“Schadenfreude” : Why We Want Obama to Fail

We hear this stuff all the time: The guy sitting across from you at lunch -- maybe your boss -- leans across the table, intensifying his eye contact with you, and with an air of hubris bred authority, announces something to the effect that “Rupert Murdoch owns Gingrich”, or that “George Soros owns Obama”. And you glance back appreciatively at this guy, tighten your lips a bit and nod your head in agreement. After all, he would know, wouldn’t he? He is regional manager of the vast distribution network of ladies underwear clips that employs you. A guy like him must be on a first name basis with (and, himself be owned by) the most authentic, bona fide movers and shakers of this world.

On top of that, well, he does own you. There’s little doubt of that. Just ask your secretary. She’ll tell you what a nobody you are. In fact, she probably has already told everyone else. You may have been "bread" in Kentucky, son. But you’re just a crumb up here.

The Germans, of course, have a word for it

It’s important to us that those more powerful or successful than ourselves have an Achilles heel of some sort. Oscar Wilde once told us something to the effect that "it is not enough in life that one succeed. One’s friends must fail." The Germans, of course, have a word for this: “schadenfreude” . There is no equivalent word in English. The closest are perhaps sadism or malice, but really they don’t capture the broad spirit of the word since it can encompass even small matters like the humor we take at someone’s comedic misfortune upon slipping on a banana peel. It’s basically taking your enjoyment from the misfortunes of others. In short, its being never satisfied until others are reduced to one‘s own level -- or preferably below.

So, when the lofty among us stumble or fall, it is always a delicious event in the day’s news. Network viewership statistics rise when we smell blood. It brings out the shark in us all. It provides a fresh opportunity for those of us engaged in class struggle -- the vast lower 90% of humanity -- to sharpen our teeth on the bones of the decaying carcasses of random aristocratic misfortunates.

The vast majority of us are owned

But this reminds us too. It reminds us that all of us who struggle, who trade our labor for bread, are owned by others. That we are all what that great labor leader Eugene Debs called "wage slaves". And that even here, in this land of the myth of the Great American Dream, one is no more likely to rise to the next rung of the social ladder than his father was. Most of us -- most ordinary Americans -- don’t believe any of this. But the empirical evidence supporting the case is awesome. In fact, in the past 40 years, given a resurgence of the Social Darwinism that characterized the gilded age (that which we refer to today as neo-conservatism), we are even less likely to do so.
The vast majority of us really are owned. Sometimes, at the lowest rungs of the food chain, even our costumes give it away. Those of us in the blue vests are owned by the Walton Family and their vast personal family fortune of over $80 billion dollars. Those in red polo shirts and kakis are owned by Target Corporation. Even those in the black suits, roman collars and red skull caps are owned -- by the Vatican.

So, is it so all that difficult to see that even many of the owners themselves among us are owned by others as well? That our politicians are owned by the corporations that finance their bids for election and reelection? And why their votes are not going to be tossed in favor of the interests of the vast majority of us who think that it really is “We, the people” who determine the direction and fate of America?

Why Nothing is as it Seems

At the far edges of the universe, cosmology tells us that gravity behaves differently. That Newtonian physics and even Einstein’s relativity breaks down, and that the laws of physics no longer apply as they do in our tiny neighborhood of the heavens. So it is, too, at the far edges of our national and global economies. The invisible clusters of the privileged few, the veiled aristocracy of names that seldom cross the lips of those gathered at our evening dinner tables operate in a different universe than that in which we live out our daily lives. The laws that guide our existences do not apply to them. The rules break down. They are free to manipulate both the weak and the powerful... Would that "everyman" were free to roam those other dimensions that common minds never dreamt of.

While the rest of us take our delights in “schadenfreude” -- in the misfortunes of those most like ourselves; while we scatter our rare opportunities for social progress to the ill winds of chance, to the notion of the survival of the fittest, these privileged few continue to feast on the profits of our labor and the misfortune of our ignorance.

These are not new ideas. Long ago, Mark Twain had this to say about humanity in his novel, The Mysterious Stranger :


"And what does it amount to?" said Satan, with his evil chuckle. "Nothing at all. You gain nothing: you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously re-performing this dull nonsense to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touchedthem; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for,die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master toward slave, and are answered in the language of slave toward master; who are worshipped by you with your mouth, while in your heart if you have one you despise yourselves for it. The First man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not failed yet in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built."

