Letter 2 America for October 22, 2013

Dear America,

The world...at least the financial world...is breathing a collective sigh of relief now that a deal has been struck between the hard right and the rest of us on the subject of government operation and service of its debt, but how long will it last.  This seems to me to be just one more chapter in a never ending saga of political manipulation and disingenuousness.  After all, the real purpose of the Republicans' most recent tactic was pursuit of an overall strategy intended to reverse eighty years of socio-political progress toward an egalitarian society.  The progressives want a country in which everyone has a modicum of comfort and the conservatives want a society in which they can have everything and let those less fortunate swing.  That is their goal, and they will persist in pursuing it until the end of American history, and then they will find another country on which to inflict their creed.  The reason for their persistence and ardor is bifurcated.  On the one hand, they want everything for themselves, but that begs the question, what are you going to do with everything when you get it.  The holy grail of conservatism seems to be having so much that you cannot possibly use it all, but why.  The answer is the other half of their motivation: to prevent anyone else from having anything.  I know that sounds like a petulant, jejune oversimplification...more like a child's jibe than a worldview, but it seems apt to me.  It is predation for predation's sake that motivates conservatives, and now there is proof.

This whole fixation on "Obamacare" demonstrates both principles that drive conservatism.  The Affordable Care Act is just the pragmatic version of what the people of this country--and most of the rest of the developed world really--want for themselves.  In fact, even in the most recent period of conservative political hegemony, the period during which George W. Bush was elected to The Presidency twice and at least for the first part of those two terms the two branches of congress were Republican too, more than 60% of the American people wanted a single payer health care system.  Yet, during that period of Republican political dominance, nothing was done to advance the decades old crusade among liberals for universal health care.  The fact is that the Republicans...conservatives in particular...didn't want it, but they were savvy enough to come to the American people with enough other specious ideas to prevail.  They claimed to hold certain things sacred, and Americans bought American Exceptionalism, the Evangelical Right, moral absolutism and the like, never questioning how so much sketchy behavior in congress could be the product of people holding those values, and never asking why protecting the health of all of the American people was a bad idea.  And then came 2006 and the Democratic congresses that followed, culminating in 2010 with the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which the Republicans quickly dubbed Obamacare as if it were "Seward's Folly," now better known as Alaska, you know, where ten percent of our domestic oil production still comes from.  And in a deliberate, concerted way they defamed the law that was the only pragmatic option for an administration that really wanted that single payer system that the American people had been wanting...at least since 1992 with the election of Bill Clinton.  In fact it was then that the idea for Obamacare was hatched...by Republicans trying to prevent Clinton's commission on the subject from overseeing the creation of a single payer system in the United States.  With canards and exaggerations like "death panels" they defamed their very own idea when it became the Obamacare alternative to what everyone really wanted because they really don't want anything in the way of universal healthcare.  How else can you explain the history of the idea.  But what is their motivation.

It's money.  They want to preserve the money machine that is the pharmaceuticals industry, the medical profession, and ironically, the drinking at the federal, tax-payer funded trough by both.  Medicare puts enormous amounts of money--hundreds of billions of dollars both directly and indirectly--into their pockets and those of the insurance industry, which wins either way.  A government regulated system puts a damper on that cash flow, and that is the real objection to Obamacare, and to the greater concept of a single payer system of healthcare.  If it's public it's controlled, and that's not where the money is.  So in the final analysis, it all comes down to a simple question for the self-proclaimed moralists of the conservative movement: WWJD as they say.  What would Jesus do?

First, let me concede that I have only a secular idea.  To me, Jesus is not a religious, but a historical figure, which doesn't diminish his role in my life, by the way.  Christ is as much an example to me as He is to anyone who worships him mindlessly.  The Judeo-Christian ideal is a positive thing, and even for those of us who are agnostic...or even atheistic...the pull of that ideal as a social normative is powerful and unquestionably noble.  So, while I am not among the faithful, I am a christian none the less, and in my estimation I am the better for it.  But what about the Koch brothers?  Are they christians, or are they just Christians?  I think the answer is in their quest to abolish what conservatives pejoratively call "Obamacare."  In my opinion, the issue of universal health care in whatever form is the watershed for morality in this country, and in that respect, I'm glad that I'm not a conservative Republican.  If they're right and there is this sentient being in heaven overseeing all we do, they are going to have to answer to him one day...all of them.

Your friend,

Mike