A Slight Delay

It’s now five years to the day since President Bush unilaterally declared an end to the Crusade War On Terror  Fight Against Global Extremism Glorious Struggle Against Islamofascism War in Iraq, which was meant to find Osama Bin Laden democratize the Middle East bring peace, prosperity, and democracy to Iraq  wait a minute. What in the hell are we doing there again? The names, faces, and rationales have shifted as if in a sandstorm, or have become lost in the fog of war; each promise, and each benchmark, has been broken, rationalized, and ultimately replaced, with the administration fervently hoping each time that nobody remembers the rationales of days gone by. (more…)

Since the government seems to have realized, gradually and belatedly, that trying to scare the hell out of the populace with threats of terrorist attacks doesn’t have the same political effect that it used to, I’m thinking there’ll probably be a change in tactics for the ‘08 elections. With prices both of crude and of gasoline reaching all-time highs (and with gas prices here on the east coast projected to top $4.00/gallon in time for Memorial Day weekend), fuel prices have become a hot-button issue. My gut tells me we’ll see either some form of negotiated deal to drop prices, or a release from the strategic reserves, timed either for the Democratic convention, or some time around Labor Day weekend. I could be dead wrong here (lord knows it wouldn’t be the first time), but this administration has played politics with enough other issues that it wouldn’t take a hardened cynic to see the possibility.

We’ve been in a more or less constant election cycle since late 2003. We went from being in the run-up to the ‘04 election, to the election itself, to a protracted runup to the ‘06 election, to the run-up to the ‘08 election starting pretty much as soon as the polls closed in November ‘06. I don’t expect that will change; the only thing that will be different, I suspect, is a different opposition party doing the talking.

And there’s been no shortage of talk… the endless rounds of the Sunday talk shows, dozens of commercials (including 3 renditions of the “3am” ad, as of this writing), and 30 or so debates. (more…)

After reading Chris Hedges’ I Don’t Believe in Atheists and Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (and Kurt Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect, which I’m reading now and will be taking up later this week), I seem to have pacifism on the brain lately. Something occurred to me: Pacifists, like generals, are always ready to fight the last war. Just the same as those who wage war need a degree of creativity and foresight to be effective, so too must the antiwar movement. It isn’t enough to do something because it worked in ‘68; we’re forty years on now, and the same old things aren’t going to be nearly as effective now as they were then.

Worst of all, it seems that so much of the antiwar movement is reactive rather than proactive. We seem to have waited ’til we were already well on the way to mobilization to try to sound the alarm, rather than realizing that the run-up to war, the war itself, and the means by which it’s conducted are all the product of a particular mindset. It seems to me that the odds of a good result would be higher if we’d address that mindset, rather than trying to change the tide this long after the fact.

Science has made great strides in prenatal and neonatal research, and things have the potential to get interesting. For instance, it’s only a matter of time before we see a modification of the common “Parental Advisory–Explicit Content” stickers found on so many CDs. Building on pseudoscientific quack Don Campbell’s research on the effects of music on unborn and newborn babies, a bill to relabel CDs will be introduced. The current sticker will be replaced by, “Prenatal Advisory–Explicit Content.” It will be argued from both sides that hearing obscenity will have a deleterious effect on the unborn. Using the same labirynthine logic with which they’ve defined the abortion debate, the GOP will argue that the unborn, though they lack the facilities to comprehend what they’re hearing, could be corrupted by the content of the music; the Democrats, of course, will fall in line behind the GOP for fear of losing support on a populist issue in an election year. (more…)

This being an election year, we’re reminded constantly that somewhere in the neighborhood of 45 million Americans have no health insurance. An additional 30 million people (give or take a few mil) are temporarily without health insurance in the course of a given year. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that nobody’s getting sick, it just means we can’t afford to.

And how, exactly, are the uninsured going to pay for anything from hospital visits to critical care? You see ads for hospitals from time to time, about how they’re so advanced, about their great strides in neonatal care, cardiac medicine and oncology… it’s like they’re rattling off the features on a car. “Do you have 99 dollars and a job? You may qualify for health care! Try the new 2009 Pinebrook Hospital. Preferred patients get 4.9% financing with only 150 dollars down.” Before you know it, they’ll be offering lease options on artificial hearts. What the hell, once you kick over, someone else’ll get it.

And like everything else that’s financed, they’ll find ways to repo the stuff if you fall behind on your payments. You’ll wake up one morning to two enormous guys holding you down while a third cuts out your corneas. Your female coworkers will come in with their faces saggy and their breasts two cup sizes smaller: “Liz missed two installments on her implants.”

At least there wouldn’t be the long waits for transplants. Just go to the hospital and some guy with a cheap jacket and a combover will tell you about this week’s livers. “This one’s only had two previous owners. The last guy had a bit of a drinking problem, but it still works like a charm.” They’d even make sure it had that new organ smell.