Fluid ImaginationFrom Teachers, child care workers, more high-risk Vermonters eligible for vaccination next week:
With the Johnson & Johnson vaccine coming online and the federal pharmacy program ramping up, Gov. Phil Scott announced Tuesday that school staff, child care workers and more Vermonters with high-risk conditions would become eligible to receive the Covid-19 vaccine starting [March 8, 2021].
With my wife and I both working as teachers, this is incredible news!
From Sanders blasts MLB for dropping Vermont Lake Monsters ball club:
“If the multibillionaire owners of Major League Baseball have enough money to pay hundreds of millions in compensation to a single superstar baseball player,” Sanders said, “they have enough money to prevent 40 minor league teams from shutting down in Vermont and all over this country.”
From How to Radicalize Your Parents:
When trying to educate older relatives about radical politics, it’s important to remember that you don’t need to—and in, fact, shouldn’t—get everything done in one discussion. It’s much better to start with one topic and branch out from there. Many radical frameworks and policy issues such as prison abolition, defunding the police, decriminalizing sex work, and raising the minimum wage, are related and strongly interconnected. If you can get your relatives on board with one idea, it can be easier to convince them of the next one.
From “Mark Changed The Rules”: How Facebook Went Easy On Alex Jones And Other Right-Wing Figures:
“Ideology is not, and should not be, a protected class,” a [Facebook] content policy employee who left weeks after the election wrote. “White supremacy is an ideology; so is anarchism. Neither view is immutable, nor should either be beyond scrutiny. The idea that our content ranking decisions should be balanced on a scale from right to left is impracticable … and frankly can be dangerous, as one side of that scale actively challenges core democratic institutions and fails to recognize the results of a free and fair election.”
From Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon?:
On September 8, the Air Force gave the defense company Northrop Grumman an initial contract of $13.3 billion to begin engineering and manufacturing [a new nuclear weapon], but that will be just a fraction of the total bill. Based on a Pentagon report…the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029. To put that price tag in perspective, $100 billion could pay 1.24 million elementary school teacher salaries for a year, provide 2.84 million four-year university scholarships, or cover 3.3 million hospital stays for covid-19 patients. It’s enough to build a massive mechanical wall to protect New York City from sea level rise. It’s enough to get to Mars.
In his State of the Union address in 1944, President Roosevelt suggested a second, economic-based Bill of Rights because his generation, which was still in the middle of World War II, came “to a clear realization…that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence [and that] people who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Among other rights, President Roosevelt’s address proposed for every American citizen “a right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.”
President Roosevelt wasn’t the first to call for an American right to healthcare.
His fifth-cousin, former President Theodore Roosevelt, made affordable health insurance a key plank in the agenda of his Progressive Party. In his Confession of Faith speech from 1912, given four years after his second term ended, former President Roosevelt called for “industries, the employer, the employee, and perhaps the people at large to contribute” to the insurance pool. Though Roosevelt did not call for the recognition of a new American right, he did recognize the unfairness “for any industry to throw back upon the community the human wreckage due to its wear and tear.”
In 1915, the American Association for Labor Legislation called for subsidized healthcare for low-income workers, but opposition from the American Medical Association and a little thing called World War I prevented it from making much headway (opponents at the time characterized the proposal as “a Prussian menace”).
In the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security considered adding government-funded healthcare to the New Deal, but the American Medical Association’s opposition prevented it from being included in the Social Security Act of 1935. Despite the opposition, President Roosevelt continued to stump for the policy, as did his Surgeon General, who argued “equal opportunity for health is a basic American right.”
At the end of the 1930s, a New York Senator proposed the National Health Care Act of 1939, which “created federal funding to states for expanding public health, maternal and child health services, medical care for the low-income, short-term disability insurance, hospital construction, and prepaid medical insurance,” but the onset of World War II distracted Congress from ever taking it up.
In the 1940s and 50s, various versions of the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill proposed compulsory health insurance for every American, paid for through payroll taxes. After President Roosevelt died in office without Congress having taken up his call, his successor, President Harry Truman, came out in support of the bill, but with anti-socialist Republicans in control of Congress, the proposals died before they got a chance to breathe.
Congress wouldn’t seriously address healthcare for another two decades, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965 to create the Medicare program, which aimed “to provide a hospital insurance program for the aged…with a supplementary medical benefits program and an extended program of medical assistance.” With this bill, President Johnson and the 89th Congress created a universal health insurance program for every American over the age of 65.
