Obama's healthcare horror

Obama's healthcare horror
Heads should roll -- beginning with Nancy Pelosi's!
By Camille Paglia

Aug. 12, 2009 |

Buyer's remorse? Not me. At the North American summit in Guadalajara
this week, President Obama resumed the role he is best at --
representing the U.S. with dignity and authority abroad. This is why
I, for one, voted for Obama and continue to support him. The damage
done to U.S. prestige by the feckless, buffoonish George W. Bush will
take years to repair. Obama has barely begun the crucial mission that
he was elected to do.



Having said that, I must confess my dismay bordering on horror at the
amateurism of the White House apparatus for domestic policy. When will
heads start to roll? I was glad to see the White House counsel booted,
as well as Michelle Obama's chief of staff, and hope it's a harbinger
of things to come. Except for that wily fox, David Axelrod, who could
charm gold threads out of moonbeams, Obama seems to be surrounded by
juvenile tinhorns, bumbling mediocrities and crass bully boys.



Case in point: the administration's grotesque mishandling of
healthcare reform, one of the most vital issues facing the nation.
Ever since Hillary Clinton's megalomaniacal annihilation of our last
best chance at reform in 1993 (all of which was suppressed by the
mainstream media when she was running for president), Democrats have
been longing for that happy day when this issue would once again be
front and center.



But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama
would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises -- or
that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive
branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under
pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants
about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing
grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.



There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement
of a healthcare plan that does not even exist yet, except in five
competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo
Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-
switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country
into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over
American cities.



You can keep your doctor; you can keep your insurance, if you're happy
with it, Obama keeps assuring us in soothing, lullaby tones. Oh,
really? And what if my doctor is not the one appointed by the new
government medical boards for ruling on my access to tests and
specialists? And what if my insurance company goes belly up because of
undercutting by its government-bankrolled competitor? Face it:
Virtually all nationalized health systems, neither nourished nor
updated by profit-driven private investment, eventually lead to
rationing.



I just don't get it. Why the insane rush to pass a bill, any bill, in
three weeks? And why such an abject failure by the Obama
administration to present the issues to the public in a rational,
detailed, informational way? The U.S. is gigantic; many of our states
are bigger than whole European nations. The bureaucracy required to
institute and manage a nationalized health system here would be
Byzantine beyond belief and would vampirically absorb whatever savings
Obama thinks could be made. And the transition period would be a
nightmare of red tape and mammoth screw-ups, which we can ill afford
with a faltering economy.



As with the massive boondoggle of the stimulus package, which Obama
foolishly let Congress turn into a pork rut, too much has been
attempted all at once; focused, targeted initiatives would, instead,
have won wide public support. How is it possible that Democrats,
through their own clumsiness and arrogance, have sabotaged healthcare
reform yet again? Blaming obstructionist Republicans is nonsensical
because Democrats control all three branches of government. It isn't
conservative rumors or lies that are stopping healthcare legislation;
it's the justifiable alarm of an electorate that has been cut out of
the loop and is watching its representatives construct a tangled
labyrinth for others but not for themselves. No, the airheads of
Congress will keep their own plush healthcare plan -- it's the rest of
us guinea pigs who will be thrown to the wolves.



With the Republican party leaderless and in backbiting disarray
following its destruction by the ideologically incoherent George W.
Bush, Democrats are apparently eager to join the hara-kiri brigade.
What looked like smooth coasting to the 2010 election has now become a
nail-biter. Both major parties have become a rats' nest of hypocrisy
and incompetence. That, combined with our stratospheric, near-criminal
indebtedness to China (which could destroy the dollar overnight),
should raise signal flags. Are we like late Rome, infatuated with past
glories, ruled by a complacent, greedy elite, and hopelessly powerless
to respond to changing conditions?



What does either party stand for these days? Republican politicians,
with their endless scandals, are hardly exemplars of traditional moral
values. Nor have they generated new ideas for healthcare, except for
medical savings accounts, which would be pathetically inadequate in a
major crisis for anyone earning at or below a median income.



And what do Democrats stand for, if they are so ready to defame
concerned citizens as the "mob" -- a word betraying a Marie Antoinette
delusion of superiority to ordinary mortals. I thought my party was
populist, attentive to the needs and wishes of those outside the power
structure. And as a product of the 1960s, I thought the Democratic
party was passionately committed to freedom of thought and speech.



But somehow liberals have drifted into a strange servility toward big
government, which they revere as a godlike foster father-mother who
can dispense all bounty and magically heal all ills. The ethical
collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total
silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's
outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable
"casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done
this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast
to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant
totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have
immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.



