Tag Archives: Healthcare

The Legacy of Rush Limbaugh

18 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by in Politics

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Rush Limbaugh passed away today.

I for one have no intention of dancing on Rush Limbaugh’s grave. Neither will I sit passively while the right wing echo chamber tries to fashion his memory into something worthy of respect and admiration.

Limbaugh consistently claimed to be doing satire. He was “illustrating absurdity with the absurd,” or so he liked to say. What this meant in practice was a good example of Schrodinger’s Asshole, the practice of saying something outrageous, then deciding whether or not you meant it based on the response you get. When Limbaugh got enough support, then he stuck to his guns. When he caught enough flack, then he was just kidding, and we liberals really needed to get a sense of humor. Teenagers do this. So did this professional bigot.

Often Rush would enter into a segment by noting some objectionable behavior carried out by someone on the left. He would ask, “What if I did that?” Then he would have a field day. The resulting rant could always be dismissed as a parody of liberal behavior, but that was only if such disclaimers were necessary. All too often what Limbaugh said following this kind of set-up became God’s own truth in the minds of his followers. What Rush did or didn’t mean by his comments on any given show was always up for revision. His ‘satire’ was never more than an exercise in plausible deniability, and his constantly insincere commentary carved a lasting place in the literal understanding of the ‘conservative’ mind of American politics.

So, what is Limbaugh’s legacy?

Let’s take a look at just one of the many interventions Limbaugh made in our national politics.

Limbaugh’s comments on Sandra Fluke.

This was part of the debate over The Affordable Care Act, specifically, a question about whether or not the Catholic University, Georgetown, was entitled to an exemption from required standards of insurance coverage for their students. The requirement in this case was the obligation to cover birth control. Sandra Fluke was one of several people called to testify before a Congressional committee on the matter in February of 2012, but she was excluded for for a number of reasons. A week later, the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee met and invited her to speak.

In her remarks, Sandra Fluke, a law student at Georgetown, made the case for mandating full coverage of birth control at Georgetown. Her comments focused on the use of birth control to combat health problems such as polycystic ovary syndrome. Fluke told the story of a friend suffering from this condition, one who paid over a hundred dollars a month for birth control that was specifically used to combat this particular health condition.

At no point in her testimony did Sandra Fluke comment on her own sex life or any birth control expenses she herself might have had.

On February 29th, Rush Limbaugh commented on Fluke’s testimony with the following diatribe:

What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic] who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex — what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex.”

(As quoted in The Huffington Post, emphasis in the original.)

Subsequent controversy focused on the rudeness of Limbaugh’s commentary, on his decision to call Fluke a ‘slut’ and a ‘Prostitute’. Many on the right wing of the political spectrum came to Limbaugh’s defense, but in this case the backlash was sufficient to threaten earnings for Limbaugh’s show. In response, Rush came out with the following apology.

For over 20 years, I have illustrated the absurd with absurdity, three hours a day, five days a week. In this instance, I chose the wrong words in my analogy of the situation. I did not mean a personal attack on Ms. Fluke. I think it is absolutely absurd that during these very serious political times, we are discussing personal sexual recreational activities before members of Congress. I personally do not agree that American citizens should pay for these social activities. What happened to personal responsibility and accountability? Where do we draw the line? If this is accepted as the norm, what will follow? Will we be debating if taxpayers should pay for new sneakers for all students that are interested in running to keep fit? In my monologue, I posited that it is not our business whatsoever to know what is going on in anyone’s bedroom nor do I think it is a topic that should reach a Presidential level. / My choice of words was not the best, and in the attempt to be humorous, I created a national stir. I sincerely apologize to Ms. Fluke for the insulting word choices.

March 3rd, 2012, As quoted in Wikipedia.

Limbaugh later added that he had acted to much like a liberal in making such remarks (Wiki again).

To say that Limbaugh’s apology was disingenuous is putting it mildly. The sheer irony of a man denying that he meant to launch a personal attack on a woman he had described as a ‘slut’ and a ‘Prostitute’ while lecturing her on the importance of personal responsibility is beyond outrageous. Adding that the nature of his error was essentially that he had acted too much like a liberal doesn’t help much. In effect, Limbaugh’s apology was really a thinly disguised effort to press forward with his attack.