“Schadenfreude” : Why We Want Obama to Fail by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Is Universal Health Insurance Like Universal Auto Insurance?

This question was raised by an interesting (if right-leaning) gentleman who calls himself “Blogsniper” in the Comments section of the Altoona Mirror Opinion Forums. And (though I have, more than once, nastily referred to him as a “neo-con Appalachian hayseed” this time he presents us with an excellent analogy. And with that, he has redeemed himself (permanently?) in my eyes. You can read all his comments on the subject here. Blogsniper, unsurprisingly, believes that we can avoid involving yet another layer of government bureaucracy by having a Pennsylvania-vehicle-code based health insurance plan administered by the private sector, and I’ll discuss that as well in the following analysis.

“Blogs” (as he is affectionately known to his right-leaning “comrades“) may make us a good socialist cohort yet, even without having to pry his cold dead fingers from his bible and gun. At the very least, his insight provides us a new angle from which to evaluate why one piece of common sense legislation is so readily accepted by the public while another similarly reasonable proposal can cause such bitter divisions. So, let's get on with the discussion:

From Whence Come Fear and Loathing? It’s Just Insurance!

In the case of universal auto coverage there were never any angry town hall meetings. And certainly no one felt the need to wear guns to the discussion. In fact, I don’t think there ever was much discussion; because unlike its evil twin -- universal health insurance -- it was never associated with issues of race or class. So, its practical necessity could easily be grasped by the whole citizenry -- the rich and poor alike. That’s why we now not only already have mandatory universal auto insurance -- we take it for granted. We already have it because the concept is so easy to identify with regardless of where you stand in the economic food chain. It’s based on the simple realization that most of us can’t afford to pay for a new car every month. So we all have it. No one objects. No one calls it socialism. No one would ever think to bother comparing it to the European system. None of the talking heads on the tube are trying to convince us that it is some grand totalitarian scheme. We just drive our cars with some confidence that the guy who hits us at a stop sign also has it, and neither of us is going to entirely loose our ass .

Enter the Puppet Masters

As for who should administers such a universal health care program -- is there really any difference between government and private business? Not really. The beast may look like two separate pieces of machinery. But it’s not. It's a single beast with two heads. It’s one big contraption run by the same people. That’s why politicians go directly through the revolving door into private companies when they leave office. (Think Daschle and Santorum). It’s also why only private companies pick and fund the candidates who run for office. They choose them and then return them through that same revolving door right back into government. It’s sort of a perpetual game of musical chairs for affluent adults.
Given that the same group of individuals is always involved in this game, it is easy to understand why levels of competence and incompetence are equal on either side -- the public sector and the private. Government is stupid and greedy. We all know that. We know it because so much of what it does is in fact, legally mandated to actually be “public“. But private industry, by its very structure is simply less transparent in how it operates. It is, as the term infers, “private”. And we are expected to keep our noses out. So, it has managed to mask its stupidity and greed in this myth of an amazingly well oiled machine called the free market. In fact, there is no free market. No efficient market. There is only an interdependent coalition of insiders on both sides of the fence, governmental and corporate, manipulating the marketplace through a matrix of expedient legislation, interlocking individual interests, the special favors of lobbyists and the secret agreements of the privileged few. The movement of markets is based not on the public good but on the narrow self interests of those giving the orders. They (those who run both public and private sectors) are all the same people, all wearing the same Hickey Freeman suits, eating at the same upscale restaurants and playing golf together at the same country clubs. And they all have matching collective IQ’s whether they are sitting in the Oval office or in the Chief Executive Suites of the Fortune 500. And none of them -- absolutely none of them -- neither the corporate leeches nor the political leeches -- give a damn about you or me.

If you find that picture of private industry hard to swallow, try being a shareholder in a publicly held private corporation. It won’t take long to see where you stand in the pecking order. Especially if you try to question executive compensation for poor performing managers, or the need for decreasing dividend payments to shareholders, excessive perks, corporate jets, golden parachutes, padded severance packages to encourage the departure of bungling executives, overgenerous contracts awarded to golf buddies, or simultaneous contributions to opposing political candidates. Let’s just say your concerns will be as graciously acknowledged as they will be quickly assigned to the nearest dust bin. To the leeches who run the private sector, as to the politicians and bureaucrats who run the public, all we’re good for is paying the bill on their free lunch.

