Healthcare and Me Part 1

Some time in the spring of 1974, my world was somewhat disturbed by the event of my conception, in Belfast, northern Ireland.   When this became obvious to my parents, they went to see a doctor, employed by the UK National Health Service.  They saw the doctor quite a few times.  They got ready. The doctor’s fee to them?  Nothing.

My mum spent a few days in hospital in January 1975, including a monumental and pretty heroic 24 hour labor.  She was attended to by the doctor she had come to know well and by excellent nursing staff; my dad was there for the duration.

The hospital’s fee to them?  Nothing.

When I was seven years old, I had my tonsils removed due to the fact that my doctor thought it would help with a recurring sinus problem.  Two nights in hospital.  Very dry throat. Large-scale Boba Fett ‘Star Wars’ toy arrived to make me feel better.  It worked.

What it cost my parents?  Nothing.

Thankfully, my health has been pretty good since then, but any time I got sick, my prescriptions cost me the equivalent of around $10, the same as any prescription for any medicine did in northern Ireland until recently.  In fairness, I have to acknowledge that the price has changed in the last year.

It’s been cut in half.  And from January 2010, medical prescriptions in northern Ireland will be entirely free.

Of course it isn’t strictly true to say that ‘my parents paid nothing’ for my health care.  They paid taxes.  Taxes that in the UK amount to nothing on the equivalent of the first $10500 of income; above this level average earners pay 22%; in practice, this is favorably comparable to US federal income tax rates.  (Frankly, the total amount I have paid in tax in my adult life may amount to less than one typical private industry major medical intervention in the US.)

This is what funds the UK National Health Service.  This is what made it possible for my parents to have three children cared for through pregnancy, labor, birth and throughout our lives.  This is what paid for my childhood surgeries and medications.  This is what salaries my doctor.  This is what paid for the attempts to save my grandmother’s life from breast cancer, covering two mastectomies and long hospital stays.  This is what has paid for all of my sister’s diabetes medicine and hospital care for over twenty years.  This is what paid for another family member to have electronic breathing apparatus at home when his asthma sometimes became so severe he needed extra support.

This is why no one in the UK ever has to go bankrupt due to medical bills.  This is why no one in the UK has to choose which part of their body to care for.  This is why no one in the UK has to stay in a job they hate because they’re afraid of getting sick.  This is why no one has to hide details from their doctors in case a pre-existing condition became the reason an insurance provider refused to provide insurance.  In my book, that would suggest the insurance provider probably should call its business something else.  No one in the UK ever worries about how they are going to provide for their own, or their families’ health.  This, to me, is an astonishing example of communitarian justice; the highest ethic of humanity: when people care for their fellow people, with no concern for individual reward.  And this is why, if I require major medical intervention in the future, instead of receiving it in the United States where I now live, work, and hope to contribute as a grateful immigrant, I may have to go back home.

Forget Your Perfect Offering

It’s been a strange few weeks – suddenly UK politicians have been forced to live like the rest of us (or maybe just a little bit more like the rest of us), senior US politicians are claiming that the CIA lied to them about torture, a Scottish Presbyterian minister is comparing the gay rights movement to Nazism, US radio hosts are implying that President Obama is the antichrist, Tom Hanks is chasing the Illuminati, and Leonard Cohen’s still coming to town.  Thank God.

Next week the Canadian poet, novelist, and singer will once again perform his exquisite songs in public, over three nights in Dublin and one in Belfast, inviting his audience to participate in the mystic wandering that first spoke loudly for a generation seeking to live meaningfully, in the late 1960s, between what Martin Luther King, Jr. called the triplets of racism, materialism and militarism.  Cohen is now 74 years old, and after an eventful decade in which the sacred and profane mingled perhaps more obviously than usual (six years in a Buddhist monastery on the one hand, having his retirement fund stolen by his accountant on the other) seems more at peace than ever, more amused with life than complaining about its struggles, honest about human need – for companionship, pleasure, answers, or at least the beginning of answers.

His recent live album showcases a voice slow-crackling with gravel, but incarnating generosity – he speaks often of his sense of privilege to be able to share his art in public, and his addressing of the audience as ‘friends’ evokes a sense of genuine community.

“Forget your perfect offering, there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets through,” he wrote in 1992; and listening to him today, it feels like these words have been traveling for seventeen years to meet an audience living between the same triplets as Dr King, but perhaps with a new demonic sibling in the form of constant fear.  When Cohen sings these words, you can feel the light.

I can feel it especially, as I continue to try to make sense of my new life in the United States.  This past week the news out here has been dominated by the suggestion that the CIA may have lied to members of Congress about the use of the euphemistically named ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.  I wonder if this story will admit the cracks that Leonard Cohen speaks of – because we surely need some light when we can’t be sure who’s telling the truth, when our public conversation has been so colonized by vengeance and snark that we couldn’t even be sure of the truth if an objective robot truth machine appeared on television to tell us what it was.