Naturally, Fluke rejected his apology.

What always struck me as the most important outcome of all of this is the fact that Rush Limbaugh never retracted the central deceit of his comments on the matter. Fluke had not been talking about her own sex life or that of anyone else. Her point had always been that medical conditions could generate the need for birth control and even drive up its expense. One could find a lot to dispute in Fluke’s testimony, and reasonable arguments could be made about the policies in question, but it is simply not true to say that she was asking anyone to pay for her personal birth control. If Limbaugh was ever confused about this fact, he surely knew it by the time he produced his pseudo-apology. Not only did Limbaugh leave that lie on the table, he pressed forward with it in the very way he worded his fake apology.

In fact, the lie stands to this day.

Limbaugh’s fans, and countless ‘conservatives’ all over the United States still think of Sandra Fluke as the woman who wanted a university to pay for her own personal birth control, the liberal who wanted Georgetown to fund her own sex life. Whatever ‘conservatives’ think of Limbaugh’s language and general conduct, his narrative still dominates the right wing take on this matter. The lie that Limbaugh used to drown out more reasonable efforts at debating the policy implications of the day has never been rectified. It still clouds the issues, and it still paints a bullseye on Sandra Fluke which America’s right wing will be all to happy to take shots at the next time she dares to enter the public eye one more time.

This is Rush Limbaugh’s legacy. This is the long term outcome of his rhetoric, the result of a juvenile game of “maybe I mean it – maybe I don’t.” In this instance, Limbaugh’s intervention served not only to harm an individual but to leave a lasting source of disinformation which he never corrected in any way.

This lie is Limbaugh’s legacy.

This lie and countless others like it.

A World Without Children, or at Least a Policy Without Them!

13 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by in Childhood, Philosophy, Politics

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Can you imagine a human being, fully formed without also imagining him or her embedded in a network of social relationships? Can you (or anyone) be a person without being among others?

Suffice to say that some people have tried.

This is part of the reason for interest in feral children, and of course we sometimes read of ancient experiments depriving children of exposure to language (or in some cases any human interaction). These experiments wouldn’t get past a human subjects review panel in a modern university, but the stories are certainly interesting. A large part of that interest comes from the prospect of finding a person who became a person without any significant human interaction whatsoever. What kind of person would they be? What kind of language would they have? How would they think? These stories are long on legend and short on data, but it’s not hard to understand why people would want to investigate such things.

…even if only in a story.

The thought experiments of certain social theories are not far off from such stories. So very many people have attempted to imagine the nature of a human isolated from social connections. Chapter XIII in Thomas Hobbes’ book, The Leviathan would be a good example. So, would be the calculations of many rational choice theorists, those attempting to find the self-interest in just about any human interaction. And of course, there are always the masturbatory fantasies of Ayn Rand and her cult of ‘objectivist’ fan-boys. (Honestly, I feel kind of bad mentioning her alongside serious thinkers, even those I disagree with, but with the likes of Paul Ryan and Ran Paul claiming inspiration from Rand, one must admit the woman remains relevant.) What these approaches have in common is a rather atomistic vision of social life. They take an individual human being as a given and problematize questions about how and why that individual human does what he does in relation to others. In effect, they reduce social life to individual psychology; tey reduce social interaction to individual self interest.

The problem in each instance, is that individual psychology is intrinsically social. You can’t be a person without being in relation to someone else, because you can’t become a person without relating to someone else. You wouldn’t survive childhood without someone feeding you, clothing you, keeping you clear of the neighbor’s dog, and giving you the occasional hug. You wouldn’t be who you are if your Mom hadn’t stared into your eyes and smiled at you until you smiled back. You wouldn’t be who you are if somewhere in those early days you didn’t notice that the great-big Mom-face smiled back when you smiled yourself. You figured that out long before you figured out the words for such things, or even the difference between you and the mom-face, or anyone else. And you wouldn’t be who you are if somewhere along the way you hadn’t learned to give a damn about such things.

Even the basic problem of solipsism seems to get this whole thing wrong. We don’t start as an individual and then figure out that others might (or might not) also occupy our world. We don’t figure out how to relate to them long after we’ve decided what we want in life. We don’t decide how to treat other people only after deciding what we want ourselves. We develop our own self-image in relation to those around us, and we base on desires and goals on a sense of the world that is already populated with other human beings, some of which (hopefully) we care about. (Thank you Martin Heidegger!)

