Hey, you know what? The United States appears to me to be a third world country with better plumbing. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very nifty things about America, but let’s face it: There are a lot of pretty, pretty people out there that are damaged and hurting on the inside; Lady Liberty, in my opinion, is no exception.
I’ll try to make this less depressing than it has to be, what with Dear Leader (as Pam Spaulding likes to call him) cutting Libby loose and all… Levity, anybody? Keep on reading. I promise it’s coming.
The other night I saw SiCKO at the Mayan, coincidentally on the last day of my medical coverage through my old job. I have the option, as a new member of the “working underclass” (although I’m beginning to see that the real underclass is much greater in number) to either pay a king’s ransom in protection money to my health insurance provider within 60 days, and then once a month afterwards, or hope and pray that I don’t get hit by a bus, shot, stabbed, or sick.
I have to admit that I dig the idea that there are places where even those who aren’t too rich to care, or prostrate to those who are, have access to things like health care and representative government simply because they’re human beings.
The concept that everybody has a tax bill, but not a price tag (or sword of Damocles) over their head? That people in some societies not only take care of their politicians, but each other, too? That one isn’t expected to gamble on one’s life and/or health to, I don’t know, pursue happiness, among other things?
Crazy shit, eh? Summon the white-coats, ’cause I’ve got baskets to weave!
But, onward and upward to the cartoons:
To start, some non-cartoon snark. See, PageOneQ offers me a bit of creative control — perhaps a dangerous amount — but it keeps things interesting.
A C of E bishop lists gay rights regulations among the causes of flooding. Freakin’ awesome.
Added Rt. Rev. Dow in the newspaper in my mind: “Plus, imagine all the levees we could have built off Ron Lynch’s inheritance tax. Maybe if we taxed vice where vice is found we could get some things done around here! You know, like they tax the sodomites, even the ones in decades-long committed relationships and stable households, some raising kids, even; back in the States?!”
Sure, the comic happens to be Americentric when it links to a story out of the UK, but the Colonies have had their share of much the same rhetoric, have they not? I would be interested to hear Geraldine Granger’s take on the whole John Inman/tidal waves over Royston Vasey connection, regardless.
…I’d like a beer right about now.
And the following two strips just go to show: “Relevant” is in the eye of the beholder.
Some poetry:
And some culture:
Filed under: Christianity, capitalism, gay rights, health care, human rights, humor, media, politics | Tagged: cartooning, gay, GLBT, Nick Langewis, Scooter Libby, webcomics
I just tripped in like seven different ways reading all that.
DON’T TOUCH IT, IT’S EVIL!
This is one I’ll read again..
Early thoughts:
1. The Bishop is a nut.
2. Bin the OLD Testament.
3. Church should equal a place of quiet, spiritual sanctuary that stays
out of politics, gives relief to all and does not stand in judgement.
4. The Daily Mail is about the only paper in the UK that would 150%
endorse the old testament style ‘prophecy’ of such a Bishop.
5. John Inman is a national institution.
6. The introduction of civil partnerships was a wise, sensible and
brilliant move.
7. If my son turned out to be gay…I’d be so happy he could hold
out for ‘marriage’ and the ideals of faithfulness and exclusivity
that it should stand for. Also he could give and receive financial
protection legally.
8. Taxation is a necessary EVIL until humanity comes up with
something better.
I understand that you’re using levity to emphasize a point, but I think this ends up obfuscating the core of the issue you’re addressing. You seem to advocate socialized medicine. I don’t have any problem with this in principle, but the principle is what requires attention. For instance, how do you rationalize your support for a model of universal health care? Your premise seems to be that people are entitled to medicine following from their common humanity. Their membership in a species. Is this the case? It seems that in order to appraise your position, we need to ask some much more basic questions.
What _are_ people entitled to, and where do such entitlements originate? Which people are so entitled? And why are we obligated to these people but not others? What sets the limits of these obligations? Even more basically…
What _are_ our moral obligations?
