their social awareness.
I arrived ten minutes early and pulled out my blackberry to check some news. It's a lousy habit and it makes me look like one of those space cadet teens swallowed whole in their technology matrixes, but it's something I do. Nearby, some hippie guy was having a conversation with a younger gentleman in his early twenties about renewable energy. The hippie made a gesture towards my car, one of the only ones in the parking lot and remarked on how in 30 years or so those things would be extinct. As if taking his cues for Zerzan, he didn't even mention the word "car" or "automobile", as if the very term offended him to the core. Moments later, he noticed as I did that his son was about to run into the road. Watch out there, hippie guy, cars aren't extinct yet!
I could tell the hippie held the same kind of antipathy toward me. I was dressed in a nice tucked in polo shirt and khakis, ready for work and absorbed in my cell phone. I drove that car to the grocery, not only because it was cheaper and far more convenient than Philadelphia's awful public transit system, and not only because it seemed more reasonable for carrying frozen groceries back to my home which wasn't within walking distance to the only affordable natural food market in the city, but because the rotten job market had forced me to work some 30 minutes outside of the city. You see, I had to make it to work on time or they might think that I was expendable at my place of business, where the employees had just incurred a 10% across the board salary cut. I was the enemy, alright. The working man.
A small crowd started to gather as opening time drew near. The presentation of new bodies likely introduced new pathogens into the environment and, possibly as a result, I sneezed. I must admit that I was a bit dumbfounded when the sneeze was followed by a long period of silence. Momentarily insulted by my peers, I soon looked back down at the day's headlines. Then, I felt the next sneeze coming up. They're sure to say something this time, I thought. It's early morning and perhaps the first one just caught them off guard. Sometimes, that will happen to me. I'll miss the opportunity to say "Bless you" by suspending too long a gap between the sneeze and my response time. To avoid embarrassment, I'll simply say nothing instead, but feel awkward and slightly perturbed.
Now, they were ready for it. Those lefty liberals with all that goodwill supposedly oozing out of their pockets. The Zerzanian hippie who was set to save the planet by enacting a final solution on automobiles. Here was their chance to redeem themselves with the smallest possible tiding they could grant.
"Bless You", or "God Bless You", which an agnostic like me doesn't say but still appreciates, is more than just an Emily Post gesture of proper manners. It's an incantation and an acknowledgement. It's well-wishing as a selfish act. Saying "Bless You" is a hex on your disease, an amelioration by way of a social support placebo. You say it not only because you care about your fellow man, but because you know that his disease could spread an afflict you. Despite all our attempts to set barriers between one another, we are still biologically dependent on one another. The survival of the species depends on our perpetual collective interest in the wellness of others. A society that does not care, looks away, or stands in silence is a society that is sick sick sick.
They ignored me again. I wanted to go inside and phlegm all over the organic produce. I wanted to wipe my sleeves on their shopping carts, to lick their granola, to teabag their teabags, but it'd be unreasonable to mistake a small gesture like this for a lack of caring. But caring is not only a convenience, it's also work. It's a full time job. Any of the doctors and nurses I work with will tell you how hard it is to keep treating the same assholes who never listen to you, are never compliant with their medications, and consecutively promote their own self-destruction, but they continue to treat these awful people. Real health care doesn't care who you are or what you did. It treats you same whether you just shot a cop or saved a baby from a burning building, whether you can afford to pay your bills or whether you don't have a dime to your name. It's the most indiscriminate, even Christlike, of all professions.
I arrived ten minutes early and pulled out my blackberry to check some news. It's a lousy habit and it makes me look like one of those space cadet teens swallowed whole in their technology matrixes, but it's something I do. Nearby, some hippie guy was having a conversation with a younger gentleman in his early twenties about renewable energy. The hippie made a gesture towards my car, one of the only ones in the parking lot and remarked on how in 30 years or so those things would be extinct. As if taking his cues for Zerzan, he didn't even mention the word "car" or "automobile", as if the very term offended him to the core. Moments later, he noticed as I did that his son was about to run into the road. Watch out there, hippie guy, cars aren't extinct yet!