All very academic, right? (Well academic, in a loose kinda bloggetty sorta fashion.)

Except, there are moments when theoretical atomism seems to mesh with the more pointed boundaries of compassion and empathy in real life. People don’t lack for reasons not to care about this group or that kinda person. Often as not, people seem to tell us who they do give a damn about in much the same breath as those they don’t. We care about us, but we don’t give a damn about them. What constitutes the difference? Race, religion, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, …you get the idea. Any number of categories will do. It’s a pretty familiar dynamic, one with sometimes startling consequences. Those we make our own, so to speak, we may treat with great care, but those we don’t, we may visit great cruelties upon them, often without a second thought.

It doesn’t help when people looking for reasons to reduce their fucks given for others to zero can make ready use of theories breaking all our social connections up into phantom gestures of self-interest. It doesn’t help when the dominant metaphors of government programs (or the lack thereof) come straight of the sociopathic imagination. Whatever the theoretical (de-)merits of atomistic theories, they become far more critical when they become the actual basis of public policy.

I am of course talking about the free market fundamentalists among us, those who consistently reject the case for public welfare wherever they may find it, or at least whenever it might require collective effort, and especially if it means anything resembling taxes. Time and again, libertarians (and often their more conventional conservative allies) will tell us we mustn’t have this or that program because it will violate the individual rights of tax-payers and produce inefficiencies in the market. If someone poor is to receive aid from the government, someone else must pay it, and that payment will be secured by force. Then we have to deal with all the moral hazards of people changing the rational choices on the basis of programs changing the natural inclinations of supply and demand. These are real problems, to be sure, but for some these problems are also damned convenient excuses for denial of social responsibility. If they have their way, progressive taxation is out. The social safety net is a bad idea (goodbye welfare, medicaid, and medicare, among other thigns). Every regulation is suspect, including those that keep poisons out of the air we breathe and the water we drink. And of course everything from schools to the post office would be better if privatized. Why drive on on a federal highway when you could take a toll road? For such folks, it goes without saying; whatever government can do, private business can do it better.

Why?

Because private business can be described as the actions of private individuals whereas government is of course a collectivist enterprise. To fall into this mindset, we have to ignore the collectivist nature of modern corporations, but hey, if the Supreme Court says they are people, then corporations are people. So, the actions of these incredibly powerful collective entities count as the actions of private individuals in the narratives of free market fundamentalists. We are supposed to believe that single-payer insurance polices are against the free market, but insurance corporations are not. There is a difference, I know, but that difference doesn’t really support the distinctions made in public policy. One is not individual while the other is collectivist One is not a function of free market policy while the other counts as a socialist scheme.

People vary in their source material, educational background, and rhetorical strategies, but somewhere in the din of all this free market noise, I can’t help but hear the echoes of Hobbes and the others. Hell, I can’t help but hear echoes of the Pharaoh Psamtik. He is the source of one of those legendary experiments I mentioned up above. According to Herodotus, Psamtik had two children raised without any communication in order to see what language they would speak. He was disappointed, according to the legend, to find the children grew up speaking Phrygian, but of course they would actually have come out of that experiment speaking nothing at all, and being hardly human. Such an experiment would be a disaster for the children.

Is it really all that different from the social experiments urged by those seeking to deny essential support to future generations? Time and again, the brave heroes of the free market tell us that individuals must rise above their circumstances, as if poor schools, poor healthcare, and poor infrastructure could be resolved by the platitudes of a motivational speaker or the narrative arc of a Horatio Alger novel.The denial of social responsibilities thus comes with a bundle of narrative solutions, all of which work much better for the narrator than they do for any real life protagonists.

These stories particularly don’t work for children. Often as not, children don’t even make it into the narratives of libertarian rhetoric. We get the stories that deny aid to adults (why should I pay for someone who won’t work and might even be taking drugs?), and then someone else has to point out that aid also goes to children.