You’ve provided an indication of where you suspect such entitlements originate, I think. Your allusion to the “pursuit of happiness” traces an origin for our obligations to others to the Bill of Rights. Now I’m not holding you to this because I realize that the tenor of your comment was jocular. I’ll wait for you to qualify your premises or correct me if I don’t faithfully represent your intent. In the meantime, however, the bare allusion requires some scrutiny. What would it mean to appeal to the Bill of rights as an origin for our obligations to others?
Can rights or obligations originate with a document?
Morality_play
Morality_play:
The allusion to the “pursuit of happiness” originates from the Declaration of Independence.
In that document Thomas Jefferson (with wise advice from Ben Franklin and John Adams) stated that “men” (and I think he meant all people not merely white males) are “endowed by their Creator” (make of that Creator business what you will) with certain “unalienable rights.”
Those unalienable rights include “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Now the Founders were purposefully vague – prescience on their part, I believe as they envisioned that the world of 2007 would be far different than the world of – 1776, say.
And I further believe that the language of the Declaration, while not binding as a legal document, perhaps, suggests the language of the Constitution’s Preamble which is binding language – or should be, despite the efforts of various parties past and present. “Promoting the general welfare” means the government should make every effort to see to the welfare of the public – including making health care available and affordable for all Americans.
So, yes, our rights and obligations can and do originate with these two documents. And we’d be a damned sight better off as a nation if we focused more attention on these obligations than on our quest for oil or other resources which are primarily pursued to enrich corporate interests.
Morality_play:
I don’t mean to connect any one particular document with the idea that we as human beings are morally obligated to each other any more than I am compelled to fire up LexisNexis and find a precedent for each of my other personal convictions.
Hint: Sometimes we have to set the precedents rather than follow them.
I certainly think that those three words, “pursuit of happiness”, still mean something, and what I had in mind at the time I wrote this was how we’re seemingly free to pursue happiness, but a striking majority of Americans would be very quickly ruined in the process, making us a bit less eager to stray.
How many people, for example, stay at jobs they don’t like because they have health conditions or don’t want to run the risk of not being covered? Sure, you can do what you want, and you can leave any time you like, but guess what? Your corporate overlord gets to hold over you not only your daily bread; he gets to control whether or not you get your medications, whether or not you can afford to see your doctor; your sense of security, your physical well-being (especially in the event of an emergency)…
Private companies run by private interests ultimately control the health and well-being of millions of people. Their government is full of people that don’t give a shit because they’re set for life, on your dime, whether or not they actually accomplish anything for anyone but themselves.
In some places, you have health care, if and when you need it, by government mandate rather than with the permission of a private enterprise or last-resort social safety net that only kicks in after you’re down for the count.
In some places, it doesn’t matter who you work for, what tax bracket you’re in, or whether or not you already need medical attention before you’re deemed worthy of receiving it.
In some places you can’t be priced out of a doctor, nor can you be denied access to affordable health care because you need it too much.
“Pursuit of happiness” being the three little words they are, how about these ones, which I suspect have been spoken at least once, in some form, by millions, mostly to themselves:
“If I pursue happiness on my terms I will be abandoned and left to fend entirely for myself while I continue to pay, and honor, this society for whatever is that it’s doing for me to begin with.”
In the US, there’s a lifeguard at the pool, but it’ll cost you. If you don’t have cash on you, he’ll do his best to ignore you when you start to drown, or save you then send you a bill. If you come with the right friends, you get a deep discount or don’t have to pay at all.
Admission doesn’t cover the lifeguard, of course, and most of that money disappears anyway. All they do anymore is add more chlorine.
I, personally, believe that a lifeguard doesn’t have the right to choose who drowns and who doesn’t, nor should he be allowed to put a price tag on the quality or duration of a human life.
Tyranny comes from every direction.
Hi Jim,
“So, yes, our rights and obligations can and do originate with these two documents.”
By prefacing this statement with the word “so,” the way you have, you seem to intend that you’ve confirmed your premise, but in your preceding four paragraphs, you have not demonstrated that rights can originate with a document. You’ve merely belabored me with a history lesson I don’t require. If you wish to maintain the premise that rights can and do originate with a document in the form of the bill of rights, then you will be required to qualify this premise. Reassuring me that the founding fathers “declared” it to be so will not be sufficient.