President Richard Nixon tried to reduce government involvement, proposing a Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan that would force employers to carry the burden of health insurance for most Americans, while also providing assistance to low-income individuals and improving Medicare. Unfortunately, President Nixon’s crimes in the Watergate scandal put an end to his legislative agenda.
His elected successor, President Jimmy Carter, abandoned his earlier call for mandatory, universal coverage, disappointing his ally, Senator Ted Kennedy. Instead of trying to expand coverage, President Carter fixated on reducing the cost of healthcare as part of his focus on reducing inflation. He later wrote that “for most of my term, I fought the hospital and medical lobbyists, trying to initiate hospital-cost containment measures designed to insure adequate health care at a reasonable expense…I was never able to succeed in this effort…In the final showdown, Congress was flooded with money, in the form of campaign contributions from the health industry.”
President Ronald Reagan took a different route on healthcare. He’d long been an opponent to federally-funded healthcare. In 1961, he released a 10-minute long speech on LP titled, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” which (of course) was secretly paid for by the American Medical Association. Twenty years later, the AMA’s spokesperson became president, and the Reagan Administration slashed federal funding for healthcare. His budgets cut Medicaid funding by 18%, reduced the budget of the Department of Health and Human Services by 25% (eliminating a number of healthcare programs in the process), and cut funding for maternal and children’s health by 18%.
The hits continued. Under the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, “a million children lost reduced-price school lunches, 600,000 people lost Medicaid, and a million lost food stamps…Nearly 500,000 lost eligibility for Aid to Families with Dependent Children…More than 250 community health centers were closed. Between 1980 and 1991, 309 rural hospitals and 294 urban hospitals were shuttered. Nearly one million Native Americans lost access to Indian Health Service care when eligibility was narrowed…Unintended pregnancy rates increased by nearly 8 percent…Life-expectancy-at-birth of black Americans decreased…By 1988, the Institute of Medicine declared that the American public health system had fallen into disarray.”
President George H.W. Bush didn’t care about healthcare. According to what his staff members told a healthcare writer, the president was “bored silly” by domestic policies and his healthcare proposals in the election of 1992 were only offered as a sop to voters — “he was a fish out of water on health care from start to finish.”
After defeating the incumbent (partly due to the healthcare issue), President Bill Clinton made universal healthcare the number one priority of his administration, and in an unprecedented step, he appointed his wife, then First Lady Hillary Clinton, to oversee a task force to make it happen. The result was a 1,000+ page proposal called the Health Security Act, which wasn’t universal healthcare, but was a suite of complex health insurance plans aimed at providing a comprehensive benefits package to all citizens, permanent aliens, and long-term nonimmigrants (e.g., foreign diplomats). Famously, the Clinton effort failed.
President George W. Bush reversed some of the Reagan-era reductions in healthcare-related federal spending. He took strong steps to curtail HIV/AIDS on a global scale. His administration’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief was “the largest commitment by any nation to combat a single disease in human history.” His administration also took on diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis around the world.
For Americans, he expanded prescription drug benefits under Medicare, giving the program its largest expansion in decades (though denying the program the right to negotiate en bloc). According to an editorial in The New York Times published in the days before he left office, the plan was responsible for “reducing the percentage of older Americans who lack drug coverage, from 33% before the program started to only 8% in 2006.” He also doubled federal financing of community health centers.
But he focused less on ensuring the right of all Americans to quality healthcare and more on expanding the market’s influence on the industry. In 2003, Congress created Health Savings Accounts, high-deductible health plans that allow for tax-preferred treatment of medical expenses. HSAs were, as one of his advisors put it, “an opportunity for people…to have more skin in the game,” but as one of his critics, Senator Ted Kennedy, said, “President Bush’s health savings accounts are a gimmick that will only make a bad situation worse.”
When President Barack Obama took over the White House in 2009, he followed President Clinton’s lead and made healthcare his first priority. After a bitter fight in Congress over what would be termed Obamacare, he signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law. While the progressive goal of single-payer healthcare was abandoned during the drafting of the bill, President Obama tried to sidestep the failure by suggesting with its passage, “we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all.”
Of course, we didn’t do that. Instead, with the passage of the ACA, which forces Americans to either buy health insurance or pay a penalty during tax season, we declared that the United States is committed to a private health-insurance industry regardless of the profit motive’s effects on the health of our citizens.
