Forget Trying to Make Nice with the Priests and Kings
By LIONEL ROLFE
Dear Mr. Obama,
Please let me remind you that there are times you just can’t be bipartisan. Not with the priests and kings who you can always count on standing against progress. In the midst of battle against these same foes, a couple of our nation’s founding fathers took strong note of that. “These are the times that try men’s soul,” Tom Paine wrote in “Common Sense.” Thomas Jefferson said that, “the tree of liberty must be replenished every ten to 20 years with the blood of patriots and the blood of tyrants.”
You couldn’t be bipartisan in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War when Hitler helped his pal Franco destroy the democratic Spanish Republic. And no one was talking bipartisanship with Hitler in Germany. Sometimes you have to fight.
There were concepts of enlightenment that the American and French revolutions both championed. It was no accident that some of the leaders of our revolution were also leaders of the French Revolution. Think men such as Tom Paine and Benjamin Franklin. The revolutionaries believed in the enlightenment, in democracy and science over the kings and priests. Go back and listen to Beethoven’s Ninth to understand the age of enlightenment.
And don’t misunderstand our country. The people who believe in kings and priests are still with us. The fact is that a couple of centuries after the revolution, we’re still a nation torn between the ideals of enlightenment and science and democracy against the brutish ways of the powers that be.
As the battle over healthcare evolves, remember it’s the same battle that has been fought and re-fought ever since the Revolution. Jefferson was right on. There are tyrants and patriots. The insurance companies come first to mind.
Healthcare is the most important domestic concern there is. You notice I said, “healthcare,” not “health insurance.” The whole concept of a nation being healthy has little to do with the odd business of insurance where you’re betting against the house, which always wins. They are in business to sell policies to the healthy and make the taxpayers pay for the sick. It’s always been a good bargain for them, but it’s a lousy one for the rest of us. That’s why we’ve been stuck paying nearly a fifth of our gross national production on health care.
I speak as one who spent a month at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. The great stone monolith rising above the freeways with its three stern towers used to fill me with that same sense of horror the dreary Dickensian workhouses that still dot grimmer parts of the green, gray English countryside invoke.
But in the 1980s, I came to have reason to change my view of the place. It became a house of life, not a house of death, which its appearance seemed to suggest. I learned that my previous negative feelings about the place were unfounded.
I knew that County Hospital has always been the hospital of last resort, but when I developed chills and high fever and my privates swelled to twice their normal size, I was in such intense pain I hardly remember getting there.
What was surprising to me, right from the start, was the concern of nearly everyone who took care of me exhibited. I’ve been in hospitals before so I had valid comparisons. Back in the ’60s, I spent nearly three weeks in traction in a San Joaquin Valley hospital after an automobile accident. And five years before I had gone to Cedars-Sinai for something, where I think the inferior care caused some of my later problems.
County, which has only recently been decommissioned, was most definitely of another time and place. It was built when Los Angeles was substantial, serviceable and solid, in a mid-west kind of way.
It was summer, and the evenings were hot, yet the high green walls stayed cool. Small fans here and there labored to keep patients and staff comfortable, and they succeeded, although perhaps not by modern standards.
I realized that in a way, this country has always had rudiments of socialized medicine, and to it I owe my life. County Hospital was built with the spirit of the New Deal, with the kind of enlightenment that has too long been missing from the body politic ever since Ronald Reagan. What’s a society for, if not to provide everyone good medical care, even if they can’t afford it.
Construction of the old county hospital was begun in the 1920s, financed by local bonds. By the 1930s, the bonds were kaput, and the hospital was finished as a WPA project. By the 1980s, the building may be a little down on its uppers, but the lobby still featured art and designs done in the grand public manner spawned by the Great Depression, with a quote of the Hippocratic oath, reminding healers that the lives of the poor are just as valuable as the lives of the rich.
The Hippocratic Oath written large in the hospital’s lobby today sounds almost socialist in its implications, so it’s good that the old building still stands, reminding us that we are a nation that was born in revolution, against the kings and priests.
Make no mistake. The tyrants, the insurance companies in this case, will try to destroy the dream, the necessity of healthcare for all the people. Patriots must stand firm.
Take this to heart, Mr. Obama. Sometimes, a person’s worth is reflected by his enemies.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