This makes me feel more than a little depressed.  I need to remind myself that darkness can get the upper hand only if I tune my mind to its frequency.  I think this is what the Apostle Paul means when he asks us to focus on ‘whatever is noble’.  You can be captivated – captured, actually – by images of suffering and violence; you can be consumed by the notion that the world is a terrible place.  But you have to learn this.  You learn it from the strangest of places – from the LCD screen that dominates your living room, from a party political campaign billboard, from the over-mined themes of fiction sold in supermarkets or multiplexes.  You don’t have to think to believe that everything’s going to hell.  It’s the default position of our cultural discourse; or at least the part of it that turns up as headlines in the mainstream media, most of the time.  You do have to think to challenge the tide of negativity and even nihilism that wants to be in charge.   There are, of course, poets and writers and musicians and architects and activists and artists in every medium of life that offer lenses through which you can resist this tide.  And if I were in Ireland, I’d be planning to make a kind of religious pilgrimage to hear Leonard Cohen in my home town later this month.  I’d want to be balmed by his voice, the way we feel when we are with someone who seems to know more about everything than we do; I’d want to be graced by the sound of his music; I’d want to meditate on lyrics that require us to face ourselves, and in the light of God, to see something more than just the cracks.  The light shines through the cracks, and the cracks cannot overcome it.

Rest

I'm away for a week and so won't be posting til the 10th July or later.   If you haven't taken a vacation from the internet for a while, you're welcome to join me. Take care everybody.

Apologising

The Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Dromore, Harold Miller, has called for the people he represents to acknowledge their part in the communal division that contributed to the violent conflict of the past forty years.  You can hear the interview here (scroll to 33.26 for the start of the conversation).  This conflict recently reached another one of the milestones that negotiated settlements require, when Loyalist paramilitaries decommissioned their weapons.  Bishop Miller is taking the opportunity for self-reflection as we live through the 40th anniversary year of when the modern 'Troubles' began.  He suggests that as part of marking the moment 'when things came to the surface' that we should all ask ourselves what particular responsibility each of us may have for shaping the social norms that allowed so much violence - physical and psychological - to prevail for so long. "We must never go back to that point: it can happen so quickly – we have to come to a point of examining ourselves whether in the Protestant or Catholic community to ask what were the things that were wrong in our community."

When asked if he agrees with the suggestion that Protestants are inclined to think that they are 'entirely the victims of the Troubles' he responds with clarity:

"Let’s not play games: to the extent that the allegations are true, of course they should be repented of."

He's right.  He speaks for me too.  I am too quick to allow my prejudices to surface; and need help to understand the world as people different from me do.  I once heard Stanley Hauerwas say that one of the reasons that he is a pacifist is that he has inner violent urges that trouble him (if I'm mis-paraphrasing, please forgive me).  I don't think I'm particularly violent, but it's very easy for me to shape other people in my image; to decide for them how they should feel about things; to imagine that I know better than they do.  Actually, this requires very little imagination at all - in fact, if I was using my imagination, I might be a little more respectful of difference.  I'm glad to hear the call for self-reflection from Bishop Miller.  He's not the first to say such a thing; but he's saying it with authority and humility, and I want to listen, not just because he is unlocking one of the keys to northern Ireland's (and therefore my) future, but for every human community that exists or will exist.

My Complete, Sent-From-The-Future Review of 'Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen'

I had a dream the other night in which I was visited by my The Film Talk co-host Jett Loe as an old man –he  didn’t seem to remember me; but he gave me a transcript of a statement which he asked me to read on the show.  I duly complied, but demand for a text version of the statement has been so high that it seemed useful to publish it here.  Apply some mournful music and you'll get the picture:

"No one would have believed in the first years of the 21st century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless mists of space.  No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized as a scientist studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.  Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets.  And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded us with envious eyes and slowly, and surely drew their plans against us.  [With deep thanks to Mr Wells]

It was in early summer 2009 that the tipping point was reached; an event so pure in its rage against the right of human beings to the pursuit of happiness that one would be churlish to deny its particular genius.  The race had lived through moments of such fear and trembling in the past that its mavens did not at first fear the worst.  After all, a culture that had endured the spectacle of ‘The Mummy Curse of the Dragon Emperor’, the films of Tony Scott, the willingness of whole populations to buy Tamagotchi virtual pets, and the appearance of Ricky Martin at President Bush’s first inaugural ball, could sustain any assault.  Couldn’t it?

But that was before the virus.

