Now With More Ranty Goodness!
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
My goofy friend Paul (not my boyfriend Paul) came over last week with Roscoe’s chicken and waffles. (Two weeks ago he brought ceviche.) I am very happy to see him for a visit every week, now that he is not my terrible roommate and I don’t come home after a 12-hour workday and commute from Los Angeles to Anaheim to find him, fat and hairy, sitting in my pretty Deco chair, in my bedroom, in his boxers and no shirt, insisting even after many demands that he get the fuck out of my room and my Deco chair that since that is the only place the wi-fi works, he has every right to be in my room, in my pretty chair, hairy as fuck. GET OUUUUUTTT!
As we ate, Paul told me his wonderful idea. If we knew someone who developed affordable housing, that person or consortium could get or build a building in Long Beach, near the VA, and make it veterans housing, with a pleasant and calming garden on top and medical marijuana outlets on the bottom, and we could show a rotating lineup of Vietnam movies. Monday could be Platoon night, Tuesdays could be Apocalypse Now, and if it’s Wednesday, it must be The Deer Hunter! The affordable housing person or consortium could get some grants from the feds for the paying of the rent, and the veterans could get their VA treatments and take classes at LBCC if they had a yen. Also, they could yell a lot of wordless grunts and moans and just have general crazy eyes. Here, let Paul demonstrate some crazy eyes and wordless moans for you. See? It would be awesome!
Paul is full of very good ideas.
And that was all well and good, but I was too angry—filled with weeping and anger!—to do much more than add the very pertinent Deer Hunter to his list of awesome movies to show the vets, so as they’d feel comfy and at home. Why was I so weepy and mad? Why not! First, I was probably ready to menstruate, and second I am taking this health care debate too personally. Really, I really am. I am not taking it as personally as the bloggers at Fire Dog Lake who decried Bernie Sanders as a “coward” for removing his Single Payer amendment from the floor. But I am taking it personally enough to write shrieking e-mails to Andrew Sullivan with the subject line “WHAT IS IN IT FOR ME?” (which he does not post) and then I talk to my mother on the phone and sob at her, “I don’t want to be one of those people screaming ‘what’s in it for me,’ but WHAT THE FUCK IS IN IT FOR ME?” and that was back when the public option was being traded for the Medicare buy-in for 55-year-olds, and I AM NOT 55, even though all the wonks say it was better than the watered-down public option anyway, and now there’s not even that, because JOE LIEBERMAN, and I’m so angry, at Lieberman (duh) and Rahm Emanuel for his triangulating DLC bullshit where Lieberman is king and gets all the virgins he wants and nobody ever says boo to him but Howard Dean replaces Osama bin Laden as Enemy No. 1 for pointing out that the bill kind of sucks now because we gave all this shit away to the insurance companies as a COMPROMISE but somebody (SOMEBODY) doesn’t understand that unilateral compromises aren’t so much compromises as muggings (I’m pretty sure Ronald Reagan said that) and I’m even mad at the president for really not doing a very good job with “leadership” on this, truly he didn’t, because only ALL THE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD except for four loud (and armed) morons at town halls WANTED A STRONG GODDAMN REFORM, and it’s all gone now, for Lieberman, but oh, I can’t stay mad at the president for long: so handsome! So smart and wise and liberal-talkin’ and thoughtful and nuanced and his awesome wife holds poetry jams at the White House (awesome!) and maybe he’s a little bit of a pussy but Emanuel was supposed to be his fearless thug, stabbing people in the throat and sending them fish threats, the bad cop to the president’s courteous and courtly cop, and that is not working out the way I’d wanted, or the way anybody wanted, so of course now all the mad “progressives” are threatening to go Nader again because that worked out so well the last time.
Here is what happens when you go Nader:
What a stupid fucking decade!
You know, I cassandraed for years about how the U.S.’s standard of living was unsustainable and it would pop and we’d all have to go Ecotopia and have less shit eventually, but now that it’s actually here, I don’t really like being right. And that’s why I bought everyone Epsom salt for Christmas, because of poorness and Ecotopia and cheap natural remedies since nobody I know has health insurance anyway (except my mama, who gets Medicare, and please to keep your government out of it!). So if you are coming to my house for Christmas morning (champagne and strawberries and bagels and lox, not very Ecotopian but the way Christmas was meant to be celebrated), you are getting a box of Epsom salt from Rite-Aid, because it is roughly $3 and will cure your arthritis, smelly feet, and menstrual cramps. Also: backne! In the meantime, the hundreds of billions we should be saving on health care with the new reforms have been traded away for Joe Lieberman’s pious and unerring sense of fiscal responsibility.
Democrats are going to lose the shit out of their majorities this year, and it’s not because the GOP is such an attractive force of attraction or because the Dems weren’t centrist enough. It’s because even with supermajorities, the Dems still didn’t stand up for their constituents and rock the reforms for which people have been crying for decades. Reid tried. Pelosi’s still taking names like a badass. But the White House has humstrung them disgracefully, first for Snowe, and now for Lieberman. Yes, half a loaf, don’t-let-the-perfect, etc., pass the fucking bill, fine. But the Bush White House certainly didn’t have 60 fucking Republican votes in the Senate, and except for privatizing Social Security it got everything it ever wanted and then some.
So here’s the deal, President Handsome: nobody cares about bipartisanship but you, and it’s time to stop with the Lieberman coddling and tell Rahm what’s what. Now mama’s got some Epsom salts to wrap. Christmas is coming, you know. Also, if we knew anybody in the affordable housing racket, they should totally build something for vets in the LBC.
rebecca@fourstory.org
Comments
Yep, it’s amazing to me the visceral hatred I feel for so many of these congressional schmucks. Genuine visceral hatred, they should all die like dawgs in the street, their entrails eaten by jackals & etc. HOWEVER, my anger is constantly tempered by this: The American Voter had an opportunity in the last election to ensure a filibuster, veto-proof super majority in congress and they did not do that. They CHOSE to elect and re-elect people who were guaranteed to keep the status quo and ensure The People who voted for them would CONTINUE to be given crap with dead flies on it. So, that’s what they’re gonna get. Crap with dead files on it. Then they’ll get the bill. And then they’ll whine and snivel but it will be too late and it will be exactly what they asked for and got.
Here’s my thesis on this: America has turned into Battered Wife Nation—beat her up, pimp her out, feed her crap with dead flies on it, and she hands over all her money to her elected (and reelected) pimps, who use it to gamble on Wall Street, buy mistresses and limos and “fact-finding tours” to Belize in mid-winter, and top notch health insurance, while she gets epsom salts and a smack upside the head while her kid dies from lack of medical care and she says, “O Thank You Daddy, I’ll always vote for you!” And does. Again and Again and Again.
Go figure.
2009-12-21 by Ann Calhoun
rebecca’s idea of housing for vets is great except for the movies part. vets take their tour of duty seriously and even though her suggestion for war movies was meant in a funny, touching way, i think vets would think she was making light of their service.
2009-12-18 by florencei know this not to be true about her. after 9-11 she had an american flag sticker in her car window until it disintegrated.
secondly, the left is notorious for eating its own because they (me included) are scrupulously idealistic. which is why we STILL don’t have utopia in this country.
start little and build to a better world. that’s my new motto.