As a libertarian and refugee from the authoritarian Roman Catholic
church of my youth, I simply do not understand the drift of my party
toward a soulless collectivism. This is in fact what Sarah Palin hit
on in her shocking image of a "death panel" under Obamacare that would
make irrevocable decisions about the disabled and elderly. When I
first saw that phrase, headlined on the Drudge Report, I burst out
laughing. It seemed so over the top! But on reflection, I realized
that Palin's shrewdly timed metaphor spoke directly to the
electorate's unease with the prospect of shadowy, unelected government
figures controlling our lives. A death panel not only has the power of
life and death but is itself a symptom of a Kafkaesque brave new world
where authority has become remote, arbitrary and spectral. And as in
the Spanish Inquisition, dissidence is heresy, persecuted and
punished.



Surely, the basic rule in comprehensive legislation should be: First,
do no harm. The present proposals are full of noble aims, but the
biggest danger always comes from unforeseen and unintended
consequences. Example: the American incursion into Iraq, which
destabilized the region by neutralizing Iran's rival and thus
enormously enhancing Iran's power and nuclear ambitions.



What was needed for reform was an in-depth analysis, buttressed by
documentary evidence, of waste, fraud and profiteering in the
healthcare, pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Instead what
we've gotten is a series of facile, vulgar innuendos about how doctors
conduct their practice, as if their primary motive is money. Quite
frankly, the president gives little sense of direct knowledge of
medical protocols; it's as if his views are a tissue of hearsay and
scattershot worst-case scenarios.



Of course, it didn't help matters that, just when he needed maximum
momentum on healthcare, Obama made the terrible gaffe of declaring
that, even without his knowing the full facts, Cambridge, Mass.,
police had acted "stupidly" in arresting a friend of his, Harvard
professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. Obama's automatic identification with
the pampered Harvard elite (wildly unpopular with most sensible
people), as well as his insulting condescension toward an officer
doing his often dangerous duty, did serious and perhaps irreparable
damage to the president's standing. The strained, prissy beer summit
in the White House garden afterward didn't help. Is that the Obama
notion of hospitality? Another staff breakdown.



Both Gates and Obama mistakenly assumed that the original incident at
Gates' house was about race, when it was about class. It was the
wealthy, lordly Gates who committed the first offense by instantly and
evidently hysterically defaming the character of the officer who
arrived at his door to investigate the report of a break-in. There was
no excuse for Gates' loud and cheap charges of racism, which he should
have immediately apologized for the next day, instead of threatening
lawsuits and self-aggrandizing television exposés. On the other hand,
given that Cambridge is virtually a company town, perhaps police
headquarters should have dispatched a moderator to the tumultuous
scene before a small, disabled Harvard professor was clapped in
handcuffs and marched off to jail. But why should an Ivy League
panjandrum be treated any differently from the rest of us hoi polloi?



Class rarely receives honest attention in the American media, as
demonstrated by the reporting on a June incident at a swimming pool in
the Philadelphia suburbs. When the director of the Valley Swim Club in
Montgomery County cancelled its agreement with several urban day camps
to use its private pool, the controversy was portrayed entirely in
racial terms. There were uninvestigated allegations of remarks about
"black kids" made by white mothers who ordered their children out of
the pool, and the racial theme was intensified by the director's inept
description of the "complexion" of the pool having been changed --
which may simply have been a whopper of a Freudian slip.



Having followed the coverage in the Philadelphia media, I have
lingering questions about how much of that incident was race and how
much was social class. Urban working-class and suburban middle-class
children often have quite different styles of play -- as I know from
present observation as well as from my Syracuse youth, when I
regularly biked to the public pool in Thornden Park. Kids of all races
from downtown Syracuse neighborhoods were much rougher and tougher,
and for self-preservation you had to stay out of their way! Otherwise,
you'd get knocked to the concrete or dunked when they heedlessly
jumped off the diving board onto our heads in the crowded pool.



In general, middle-class children today are more closely supervised at
pools because the family can afford to have a non-working parent at
home -- a luxury that working-class kids rarely have. What happened at
the Valley Swim Club, whose safety infrastructure was evidently also
overwhelmed by too many visiting kids who were non-swimmers, may have
been a clash of classes rather than races. Were the mothers who pulled
their kids out of the pool that day really reacting to skin color or
what they, accurately or not, perceived to be an overcrowded,
dangerous disorder? The incontrovertible offense in all this, which
went unmentioned in the national media, was the closure for budgetary
reasons by the city of Philadelphia this summer of 27 of its 73 public
pools. There is no excuse for that kind of draconian curtailment of
basic recreational facilities for working-class families, sweltering
in the urban summer heat.



