The Intellectual Mosquito

CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST TERRORISM: MURDER IN CHURCH

There was a sudden jolt of the Breaking News fanfare, a flurry of cable babble and the morning papers screaming their headlines about Dr. George Tiller's shooting. And then it was over. The event faded from view  so rapidly  that it occurred to me that we've become accustomed to frenzied anti-abortionists shooting doctors. We no longer recoil from these killings. After each one we pause, but ever so briefly. It's like driving up on a horrific accident. We get a dose of anxiety and  a  glimpse of the carnage as we slow to look. Seconds later we're back to normal speed and a quarter mile down the road. Show's over.

Has the murder of abortion doctors become just another bump on the road in American life?  Where has it taken us? Where has it led the crazed Fundamentalist Christians?

I'm a hopeless news junkie. Before I began blogging, my weeknights were spent flopped down in my recliner, watching one news show after another. During commercials I'd surf through two or three other news programs to keep my fix going. Sensing the commercials were over, I'd click back to the first show. After that, I'd watch  news I had seen earlier again  when the late evening reruns came on. When they were over, I'd be back to working my remote, hungrily searching for late-breaking news. News from anywhere, even the Weather Channel.

Dr. Tiller's murder came and went like a hard summer rain storm. The news cycle felt like it lasted less than a day. I knew it hadn't, but it felt like it.

This latest  of  assassinations by Christian extremists sickened me. Even the newshound in me could not be lured into tuning back in to the doctor's killing.   I avoided the continuing coverage, blocked it from seeping into my brain where I knew I would dwell on it for days, as with other tragic events.

I still see the alleged murderer, Scott Roeder, in the cheap orange jump suit he wore as he made his first court appearance via closed circuit TV. He  didn't look nervous, shaken or the slightest  bit repentant. He  looked nothing like I expected a man who, just hours earlier, shot another man in the head to look.

Roeder was the perfect choice for the Christian zealots who needed someone to do their dirty work. As reported by James Ridgeway in "A Brief History of the Radical Right,"  www.motherjones.com, (June 9, 2009), during the 1980's Roeder was nurturing his hate in an anti-government, white separatist group known as the Montana Freemen. His Freemen experiences launched him into a weird, unorthodox life style that should have earned him a bed in a state mental hospital.

In 1996 he was cruising through Kansas when sheriff's deputies stopped and arrested him in Topeka for driving his car with an unauthorized license tag. The homemade tag read "Sovereign and Immune from State Law." Strange enough. But a search of Roeder's vehicle turned up bomb making materials in the trunk. Stranger yet. Strangest of all, neither his  bizarre homemade license tag nor the explosives in his car caused any legal trouble for Roeder beyond  a mere traffic fine.

Roeder and the Freemen delight in their being regarded as "Christian Patriots", a deliberate contradiction given their known history of violence and the fact  that their ranks include former Ku Klux Klan members, Neo-Nazis and  skinheads.They call themselves "white sovereigns" and believe Afro-Americans, Jews and other minorities are inferior and not entitled to the same rights they have. They preach that God gave this land called America to white Anglo Saxons only and made them it's "true sovereigns." 

Armed militants claiming 1.2 million members, the Freemen are believed to have been part of another anti-government movement of the 1980's known as the "Posse Comitatus" or "Posse."

Pump Up Your Intellect: Live Dangerously With Classical Music

 
 
   If you haven't basked in the full-throated burst of sound from a symphony orchestra or heard the verve and zest of a Mozart piano quintet fill up a room, then a full, lush life is escaping you.

You don't like classical music? No, you just think you don't like it. Okay, if you've been force fed modern classical, then I understand -- you hate classical music.

Yet you love music! There isn't a moment of the day when you're not listening to it, if you can help it.But like me, you've been hooked on rock, rythm and blues, country and other forms of popular music since you were what -- "Almost thirteen"?

That deep and abiding love for music, my friend, is a sign that the seeds have been sown. Now, it's time to step up and live life on the musical edge,to expand your intellectual muscle. Do it by giving yourself a real shot at finding out whether there can more to your musical life, something you never knew you'd like.