In the end, I can’t help thinking the failure to account for childhood is the most critical feature of libertarian approaches to policy, but its not just a theoretical failure. It’s also a very critical failure of practice. Just as atomistic theories of individualism could never account for the way one becomes a fully functioning human being, the practitioners of atomistic policy cannot, and will not, account for the needs of children through public policy. They won’t even account for the needs of adult women who produce these children, not in any realistic manner. The wealthy can of course throw money at the problem, and damn the rest of us to Hell anyway, so it seems is the only real answer we will ever get from the free market fundamentalists. Of course, there are other boundaries beyond which social responsibilities can easily be denied.

If the atomistic mindset is inadequate, the consequences of its inadequacies do not fall upon all of us equally. Some need the help more than others, and the denial of it serves some better than others. Whatever the strengths and weakness of free market fundamentalism, it will always have a little extra appeal for those in power.

Some people are just a little more obvious about this than others.

Snakes, Death Panels, and that Damned Kenyan: An Ode to the Power of the Free Market!

12 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by in Anthropology, Politics

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Steve Sheldon told about a woman giving birth alone on a beach. Something went wrong. A breech birth. The woman was in agony. ‘Help me please! The baby will not come,’ she cried out. The Pirahãs sat passively, some looking tense and some talking normally. ‘I’m dying! This hurts. The baby will not come!’ She screamed. No-one answered. It was late afternoon. Steve started toward her. ‘No! She doesn’t want you. She wants her parents,’ he was told, the implication being clearly that he was not to go to her. But her parents were not around, and no-one else was going to her aid. The evening came and her cries came regularly, but ever more weakly. Finally, they stopped. In the morning Steve learned that she and her baby had died on the beach, unassisted.

Daniel L. Everett uses this passage from Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes to illustrate the ideas of an Amazonian people about personal responsibility and their attitudes towards the suffering of others. In context, this story is a little more subtle than it may appear on this page, because Everett tell us that Pirahã will devote great effort to helping one another under the right circumstances. The point is that under this circumstance, Pirahã did not consider it appropriate to aid the woman in question, even though her need was obvious. It was the sort of trouble that Pirahã felt an individual must face alone, or with the aid of family. Since no family was there to help her, the woman in this story had to face this struggle alone.

I read a lot of stories like this, and some still have the power to shock and anger me. I can think my way to an understanding of the behavior in question, but in some cases (like this one) I lose my interest at least momentarily in learning about the cultural context behind it, and I want desperately to confront those responsible. The image of a woman and her child dying alone on a beach because people would not help her is just too much to bear. How could anyone, ANYONE, countenance such a thing?

It doesn’t help that Everett follows this with another story about an orphan girl he had been nursing back to health from a near coma, that is until her father killed her with the aid of his fellow villagers. To them this was a mercy killing, as Everett tells us. The villagers had become convinced the little girl was too sick to survive. His efforts to nurse her back to health had in their eyes accomplished nothing except to prolong her suffering. So, they killed her. I read that story, and I understand the point, and still stories like this fill me with rage. I want desperately to do something about a death I didn’t witness, to confront people I’ve never met, to stop them, to beat them, to punish them. No explanation will suffice for such things, I sometimes feel, and I cannot imagine living in a world in which I must abide such behavior.

But of course I do live in such a world; we have it right here in America.

Oddly enough these passages have helped me to understand something I have been struggling to grasp since the last election, the old yarn about death panels. Don’t get me wrong. I certainly understand the fear and horror that comes from the notion that some committee may have the power to make life and death decisions for other people. What I could never grasp was just how anyone could be so alarmed at the prospect that such a panel could operate under the auspices of government authority while remaining unconcerned about the reality of such entities in the private sector today. Insurance companies make such decisions every day which effectively sentence people to death or suffering, and this is at best a matter for reform; it is something we have to work on, because maybe there is room for improvement. Yet the mere hint of such a committee operate under the auspices of government authority is enough to render the man responsible for it into something of a vampire.

The case for the existence of Death Panels in Obamacare was never much more than a highly malicious rumor, at least as outlined by Republicans in 2008. Yet people die in America every day because they cannot get coverage for important procedures, or they suffer needlessly from lack of care. Think of dental care alone. For years I struggled to find a safe tooth to use for chewing before I finally got a decent dental package, and now I see friends and family doing the same thing. None of this is necessary. They aren’t screaming down at the river, and perhaps they won’t die, but their suffering is absolutely unnecessary. So much the more so for those who cannot get treatment for serious ailments.

