Health Care and It's Discontents

Democracy, reason, and decency won, sort of. Negotiations widdled away the public option and other points that I would have preferred stay extant. All the same the health care bill will create a country that is safer and healthier than it was before. Common citizens are now more likely to survive calamitous illness and live to maybe contribute something important to their intimates, society, or humanity as a whole. The USA is a better place than it was forty eight hours ago. Hail hail.

And as for the tight wing opponents. Well, combined with the election of Obama, this is the second time in two years that every conceit they have about themselves has been blown up in their faces. Twice in two years has their belief that they cannot possibly lose, so long as they are violently passionate enough, certain enough of their own righteousness, devoid enough from any doubt that they are the eternal standard of Americanism, and contemptuous enough of their opposition, has been proven wrong.

Health care reform passed not because they lacked the will to fight it to their last breath, but because their will to fight was irrelevant. While they were heroically engaged in an apocalyptic fight against socialism that exists only in their childishly dramatic minds, the health care bill was being cobbled together, piece by agonizing piece, by the civilized methods of process, procedure, and negotiation. Make all the vague allusions to guns and revolution you want to you sons of bitches, it doesn't change the fact that the egghead elitists are in charge of things now, and that they are, however fittingly, having their way with (cough)your(cough, giggle)country.

The party controlling the White House nearly always loses seats in midterm elections, and this year will be no different. Whether or not the Democrats lose their majority in one or both houses, conservatives will doubtlessly consider their gains to be proof that the moment of their eternal triumph, which is always just around the corner, is once again just around the corner. But if they continue to insist upon viewing the world as a hyper masculine struggle of the chosen few against the parasitic many, than the GOP as we know it ultimately remains as doomed as the White majority. So long as the modern right refuses to accept that democracy is essentially anti-glorious, that American institutions are intrinsically designed to deny illusions of cosmic triumph, so long as the right wing is more willing to cling to absurd theories of media bias and secret Muslims than to accept the banality of freedom, it is condemned to boil down to a handful of true believing cranks, the tiny handful that is immune to apocalypse fatigue.