Do this: set aside an hour or two and listen to the pieces I've set out for musical risk-takers at the end of this post. There's a chance you have a friend or two who owns them or you can get them on loan at a public library. You probably won't have to spend a dime. But if you do, some of the music I've listed can be downloaded inexpensively from the internet. Or, you can buy used CD's for $2.00 or less and new ones for $5.00 or less.

Even though I'm giving you some artists' names, don't worry about finding their recordings. Any professional artist or orchestra that's been promoted by a recording company is in the classical big leagues. So they're all very good musicians.The best performing artists are out-of-sight good.

1) Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto No.1 in G Minor, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, pianist.

2) Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No.2, Evgeny Kissin, pianist.      

3)Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No.2.

4)Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, Virgil Fox, organist.

5)Beethoven, Piano Sonata No.14 (Moonlight) [The third movement is incredible!]

6)Beethoven, Piano Concerto No.5, Murray Perahia, pianist.

7)Mozart, Symphony No. 40 in G Minor.

8) Mozart, Quintet for Piano, and Woodwinds in E-flat Major, K.452

Choose any four or five, and if your interest isn't piqued, at least you will have made an honest effort, right? And just maybe the next time you're at a highbrow cocktail party and perchance classical music comes up in conversation, at least you'll be able to make yourself look good with a couple of well-edited comments.

 If your interest is stoked, email me and I'll send  you list of what I've been enjoying for years. And yes, I'm still into rock! 

                                              

 

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Health Care Reform's Public Option: A Culture War, Plain & Simple

Mitch Albom wrote the best-seller about the five people you will meet in heaven. I'm working on a sequel: All the Republicans You Will Meet In Hell.

I used to simply regard most Republicans as the servants of big business. Now, after months of  watching them use flat-out lies and fear in their attempt to defeat health care reform and the "public option" in particular, I see them   for   what they are: amoral and souless. Now I know they are  an evil force, up to their armpits in our country's social and economic plight, not to help, but to climb back in to power.They ignore  decency and morality, choosing instead to court favor with the mega rich and to fulfill the wishes of Wall Street and big business, the people whose money pays the way to election, re-election, wealth and power.

Considering their devasting defeat at the polls last November, it's remarkable that the Republicans haven't gotten the message. What's  their rescue plan for all  the families that got scammed in the "now-you-see-it-now-you-don't" mortgage circus of '08? Yet they're  stressed  out over the future of the health insurance companies. They don't waste time worrying about the welfare of the average family, so you can write off the homeless. Right now they're hotly focused on bringing down President Obama and his Campaign for Change, the centerpiece of which was his promise for health care reform.

If they can cause Obama to fail, which they and right-wing radio comedians like Rush Limbaugh have flatly stated they hope he does, Republicans see a chance to seize  long term  political dominance. They believe that would give them the needed time and control of Congress to turn the nation into their vision of what kind of country we shall have, and whose country it will be.

As commoners, low income and middle class Americans  will  have no meaningful role  in their utopian society, one under control of  the supremely rich. The America they imagine is free from  all  fear of  the  unwashed masses. What causes them night terrors  is the Power of the Vote. Without the ability to subvert, dilute or minimize our votes,  the wealthy see us as a threat to their indulgent way of life. As the  financiers of the GOP, their interests are much better served with the legislative power to ignore demands for a living wage, affordable health care, access to higher education, tight oversight of predatory moneylenders and new laws regulating large employers who are currently free to jerk employees around as if they were a subhuman form of species bred only to meet their labor needs.  

The defenders of health insurance companies have finally been forced to stop falsely crowing about our having the Number One health care system in the world. We are not Number 1. We are  Number 37 according a study by the World Health Organization. It is true that we're first in the amount we spend on health care, but we're only thirty-seventh in the quality of care. Clearly, we are not getting our money's worth under a system insulated from change by the Republicans and ruled by companies who act as the official Keepers of the Health Care Treasury. Here are  the facts according to the September 21st issue of  Newsweek:

     1) About 22,000 Americans die annually of treatable diseases because they can't afford insurance and earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. They fall through the cracks and into early graves. We are the only industrialized democracy where this occurs.