So, how is it that folks could be so accepting of deaths resulting from lack of medical care in the present economy while falling over themselves at dark rumors about Obama’s heath care package? I’ve come to understand this sort of thing as one of the powers of the Free Market.

Yea verily!

“The power of the market!” I often wonder if the people uttering this little mantra recognize its religious overtones. You would swap “Jesus” in there for the market if you like, or perhaps “the mind” if you prefer to think of yourself as “spiritual but not religious.” Either way, it is an expression of wonder at the power of an entity to work miracles. Those uttering this phrase usually mean it to suggest something to the effect that free markets will bring about good things if only they are left to themselves.

My own suggestion is sarcastic, of course, but I do think it is the rhetoric of free markets that works this miracle, perverse as it may be. It is what separates the horrors of some deaths from the natural occurrences of others.

Time and again, one hears folks (and by ‘folks’ I mean ‘Libertarians’) assuring us that government actions aimed at correcting some remedial evil will only create more difficulties in the long run. If wages are too low, raising a minimum wage will only lead to a reduction in jobs, and if banks are charging ridiculous overdraft fees, rules against this can only lead to other fees. To correct such horrors is to fight the tide itself. The course of the market is thus a perfectly natural, inexorable force, and government action to correct it can only lead to greater harms on down the road.

And of course there is a certain degree of evidence to back this up. By a certain degree of evidence, I of course mean scads of economic analysis regarding details such as those above. We can see the adjustments that market values make in the wake of government changes quite regularly, and it isn’t hard to see just how often those adjustments prove the undoing of many well-intentioned policies.

And yet the rhetoric of Free Market Fundamentalism seems to stretch a little beyond this evidence, turning tendencies into laws and social behavior into the tell-tale signs of a god passing in the night. It is not merely that supply and demand react to one another, but that they do so under the command of an entity of sorts, one with great powers. Somewhere along the line, reasonable arguments about the particulars give rise to a mythic narrative, one which simplifies the choices in front of us.

All of this begs the question of just how simple it is to keep government actions out of business. Money, like government office, is a vehicle of power, and there is no inherent reason why we should moralize the one and naturalize the other. But of course that is precisely the point of so much talk about the power of the market; that market will do what it does, and individuals seeking profit will do what they do. Neither morals, nor governments, nor all the devils in Hell will alter the course of self interest. What is left for us to do but acknowledge in stoic terms the limitations of humanity and civic service? …and hence to let things run their course? A virtuous government is thus one that does not interfere. Likewise with virtuous politicians!

And damn those who would trespass against the will of the market.

Thus a man who dies because an insurance company will not pay for an expensive operation has in effect passed away of natural causes, but one who has died because a government panel denied him the operation? Well, his death is the result of arcane forces. Worse still, a life prolonged by such a committee must also be an unnatural event, a form of undeath, sustaining itself by draining the life from others. And if folks stop short of blaming those whose health is the result of government programs, well we can certainly point a finger at the necromancers who created those programs.

Cough, …Obama!

This is the attraction of a narrative that separates the world of power into forms about which we can make decisions of right or wrong and those about which we can only hope to adapt. Government is thus saturated with moral significance; there are good politicians and bad politicians, even evil ones. But market forces? These are as natural as the tide itself. One might as well urge reform on the laws of gravity as hope to change the nature of business.

It is for this same reason that welfare queens elicit so much more effective anger than corrupt bankers. We can understand someone fudging the numbers to make a profit, but a woman who lives off the coercive power of government authority? That is an abomination. Likewise with all manner of horrors resulting from poverty; they are natural. We might shed a tear for those that die of such things, but we expect them to handle it themselves, or to turn to family.

“She doesn’t want you; she wants her parents.”

If you want to help your neighbor, so one hears, then do so with your own money! Give to charity, or pay your brother’s bills, but don’t force others to do the same. But of course the market in its infinite wisdom sets the price for the necessities of life too high for such personal action, at least if one hopes to get ahead in life. And so neither government nor private individuals can really do much about this man’s teeth or that woman’s liver. The result is natural, so the narrative goes, and there is nothing for us to do but go about our lives as people all about us suffer.

We can only hope they will do it in silence, behind a door somewhere, not screaming down at the river.

This is, after all, a nation of civilized people.