Despite saying his healthcare plan was perennially two-weeks away from being submitted to Congress, President Donald Trump failed to replace the Affordable Care Act with a federal plan of his own. While he did succeed in gutting the personal penalty from the ACA (reducing it to $0) and repealing “the Cadillac tax” on high-end plans, at the end of a hell-scape of an administration that saw the death of over 400,000 Americans due to a global pandemic, the ACA remains the law of the land.
We’re now less than three weeks into the administration of President Joe Biden, and every one of those days has seen over 2,500 Americans die from the pandemic. While it’s way too early to know what the Biden Administration will deliver for Americans, his campaign promised to “build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate.”
President Biden’s commitment to the ACA will ensure that Americans will continue to suffer from a lack of universal, single-payer coverage for at least the next four years. During the campaign, President Biden doubled down on his opposition to “Medicare for All,” saying that if he was president when Senator Bernie Sanders’ bill reached the White House, he would veto a “single-payer, national health insurance program to provide everyone in America with comprehensive health care coverage, free at the point of service.”
The American history of universal healthcare is long and complex, and many of the arguments focus on the technical difficulties of trying to provide quality, affordable care to a nation of roughly 300 million people without driving the nation or its people into perpetual debt.
But all of the focus on how to make it happens obfuscates the why. As a nation, we still have not fulfilled President Franklin Roosevelt’s promise; we still do not recognize that healthcare is a human right.
Until we take that first step, all the discussions about how universal healthcare will work or who it will work for or how it will be paid for are useless. They all assume that we have a choice, when the reality is that, if healthcare is a human right, we don’t. We just have to make it work
We don’t need a 1,000+ page document to make universal healthcare the law of the land. All we need is a single sentence enshrined in an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that declares healthcare is the right of every citizen.
We already have some decent options on how to formulate that right:
Regardless of its wording, once the right has been established, we’ll have changed the entire environment in which healthcare is delivered in this country. The federal government, doctors, nurses, medical schools, hospitals, community health centers, private insurance companies, all of them will have to adapt to the new reality. That process will continue to be long and complex, but they won’t have the choice of maintaining the status quo.
If we change the conditions around which they try to solve their problems, perhaps we’ll make it possible to actually solve those problems.
The way forward is not to get stuck in the muck of how to do universal healthcare (which, by the way, every other developed country has already figured out), but to enshrine the why in our U.S. Constitution.
After my daughter goes to bed, my wife and I sit in the living room and watch a grown-up show. We’re usually watching two at a time: a half-hour comedy and an hour-long drama. Most nights, we watch the comedy both before and after the drama (though truth be told, my wife usually doomscrolls throughout the comedy).
Lately, we’ve been in a rut with our comedy choice. We enjoy Superstore, a very network-y sitcom in the tradition of The Office set at a Walmart-style superstore. Unfortunately, Superstore’s network only releases a new episode every once in a while, so it doesn’t serve the needs of our nightly television ritual.
A couple of months ago, when the country was still under Trumpian rule, and after Vermont’s governor declared a ban on multi-household gatherings, and while I was sinking into a temporary depression due to not being able to hug extended family members during the holidays, it began to feel like making my way in the world today was taking everything I had, and the idea of taking a break from all my worries, sure would’ve helped a lot. I just wanted to get away, so I went to a place where I already knew everybody’s names.
My wife and I are now on Season 6 of Cheers. If the next episode of Superstore isn’t available, we hang out for a half-hour with Sam, Carla, Norm, Cliff, and the rest of the gang. For six seasons now, the folks at Cheers have mostly held up their end of our bargain. They don’t make us think too much, they make us laugh, and if we get distracted by a conversation or zone-out while doomscrolling on our phones, we miss absolutely nothing in the series’ longer narrative.
Sure, the show can be problematic. In the first ten episodes of the first season, Dianne Chambers is sexually assaulted about half a dozen times, and after at least one incident, she apologizes for it; after another incident, Sam convinces her it was her fault. So that’s not cool.