     2) We have 46 million citizens without health insurance while virtually every western European nation provides universal coverage. Britain, Spain, Italy, France,  Austria and Germany see health care as a moral obligation of the government to its people. So does Japan. And the European Union has a "right to medical care" embedded in its Charter of Fundamental Rights.

     3)  No one in Canada files bankruptcy due to medical bills. In the U.S., 700,000 people do so annually.

     4) In the U.S., health insurance is not available to you and me in a competitive market  where we can shop for the best coverage at the best price. In many states, a single company is the provider and may operate under two or three business names, giving the appearance of competition, when they actually have a monoply. In states with two or three  insurance providers, the companies have a captive market and operate as a cartel, or price-fixing syndicate. The differences in coverages and costs among their policies is similar to studying varying shades of gray.

 A poll quoted in a recent issue of Time says, many people are "very or somewhat" satisfied with their health insurance, "more or less." If the quotations are from the poll, it tells us nothing. 

Most people I know are either resigned to paying  the ripoff premiums, deductibles  co-pays, non-covereds, etc. or loudly dissatisfied. People especially hate HMO's. They don't like being told which doctors they can and cannot see; they don't want to be limited to certain hospitals because even if the designated hospital is conveniently located, the restriction  limits the patient's choice of physician; people dislike insurers dictating what medicines they will or will not pay for. They despise being denied  seeking a specialist without getting the blessings of The Insurance Gods.

 Unless someone else is paying for your coverage, you know that rates continue to grow at about 11 to 13 % a year, benefits shrink and options are taken off the table at will under threat of huge hikes in premiums. Since 1999 insurance rates have increased 131% while workers' wages increased only 38%. An average family of four pays $13,400 a year for health insurance.

The people I know aren't "somewhat satisfied" with their insurance. They are concerned about how much longer they can keep paying the vigorish.  They worry about whether they will be able to afford coverage for the whole family, or just the member who most  needs it. Many are counting the months until they can  at last  cross the finish line to Medicare. Others dislike having to buy "gap" insurance to cover the cost of suspiciously expensive prescription medicines. They worry about financing their way through the "donut hole"--that annual cut-off point where insurers quit paying for medicines altogether until the insured coughs up  about $2,500 out-of-pocket expenses before reaching the other side of the hole where insurance benefits kick in again.

Insurance companies act as if the payment of patient claims is proof of their benevolence versus   a response to their contractual obligation for benefits bought and paid for. 

Many taxpayers are rightly concerned about the rapidly mounting and overwhelming national debt. But this chaos was created by the Republicans and the Bush White House whose leadership brought us to the edge of ruin and left the Democrats having to fix their financial damage, including health care, or send the country into a second Depression.

In 2003 the Republican dominated Congress passed the "Medicare Modernization Plan". Under this law, insurance companies were given more than $100 billion in unwarranted federal subsidies while raking in billions more in profits. The legislation that made it possible was flown in below the public radar or it surely would not have become law. Only the Republicans can see where it makes sense to subsidize a greedy business all ready glutted with money.

Under the proposed Health Care Reform Act, those billions in subsidies formerly  stuffed into corporate pockets will go to providing health care for millions of people and holding down taxes.

Another absurdity of the Republican's "Medicare Modernization" prohibited Medicare from using its buying power to wrangle the best possible prices out of pharmaceutical companies. Knowing a business deprived of its ability to wheel and deal with suppliers cannot avoid over-spending and inefficiency, the Republicans nevertheless approved this waste of taxpayer money.

 The fight for health care reform that has embedded in it the right for people  to choose who they want to buy their insurance from, is a major one. But it is also part of an even bigger struggle. That bigger is to strip the power to decide for all of us away from the minority of the  rich who always choose only for themselves. Next, we must throw those politicians (Democrat or Repbulican)  who serve them out of office. Only in accomplishing that will we truly be a country of the people, by the people and for the people.