It began during the last full week of June, when millions of people suddenly became detached from their otherwise sensible existences.  In large groups, they marched as if drawn by the tune of a distant drum or piper, to their out of town shopping malls, their town centers long since hollowed out by the so-called ‘vision’ of the elite political cohort euphemistically named ‘developers’; they paid their eight bucks, bought their popcorn tonnage, were carried into the salons of death by forklift trucks, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

It all seemed so safe and tranquil.

Had they only listened to the warnings.

Shadowy figures had recently emerged on the landscape; figures known only as ‘bloggers’ – as with any class of angels, some were fallen, and not only did they not see the danger, in fact they welcomed it, wide-eyed and ginger-bearded.  It fell to a remnant to see clearly the doom to come.  It has been difficult to determine just who these people were, but what surviving records we have indicate theirs was a pyramid structure; tribal chiefs with regal names such as Ebert, Kael, and Sarris gave way to younger avatars.  One sect in particular – the TFTs – were known for their sacrificial attempts at saving their brothers and sisters.  TFTs would allow themselves to be exposed to the horrors of the multiplex in the often vain hope that their visible scars would serve as harbinger enough to prevent others from suffering the same fate.  TFTs were the true unsung heroes of this time; now known in mythology as the ‘Captain Jack Sparrow Forward Slash Orc Era’.

Nothing is known for certain of the TFTs after June 26th 2009, when the Fallen rose to infect the culture; it has been rumoured for decades that a couple of the TFTs simply disappeared; they donated what little property and money they had to the poor, and underwent an experimental procedure known as ‘soul-cleansing’: by which means a human could be liberated from their memories of awful movies.  The unfortunate side effects included loss of other memories, but the benefits far outweighed the costs; TFTs may have escaped to caves on the Mexico-Texas border, where they remained in hiding til it seemed safe to emerge, fifty or sixty years later.

As for 2009, the T1N1 virus, known colloquially as ‘Robot Flu’ multiplied disproportionately after its introduction to the biosphere.  Audiences across the world were captured within minutes, unable to move from their luxuriant deep seats, weighed down by popcorn buckets and dread; forced like Alex in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ to gaze upon such horrors as a tiny mechanical dog dry humping a girl’s leg, John Turturro’s naked rear end, twin robots whose ethnic stereotyping would have looked out of place in a black and white minstrel show, images so scorched it made some viewers afraid that the celluloid would spontaneously combust, and a woman portrayed as so plastically beautiful that she deserves a snake like tail to emerge from her buttocks.

The destruction of all extant human culture seemed inevitable.  Within weeks of the release of ‘Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen’, most cities were full of zombies, people detached from their brains, their souls, and all rational thought.  Some took to watching Michael Bay’s films repeatedly, in underground clubs, in the hope that re-traumatisation might somehow diminish the effect.  It didn’t.  Others took to the hills, creating liberal survivalist communities; members were only allowed to bring the writings of either Noam Chomsky or Kurt Vonnegut, and all the tofu they could pack in a hemp bag; but the hills revolted.  Nature abhors a vacuum, and once it became clear that some of the liberals had already been infected by the virus, having tried to convince themselves that seeing the movie would be an experience of postmodern pastiche and therefore justifiable as the basis for an article in salon.com, the trees emitted a poisonous sap that expelled the desperate.  Those who were not zombies or the now displaced liberal survivalists did the only thing that seemed possible in their circumstances.  They took up World of Warcraft, which, of course, means that they were dead already.

And then, destruction.

It appears that the aliens from James Cameron’s ‘The Abyss’ had been waiting for just such a moment – a moment when they could justify ending the human race.  They had looked for a reason to ignore the earth; and indeed, for several thousand years, human beings had proven themselves capable of a myriad of miracles: freedom struggles, medical advancements, the exploration of unknown places, love between people.  But the effects of the release of the second Transformers film could not be reversed.

It was a simple decision, reached by the alien council in mid-August 2009.  A junior civil servant alien reported on the film thus:

“There once was something called human culture.  Then 'Transformers' was released.  This Racist, Homophobic, Robot-disparaging, Anti-human, Metallic-fetishistic film misappropriates the theme tune from Jaws and has a Snake-like tail coming from the rear end of a plastically beautiful woman.

Michael Bay is one of only two film-makers I can think of whose work has got less mature as he has gotten older.  If we act quickly we can spare the human race from having to endure the release of the other one’s next film.  ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is due for release on the 21st August.  We can put them out of their misery if we execute the plan now.

Like I said, Michael Bay’s work gets less mature as he gets older.  But it’s too easy to blame him – ‘The Rock’ and ‘Armageddon’ were a lot of fun.  This is the fault of an entire culture that doesn’t demand to be treated with respect.  It’s everyone’s fault, for allowing the worst big budget film ever made to be released.

Save yourselves.”