Now on to art and pop. Highlight of the month for me was definitely a
recent performance by Alo Brasil, a local Brazilian music and dance
ensemble, at Philadelphia's World Cafe Live. I positioned myself smack
in front of the stage to bathe in the magnificent, hypnotic drumming,
a Bahian style with West African roots that takes one into another
reality -- sublime and trans-historical. Of course, then there was the
sensory overload of the beautiful, nimble, long-legged samba dancers
in their jeweled bikinis and high heels! But all the dancers of Alo
Brasil, male and female, are absolutely brilliant -- it was mind-
blowing. Anyone born and raised in Bahia (such as Daniela Mercury) has
obviously been immersed in these rhythms from earliest childhood. They
are surely profoundly transformative, reshaping the neural synapses
and opening the mind toward ecstatic group communication. To be
continued!



Our pop medley for this column begins with the Algeria-born Etienne
Daho, whose three-disc set, "Dans la Peau de Daho" (2002), I have been
working my way through. Last year, I posted two other videos featuring
Daho -- his quietly compelling duet with Charlotte Gainsbourg and his
moving tribute to Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. This song, "Paris le
Flore," is a hauntingly atmospheric ode to random encounters in the
streets and cafés of Paris. In the narrative superimposed by the
video, two notable French performers do their thing -- Virginie
Ledoyen (who appeared with Catherine Deneuve in "8 Women" and with
Leonardo DiCaprio in "The Beach") and singer/actor Benjamin Biolay, ex-
husband of Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of Deneuve and Marcello
Mastroianni. I love the way Daho's shimmery song re-creates the
meditative mystique of French eroticism, shown in a thousand films.
And that liquid, stuttering bass line -- divine! (Hey, Salon readers,
if you don't have good speakers on your computer, you're missing the
cultural riches of the Web.)



Next on the docket is Sharon Stone, exploding in all her topless glory
on the cover of Paris Match. Now there's a gal who knows how to work
the gym while still keeping the sacred flame of sexiness alive! Yes,
you know who the Big Bad Example is of obsessive gym culture gone to
seed -- that increasingly artificial construction of paraffin and
chicken wire, our Madonna of the Shallows. Jesus Luz must be blessedly
myopic. (Cue the Contours' 1965 R&B hit, "First I Look at the Purse.")



Caught HBO's 1998 movie "Gia" for the umpteenth time on cable the
other day. My admiration remains boundless for the 22-year-old
Angelina Jolie's bravura performance as the Philadelphia-born fashion
model Gia Carangi, a heroin addict who died of AIDS in 1986. I've
often recommended Stephen Fried's excellent 1993 biography, "Thing of
Beauty: The Tragedy of Supermodel Gia," but this time I hit the Web to
see what else I could dig up.



Mother lode! I found Gia's original nude fence photos, shown in the
movie being shot by the perverse fashionista Chris von Wangenheim. I
was startled to learn that Wangenheim was killed in a car accident in
1981, another blow for Gia. In trying to find his obit, I discovered
that New York Times files of the World War One era are filled with
references to his noble German ancestors, many of whom were barons
killed in battle. Another German decadent artiste, like the
incomparable Helmut Newton.



Here are some wonderful photos of Wilhelmina (stylishly played in the
movie by Faye Dunaway), the Dutch fashion model veteran of 300 covers
who founded an agency that hired the scrappy Gia but who then
tragically died of cancer at age 40 in 1980, leaving Gia bereft. And
here's Gia's ever-patient, real-life girlfriend, Sandy Linter, who
turns out to be a more in-your-face urban type of the Deborah Harry
school than she was portrayed in the movie.



Interested parties should check out this pastiche of clips, with a
great song, which ingeniously conflate Gia with Patricia Charbonneau
in that lesbo classic "Desert Hearts" (1985). This is a good chance to
appreciate anew the charming eroticism of the car-in-the-rain first
kiss between Charbonneau and Helen Shaver, which proves the point I
made in my last column about the best lesbian scenes on film having
ironically been performed by straight women. Finally, here is Gia
herself -- a late clip showing her in surly, rambling butch mode, with
druggy speech and tics, and then a dazzling collection of her peak
high fashion images, which whiz by too fast but still reveal what an
astonishing, almost supernormal presence she was.



Oh, one last note. Gay trivia: The 17-year-old hustler who in 1975
murdered the gay film director Pier Paolo Pasolini by repeatedly
running him over with his own car on an Italian beach was named
Giuseppe Pelosi. Hmm ... Hustling must run in the family.



Camille Paglia's column appears on the second Wednesday of each month.
Every third column is devoted to reader letters. Please send questions
for her next letters column to this mailbox. Your name and town will
be published unless you request anonymity.



-- By Camille Paglia
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