Is Universal Health Insurance Like Universal Auto Insurance? by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Obama's Newest Spin: National Health Care with a “Public Auction.”

Even after all this debate neo-con hecklers are still asking me “what is this 'public option' that is thrown around so frequently? Please explain since I can't make heads or tails of it. “ Well, I’m going to try to use small words so that even they can understand:

Now, Obama knows that neo-con republicans will never go for health care with a “public option”. So I spoke with him on the phone this afternoon and suggested an alternative plan which he said he likes and is going to float on Capitol Hill. To appease us democrats he will retain the “public option for us. We will have national health care with a public option. On the other hand, given that neo-cons are so inclined to allow the free market to work, he will now be submitting to Congress a two tier plan that will give republicans exactly what they want as well. It will be known as national health care with a “Public Auction.”

It’s going to work this way: Whenever a democrat needs a liver transplant, the government public option plan will go into effect and cover all costs automatically. But when a neo-con republican needs a liver transplant, there will be a privately run software-driven search of E-Bay to secure the liver. When one is found then a very low bid (to ensure against excess government spending) will be submitted. If a cheap enough liver can be found then surgery can be scheduled. Otherwise the republican will remain on the waiting list until the “invisible hand” of the market agrees to do the surgery at a more reasonable price.

Obama's Newest Spin: National Health Care with a “Public Auction.” by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Yes, Altoona, There Can Be Pro-Life Liberals

The following letter appeared in the ALtoona Mirror on September 23, 2009. I am reprinting it here, preceeding my own response:

As the father of a recent college graduate who now has no health care coverage, I can empathize with those who thought they could make a difference by turning out for a candlelight vigil in Altoona (Mirror article, Sept. 3).
They should have had the opportunity to voice their views without threat of intimidation or violence.
It is clear to most people that the uninsured do need help. But H.R. 3200, the bill set to come before the entire U.S. House of Representatives, is not the answer to that prayer. The Capps Amendment to this bill (passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee) would explicitly authorize coverage of all elective abortions under the giant new "public plan."
In addition, it would also allow federal subsidies to flow to private insurance plans that cover elective abortions.
Move-On.org, the radical left extremists which organized the nationwide candlelight vigils, didn't bother to tell citizens that part of its agenda on its Web site.
But you can be sure that those who want to use health care reform to expand abortions nationwide have been knocking on the doors of Congress saying, "Look at all the support we have for this legislation!"
The majority of Americans do not favor unrestrained abortion on demand for any reason during all nine months of pregnancy.
And the vast majority do not want government money to pay for the killing of preborn babies and the lifetime of physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual damage abortion causes women.
Yet, that is exactly what we'll get if health care reform is passed without restrictions on abortion coverage.
Don't let MoveOn.org and like-minded radical groups get away with this. Tell your U.S. Representative and Senators Casey and Specter now: "Oppose any health care reform that does not explicitly exclude abortion coverage."
Michael V. Ciccocioppo
Executive Director
PA Pro-Life Federation
Harrisburg

Mallarky's Response to the PA Pro-Life Federation:

I am also the father of a recent college graduate who lost health care coverage. In fact, as my family and I left the driveway, headed for Penn State on the day of my daughter’s graduation, I walked through the rain to pick up the day’s mail. There among a small handful of letters was one from Blue Cross, announcing that as of that day -- the day of her graduation -- she was no longer covered under my policy. They didn’t waste any time -- not a single minute longer than necessary -- to drop her. They had obviously done the math far in advance. I fully expected she would be terminated upon graduation. These were the terms of our policy. It was the cold, impersonal swiftness with which they acted that reminded me that the private insurance companies care nothing for the people they insure.

They care about cash, not health. And they will not spend a single penny beyond that required by the law on patients, despite the cute, perky, warm empathetic sounding commercials they pump out at us in the media like ham salad out of a meat grinder. It’s not about the welfare of people or their health. It’s about money.

