One of the unfortunate side effects of my having a job now is that I have little energy and time. I sleep a lot. One of the nice perqs of the job, though, is that the hours and general mindlessness of the tasks allow me to listen to Stern in his entirety.
Today Courtney Love called in. I've never liked her. She seemed like Nirvana's Yoko. Today, though. She couldn't really hold a conversation. Unable to maintain a dialogue. Spoke off in random odd tangents, her thoughts continually circling around hazy notions of conspiracy. There's a certain explosive joy to be felt in hearing the thoughts of somebody who's mind is firing in lots of different directions. But then, in other circumstances, you get the shiver down your spine to hear somebody completely lost in their own delusional world, unable to be understood. It's frightening. So today I felt pity and sadness for her.
I have been trying to rebuild my JD Salinger collection. I went to the large used bookstore on Page the other day. Half the store is used books, the other half a massive porn collection. Got Franny and Zooey. Also picked up a cassette tape recording of TS Eliot reading some of his poems, including The Waste Land. He didn't read the introductory bit in Greek and Latin, which disappointed me a bit. TS Eliot's reading contained many instances of rising ends of sentences. You know how when somebody raises the pitch of their voice at the end of a sentence, making declarations sound interrogatory? He does that a lot in the recording, though it sounds more menacing than questioning.
I also wanted to say that I am confused about this whole gay marriage business. What's being asked is not to allow people to marry, but rather to extend the governmental benefits of marriage to a different group of people than before. I mean, marriage hasn't really ever meant what's meant by "gay marriage." If I had my druthers, those governmental benefits wouldn't exist for marriage. Rather, marriage would mean whatever anybody felt like making marriage mean, and we'd have a separate civil union system for gay and straight people. To expand marriage is a bit of social engineering, and while I can't say that it's a bad thing, it's something I'm loathe to endorse. I mean, we're talking about an incredibly small portion of the population. And the advocacy of this one issue has now encouraged amending the US Constitution. I mean, there're people rumbling to add a specifically anti-gay amendment to the fucking Constitution. How is this good? I don't really want government interfering in the personal lives of people, and so I'm troubled by making interpersonal relationships the business of the government.
A far more important question is health care. Affects a jillion more people. Plus, it represents something that is, I think, unambiguously evil. The notion that a person's sound health and own life should be determined by their finances is abhorrent to me.
What's more, this lack of access is distributed across racial lines. One, minorities are far more likely to have access to health care than are whites. Two, minorities who do have access to health care are less likely to receive full treatment than are whites. This is an issue that's been studied, controlling for disease, history, diagnosis, and even economic factors. A black person presenting the same condition with the same history and possessing the same finances is less likely to receive extensive treatment than is a white person with the same situation. It would be hyperbole to call this genocide, but surely the injustice falls into the same category.
And isn't private insurance in itself socialized? I mean, it pays for the care of all by spreading the costs across a large group of people. Why is it so much better to have it administered by a group of people with a profit motive? Isn't it the worst system to have these patchwork quilts of coverage, failing to spread the costs and benefits across the larger population?
And what's with people leaving weird, nonsensical comments in my fucking blog? Goddamn it.
Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters is really good, by the way.
Posted by mattb at February 12, 2004 10:47 PM