I could tell the hippie held the same kind of antipathy toward me. I was dressed in a nice tucked in polo shirt and khakis, ready for work and absorbed in my cell phone. I drove that car to the grocery, not only because it was cheaper and far more convenient than Philadelphia's awful public transit system, and not only because it seemed more reasonable for carrying frozen groceries back to my home which wasn't within walking distance to the only affordable natural food market in the city, but because the rotten job market had forced me to work some 30 minutes outside of the city. You see, I had to make it to work on time or they might think that I was expendable at my place of business, where the employees had just incurred a 10% across the board salary cut. I was the enemy, alright. The working man.
A small crowd started to gather as opening time drew near. The presentation of new bodies likely introduced new pathogens into the environment and, possibly as a result, I sneezed. I must admit that I was a bit dumbfounded when the sneeze was followed by a long period of silence. Momentarily insulted by my peers, I soon looked back down at the day's headlines. Then, I felt the next sneeze coming up. They're sure to say something this time, I thought. It's early morning and perhaps the first one just caught them off guard. Sometimes, that will happen to me. I'll miss the opportunity to say "Bless you" by suspending too long a gap between the sneeze and my response time. To avoid embarrassment, I'll simply say nothing instead, but feel awkward and slightly perturbed.
Now, they were ready for it. Those lefty liberals with all that goodwill supposedly oozing out of their pockets. The Zerzanian hippie who was set to save the planet by enacting a final solution on automobiles. Here was their chance to redeem themselves with the smallest possible tiding they could grant.
"Bless You", or "God Bless You", which an agnostic like me doesn't say but still appreciates, is more than just an Emily Post gesture of proper manners. It's an incantation and an acknowledgement. It's well-wishing as a selfish act. Saying "Bless You" is a hex on your disease, an amelioration by way of a social support placebo. You say it not only because you care about your fellow man, but because you know that his disease could spread an afflict you. Despite all our attempts to set barriers between one another, we are still biologically dependent on one another. The survival of the species depends on our perpetual collective interest in the wellness of others. A society that does not care, looks away, or stands in silence is a society that is sick sick sick.
They ignored me again. I wanted to go inside and phlegm all over the organic produce. I wanted to wipe my sleeves on their shopping carts, to lick their granola, to teabag their teabags, but it'd be unreasonable to mistake a small gesture like this for a lack of caring. But caring is not only a convenience, it's also work. It's a full time job. Any of the doctors and nurses I work with will tell you how hard it is to keep treating the same assholes who never listen to you, are never compliant with their medications, and consecutively promote their own self-destruction, but they continue to treat these awful people. Real health care doesn't care who you are or what you did. It treats you same whether you just shot a cop or saved a baby from a burning building, whether you can afford to pay your bills or whether you don't have a dime to your name. It's the most indiscriminate, even Christlike, of all professions.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Admiration for the Tapeworm
I had a conversation with a friend who had just gotten over a nasty cold that resulted in a major ear infection. without health insurance, she waited around to see what it did. Finally, after about 6 or 7 days she was able to find a friend with some leftover antibiotics, which helped clear it up. She's thankful she only got an earache. I am too.
Spinoza's idea about human survival (pieced together from what I vaguely remember) was that any species that allowed for its own self-destruction (when it could be prevented) was biologically maladaptive- and hence must have been overtaken by an external force. it's always been my contention that ideologies can function quite literally as artificial intelligences, operating as self-perpetuating beings with or without the assistance of human co-conspirators (by nature of its parasitic appropriation of our means of survival). capitalism fits this model succinctly and appears to be the tapeworm chewing away at our chance for surviva as a species. it's a disease and it's making our species sick. we need universal coverage for sure to ameliorate the symptoms, but it's just one step on the road to a full recovery.
