The raucous free-for-alls playing across the country at various town hall meetings focusing on health care reform reminds me of one of my favorite movies, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
No, this is not because Arlen Specter somehow reminds me of Paul Newman.
In the film, you might recall, Butch and Sundance make their fateful decision to go to Bolivia after they are pursued across much of the scenic Southwest by the unrelenting and implacable super posse dispatched by E.H. Harriman to stop their train-robbing ways. The pair ride and ride, desperately trying to lose their dogged pursuers, but every time they look over their shoulders their unshakeable foes are still there, relentlessly hounding them.
“Who are those guys?” Butch and Sundance repeatedly ask each other, with a mounting mixture of frustration and wonderment.
That’s what I keep asking myself about the foaming, splenetic protesters who have turned out at various congressional events to vent their screeching, splenetic opposition to Obama’s proposed health care reforms. “Who are those guys?”
I mean, who in their right mind is satisfied with our current undeniably broken and unsatisfactory health care system, which leaves millions of Americans unprotected, and those of us who are lucky enough to have health insurance paying ever-escalating premiums for ever-diminishing coverage? (Other than the insurance companies, of course, and those who carry water for them.)
Granted, we’ve learned that these shout-fests, far from being spontaneous groundswells, are well-organized and orchestrated by various factions opposed to all aspects of Obama’s political agenda, such as the self-styled Tea-Party Patriots anti-government-spending zealots. And some of the putative “just a mom from a few blocks away” have been revealed to be Republican operatives and party hacks. (Paul Krugman, as usual, has written one of his typically smart columns today, pointing out that even “moderate” Republicans like Chuck Grassley have embraced their party’s latest ridiculous lie, that Obama’s health-care proposals would establish “death panels” and advocate euthanasia of the elderly.)
Okay, if we’ve learned anything from the past eight years, it’s to expect a little—okay, make that a lot—of dissembling from the foes of social progress. But what really concerns me is the ranting, raving, and rebuking rank-and-file. Where did all of these desperate and angry and (let’s be honest) pale white people come from?
Are they so buffeted, depressed, or displaced by all of the soul-shaking events of the past decade—two recessions; terrorist attacks; two simultaneous, hard-to-comprehend wars in far-off, little-understood countries; an unprecedented financial crisis, all set off against a backdrop of growing economic inequality and uncertainty—that they have independently and collectively decided they are (in the memorable phrase uttered by Howard Beale in “Network”) “mad as hell and not going to take it any more.” Even if the proposed reforms would probably make their own lives less stressful, more secure, and healthier? (The irony, of course, is that for all their verbalized fears that Obama is a secret Socialist, in a truly social democratic society most of these people would find themselves with fewer economic insecurities.)
Are they that fearful of change that they’re willing to fight—even threaten violence—to retain our current sick health care system?
Who are those guys?
Brave New Whirl 