Sam, of course, is just generally problematic. His character, a former relief pitcher for the Boston Red Sox who had to quit the game due to his alcoholism, is a lecherous man-whore (who is now on the wagon). He cannot look at an attractive female without feeling the compulsion to sexually harass her. In the earlier seasons, when he is not just the bartender but also the owner of Cheers, he targets the majority of his harassment on one of his female employees, the aforementioned Dianne, an academic dilettante who, after five seasons of constant harassment, will eventually agree to marry her abuser before abandoning him at the proverbial altar for a longshot’s chance at literary success.
Homophobia regularly rears its head as well. One episode, originally aired in January 1983, focuses on one of Sam’s former teammates who writes a memoir in which he comes out as gay. Sam’s eventual acceptance of his friend’s sexuality stirs fears among the bar’s regulars that Cheers will transform into a gay bar. Tensions come to a boil when Norm and the others stage a walkout after Sam accepts two gay patrons, rejecting his regular customers’ call to discriminate.
This balance between demonstrating blue-collar ignorance while also exposing it to the audience highlights the quality of the show. While Cheers remains in its value-system a very 1980s television show, it should be congratulated for attempting to stay on the forward-leaning edge of those values.
Another episode plays on the gang’s homophobia while also teaching the audience that fathers who reject their sons for coming out of the closet are making a terrible decision. It does this through the dimwitted bartender, Coach Ernie Pantusso, a paternal friend from Sam’s pitching days who holds a record for getting hit in the head with the most baseballs.
A customer asks for advice after meeting his son’s new boyfriend (and here’s the kicker: the boyfriend is black!), and Coach tells him, “If you’re that unhappy about it, just throw him out and tell him you never want to see him again.”
“I can’t do that,” the customer says, “I love him too much…oh, I see what you’re saying.”
“You do?” Coach asks incredulously.
“If I can’t accept the kid the way he is,” the customer continues, “I’ll lose him.”
“Boy,” Coach says, “that’s good.”
“Well, when you put it that way, what choice do I have? Thanks, Coach!”
Sure, Coach suggested it is acceptable for a father to reject his son for being gay, but the episode recognizes the shallowness of fathers who choose this path.
Outside of the sexual assaults, harassments, and homophobia, all of which are continuously played for laughs and all of which remain highly problematic, the series walks this line between cultural progress and cultural regression. But it does so in a casual and winking way, keeping its political implications light and its characters’ relationships steady. This makes it easier for two highly-stressed teachers and parents to wind themselves down for the night.
Once our minds and our worries have settled, we turn to our current hour-long drama: the German Netflix series, Dark.
If you haven’t watched Dark, you absolutely should. It’s one of those puzzle narratives where you’re constantly wondering how events and characters are related and constantly questioning the nature of what comes first, the cause or the effect. It compares (favorably) to the experience of watching Lost (except Dark’s creators aren’t creating mysteries on a whim).
Dark also has the metaphysical weirdness of Twin Peaks. The difference is that Twin Peaks has an incredible sense of humor about it, while Dark offers very little in the way of laughter. You won’t find odes to coffee or pie in Dark, nor any absurd detectives whose deafness requires them to scream their words at the top of their lungs. But you will recognize the sense of dread that underlies the entire town and the way every character has a secret or three to hide.
As mentioned, the series is German, so we watch every episode with English subtitles. This can be offputting for some people, and if that includes you, my only recommendation is to get over it, because the series is worth it.
The subtitles offer an added benefit: because you have to read the television screen, doomscrolling on your phone means missing some highly important piece of information, forcing you to put your phone down. For those who find themselves unable to watch a show without having a phone in their face, this hour of respite will do wonders for your mental health (it’d be better if you walked in nature for an hour, but it’s better than nothing).
The series centers on the German town of Winden in the aftermath of a child’s disappearance. The town contains a soon-to-be-decommissioned nuclear-power plant and an elaborate cave system, and some suspect that both are somehow involved in the disappearance. A wide variety of narrative puzzles ensue.
Dark begs to be binged, but I recommend taking your time with it, limiting yourself to just one episode per session. The puzzles are so numerous that if you let them wind and unwind by watching three or four episodes at a time, you’ll miss the pleasure of working them over in your mind.
At the end of every episode, I look at my wife say, “Want to watch one more?” and thankfully, she has the discipline to say, “No. I’m enjoying it just one episode at a time.” Because she has that discipline, I’m enjoying it too.
We still have about 10 episodes to go in Dark, but the previous 16 episodes give me faith that the whole series will live up to its promises (and a friend has assured me it will). I’ll be thankful when it does.