Spinoza's idea about human survival (pieced together from what I vaguely remember) was that any species that allowed for its own self-destruction (when it could be prevented) was biologically maladaptive- and hence must have been overtaken by an external force. it's always been my contention that ideologies can function quite literally as artificial intelligences, operating as self-perpetuating beings with or without the assistance of human co-conspirators (by nature of its parasitic appropriation of our means of survival). capitalism fits this model succinctly and appears to be the tapeworm chewing away at our chance for surviva as a species. it's a disease and it's making our species sick. we need universal coverage for sure to ameliorate the symptoms, but it's just one step on the road to a full recovery.
Invisble Men in a One-Eyed World
I walked by a homeless man this morning, who asked if I had any change. I didn't. I wasn't trying to be an asshole. I sincerely had no money. "No, I'm sorry. I seriously have nothing." As he repeated my words to me, they took on a new resonance. "I'm sorry. I seriously have nothing." Who the fuck was I telling a homeless man I had nothing? He continued as I scuttled up the street, away from his world and his problem, expecting the reality of his situation to disipate behind me. It didn't. "I'm sorry" he screamed, squeezing his face as he did so. "I'm sorry!" He yelled. "I'm sorry, I'm sick! I'm sick!"
The senate panel shot down the public option twice today.
The senate panel shot down the public option twice today.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Meconium and Its Discontents
I was buying something at the market and the checkout girl sneezed into her hands. Oh no, Swine Flu, I thought. There it spreads. In front of me was an infant with his nose and upper lip stained by mucus. He stared at me as if from a stoned daze, looked down, gazed right. I smiled at him, trying to cheer up what was likely a trying and confusing time for him. It has always been my contention that childhood is the most stressful time for humans, which is why we repress the stress and it comes out in weird ways later in life. In fact, the pain of the day-to-day is so insufferable during the first three or four years of life that we suppress all of our memories. What a collective daydream we all live. Will humanity one day forget its own infantile collaboration of consciousness? Society is young, nascent, so young in fact that sick people like Margaret Thatcher doesn't even believe in it.
The girl could have called in sick, but then again she probably doesn't have any sick days. So, she'd have to go without a day's pay. She might also get in trouble with her boss, who probably isn't fond of people taking off when they don't have sick days. If she loses her job in this economy, she's fucked. She can't afford to do anything that might jeopardize the job she hates, that demeans her and dehumanizes her and forces her to go in when she's sick. There's a lot of politics in that sneeze. And with it, the virus spreads To the lower-income baby whose immune system is already working overtime, whose stress levels are already heightened. The check out girl's disadvantage is our loss and while someone somewhere is pocketing her sick days, the sickness is what gets redistributed. We all wash our hands in the filth, from my hand to the dollar to her hand to the register and then from the register to her hand to the next customer in line, who requires change. We all require change and we'll all check out sooner or later.
We're a sick baby trying to struggle our way through our infancy, unable to remember the past and unable to think beyond self-preservation even when our needs are being met. We're redistributing the sickness.
The girl could have called in sick, but then again she probably doesn't have any sick days. So, she'd have to go without a day's pay. She might also get in trouble with her boss, who probably isn't fond of people taking off when they don't have sick days. If she loses her job in this economy, she's fucked. She can't afford to do anything that might jeopardize the job she hates, that demeans her and dehumanizes her and forces her to go in when she's sick. There's a lot of politics in that sneeze. And with it, the virus spreads To the lower-income baby whose immune system is already working overtime, whose stress levels are already heightened. The check out girl's disadvantage is our loss and while someone somewhere is pocketing her sick days, the sickness is what gets redistributed. We all wash our hands in the filth, from my hand to the dollar to her hand to the register and then from the register to her hand to the next customer in line, who requires change. We all require change and we'll all check out sooner or later.
We're a sick baby trying to struggle our way through our infancy, unable to remember the past and unable to think beyond self-preservation even when our needs are being met. We're redistributing the sickness.
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