Now I gather from your comments that you’ve marked me as some sort of right-political shill, eager to dispense with this troublesome constitution where it comes into conflict with my own self-enrichment. My concern is actually with the way in which various right-political narratives (particularly libertarian narratives) go unchecked, and set the limits of dialogue. For example, libertarian dramas often privilege constitutional writ by the date of it’s inception, without attention to how effectively legislation satisfies or violates the requirements of moral activity. Instead the founding fathers are held up as some sort of infallible authority we’re expected to uncritically defer to. Your obsequious pawing at their brilliance above, makes me think you are not sensitive to your own right-libertarian commitments. Case in point…
Right’s can never originate with a document. In this, you are completely mistaken. The mistake became injected into dialogue by Locke and his contemporaries, and is often repeated by their libertarian descendants.
Two erroneous concepts of liberty and right originate in the enlightenment. It’s lexicon includes the concept of Natural rights attributable to Aristotle; those rights which are intrinsic to us and follow from our essential nature’s. Because theories of popular sovereignty developed naturally out of the enlightenment narrative of man as a solitary figure, and because of it’s epistemological efforts to monopolize legitimate claims to moral knowledge, Locke was able to inject the lexicon with the concept of social contract rights of his own invention. This unnatural and invented species of right colors his property analysis, and is retained in contemporary libertarian rights theory.
The concept of a right as something intrinsic to the individual that is necessary to his happiness, inalienably extant in time and sanctity prior to a civil society was originally developed by Hobbes. Locke’s second treatise on Civil society took the concept and injected it with morally dangerous perversions. This reconception of rights as external to the individual cannot possess moral relevancy. If a right can arise from contract, then it cannot belong to a man prior in time and sanctity to any civil society. Therefore, a right _cannot_ be the product of consent or contract as posited by Locke in his second treatise.
It places the locus of moral worth _outside the subject_! With some unnamed multitude that holds dominion and demands payment upon pain of death. The subject would retain the same qualities _before_ being granted protected status by a contract that she would _after_ being granted citizenship in whatever community the contract recognizes. If she possesses first order phenomenological consciousness, then she can subjectively internalize experiences of physical pain, terror and despair. She can prefer pleasure to these qualities. But _if_ a written contract can be a threshold for moral citizenship, then the mob can withhold protected status from her even while she exhibits these properties.
““Promoting the general welfare” means the government should make every effort to see to the welfare of the public – including making health care available and affordable for all Americans.”
The point I’m trying to make Jim, is that promoting the welfare of moral patients is necessary to satisfying the requirements of moral activity without respect to what any article of legislation says about it. Ideally, we appraise those requirements and design our legislation in response to it, but if legislation diminishes the quality of any moral patient, then it is to be suppressed. It doesn’t matter if Jefferson himself, _declared_ the legislation should exist.
“I don’t mean to connect any one particular document with the idea that we as human beings are morally obligated to each other any more than I am compelled to fire up LexisNexis and find a precedent for each of my other personal convictions.
Hint: Sometimes we have to set the precedents rather than follow them.”
Nick,
Your last comment here represents almost precisely what I was trying to emphasize in my initial comment. A closer representation of my concern might be this:
We need to _critically appraise_ what conditions ought to prevail rather than passively defer to the precedent of legislation.
What I’m preset to worry about is your earlier appeal to the Bill of Rights (by my estimation) as though the limits of our obligations to moral patients could actually be set by the founders. The problem is, once you privilege legislation from antiquity in this way, it’s inevitable that a very tiresome chorus of right-political ideologues will simply annul your appeal with their own interpretation of antique legislation.
You might favor the idea, as Jim seems to, that “promoting the general welfare” means that the state must institute socialized medicine. Johnny one-note libertarian will certainly tell you that it means the state must remove all restrictions to private entrepreneurship. In this way, the dialogue becomes arrested by opposing appeals to the authority of legislation, which is completely irrelevant to any discussion of what conditions _ought to prevail_.