Fewer Food Stamps, More Drug Ripoffs, Less Health Care

I AM ABSENT from this space for five reasons.

One, I am researching a story that will appear here...well, whenever it appears here – that is, assuming I can ferret out sufficient information I can write it with reasonable certainty my conclusions are correct. If not, then the story won't appear at all.

Two, I am stunned to the point of genuine despair by the magnitude of this nation's (methodically genocidal) war against elderly, disabled and chronically unemployed or under-employed people, the newest victims of which are food-stamp recipients,  self included, who will soon be savaged by a multi-billion-dollar cut (an estimated average of $90 per family per month here in Washington state.) That's atop another death-dealing atrocity: continuation of the federal ban on importing radically less expensive Canadian prescription drugs. In either instance, the savagery is typically “bipartisan” – that is, the politicians of both parties again demonstrating their one-party fealty to Wall Street and thus once more proving our “constitutional democracy” is merely (another) Big Lie.

Three, actually a subset of Item Two, is my dismay at even (presumably) Leftist media for ignoring the triple Wall Street triumph implicit in the Supreme Court decision upholding the ultimate privatization of health care: the fact (A), the individual mandate reduces us all to serfdom in the health-insurance satrapy even as (B), the Medicaid exemption effectively prohibits the federal subsidies that would allow lower-income families to comply with the mandate. Then there's (C), how the tsunami of profits granted the sultans of sickness by the court's decision dooms forever – yes, forever – any possibility We the Peasants of Ayn Rand's United Estates will be granted, by any means short of revolution, the public-option/single-payer health care the civilized world accepts as a basic human right. As of this writing, only one widely circulated journalist, The Nation's Laura Flanders, has dared address any of these issues.

Four, I'm seriously questioning the relevance of this blog. The more I reflect on the dreadful reality of Moron Nation – the terrible extent to which we have been conditioned into the 21st Century equivalent of the Tsarist Russian peasant mentality (comparable even in prideful ignorance, lynch-mob brutality and suicidal refusal to acknowledge economic reality); the parallel and even more horridly ominous rejection of any sense of noblesse oblige amongst our leaders – the more I find it difficult to regard my present content as anything more than pointless ranting. Perhaps (or so I tell myself), I might find another (less despair-making) subject, maybe something akin to "In Transit," for which scroll down. But is that possible? One of the primary axioms of the writer's workshop I sometimes co-chair is to “write what you know.” And what – especially since the loss of my life's work in that 1983 fire – do I know better than despair?

Five, I'm crippled as never before. The wildly erratic weather inflicted on the Pacific Northwest Coast by terminal climate change – a few blessedly warm days amidst the most cold and wet summer ever recorded – has aggravated my spinal arthritis, inflamed the bursitis in my shoulders and fired up the tendonitis in my arms. The combined result is constant pain of toothache intensity radically worsened by any sort of lifting or repetitive motion. Photography is impossible – it is agony to lift anything much heavier than my own hands – and writing hurts too much to endure for more than maybe 30-minute intervals. Even the weight of my cane is intolerable; it makes walking anywhere an exercise in such misery I mostly stay home.

As some of you already know, the obscenely coddled habitual drunken driver who dealt me these ever-deteriorating afflictions had been arrested for drunken driving at least 19 times before 23 September 1978, when he spun across four rainslick lanes of Tacoma traffic to ram his (beater) 442 Oldsmobile into my (new) Honda Civic. It was 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon; I was on my way home from shopping and was stopped in the momentary standstill of a shopping-center exit. Then this goddamned drunk in his gas-guzzling penis-substitute broadsided me with such force it halved the width of my car, knocking me through a fireplug (my mind's eye can still see the geyser of water) and jamming my body so far into the passenger space I had to cut my seat-belts to get free – one of the just-in-case reasons I always carried a Swiss Army Knife. It was an automotive replay of Godzilla versus Bambi, but luckily for my friends I was alone; the cops said anyone with me would have been crushed to death.

Witnesses later told me it appeared the drunk lost control of his car not just because he was approaching an all-time drunkometer record but because he was also trying to drive and beat his wife at the same time.

It pleases me no end to report this sociopath has since died, no doubt of liver failure, and to note his death has undoubtedly made Washington state highways one drunk safer. But I nevertheless curse him every morning I awaken in pain – as I curse this state for its outrageous pampering of such defiant menaces to life and limb.

And why are habitual drunks a protected subspecies here in Washington? Probably – this guess based on my years covering the courts and legislature – because too many of the people by whom we are legislated and adjudicated are themselves habitual drunks.

All of which is preface to a New Doxology:

Curse god from whom all misery flows
Curse him ye victims here below
Curse him above ye heavenly host
Curse father, son and holy ghost.

LB/1 July 2012

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