Realizing the Extinction of the Great American Middle Class

About a week before graduation we had received news from a local neurologist that my daughter, who had been having repeated bouts of migraines and visual problems of late had a rare brain disorder and would possibly need brain surgery. In the days following graduation I was busy looking into our options. Under COBRA we could continue her on my policy, but the premium was an additional whopping $570 per month just for her personal coverage. I looked into alternative policies with lower premiums only to learn that since she now, suddenly had a “pre-existing condition“, her coverage would not kick in for a year on the brain condition, so no related services (including surgery) would be covered. I had just pumped a total of $69,000 from my retirement account into her 4 year degree at Penn State to cover tuition, room, board, books etc.

We hadn’t qualified for economic aid, not because of income, but because I had unwittingly made that money an “available resource” (as the financial aid departments call it) by taking it and setting it aside in an account for her education. So, I was looking for some economic relief from the previous 4 years of college costs that was clearly not going to materialize. The only option was to pay the monthly premium so that coverage would continue.

She was already busy with the process of job interviewing, and after about a month she had secured a social services position (at close to minimum wage) with health coverage. Of course, the coverage would not be effective until after 90 days of employment. In the meantime, she had continued to job seek and secured a second job at twice the wage of the first, and with better career advancement prospects; so, of course, she took it. However the new employer’s health plan had the same restriction and she again had to begin a new 90 day waiting period.
So, many months passed, with the prospect of brain surgery hanging over her and the only health care option being my $570 monthly policy. Even having doubled her minimum wage social work salary to $15 per hour on her new job, their was no conceivable way she could have afforded that premium. That is the economy that Ronald Regan and George Bush had bequeathed us. One where families, even after exhausting much of their personal savings on a child’s education, would see that child enter a labor market where employers paid as little as possible in compensation, and the cost of health care is so prohibitive and inaccessible that even with a college degree it is next to impossible to support oneself.

The Pro-Life Enigma

So, of course, we were one of those families to whom the idea of national public health care made obvious sense. But, like Mr. Ciccocioppo, we were also a pro-life family. We had marched in Washington DC on the mall of the Capitol. We had stood in protest lines on the streets of our own town in pro-life rallies. We had marched at abortion clinics in various cities to protest the dehumanization of the pre-born. We had been shoved by police and shouted at by “in your face” angry pro-choice advocates. I had participated in the founding of a local professional organization of human service workers committed to the pro-life cause. We were, and are, in short, as committed to the cause of respect for life as Mr. Ciccocioppo.

But we are not of the mentality that life begins at conception and ends at birth. Being pro-life means assuming one's responsibility during every stage of the process of living. And that includes supporting human dignity by enabling all citizens to participate equally in the resources of our society -- including that of access to affordable health care.

We also understand that the diversity of America will be reflected in its laws. And that those laws will at times, as in any pluralistic democracy, inevitably conflict with important individual personal values; even longstanding ones that have evolved from traditionally held beliefs that have seemed to predominate from the early days of the republic. It is exactly this sort of social evolution that has given rise to today’s disputes over creationism and evolution and women’s privacy versus the right to life prior to birth. It spawned these conflicts just as the debate over abolition and slavery had at an earlier chapter of our history. And the emotions they trigger are just as fierce on either side.

There are many reasonable people who disagree with the idea that “life begins at conception” or that a fetus represents a complete human being at every stage of its development. And many of us who are pro-life base our notions of the rightness of our cause on religious values that are not shared by other citizens. We have, of course, a right to free speech and to try to argue and persuade others of the correctness of our beliefs.

But we don’t have a right to impose our personal or religious values on the moral decision making process of others any more than they do on us.

Tempering the “Everything or Nothing” Arrogance of the Political Right

Nor are we wise to sacrifice an historic opportunity to enable guaranteeing all our citizens the basic right to health care, simply because we cannot successfully extract from the proposed legislation the abortion option that already exists in our health care system. One can both support an imperfect national health care plan and, at the same time, continue to faithfully maintain a reverence for life. It simply requires tempering the arrogance that comes from believing that this fight boils down to an “everything or nothing” situation. It doesn’t. And those who insist that it does will ensure that we end up with just that -- nothing -- no national health care, and an inevitable continuation of abortion policies already firmly in place. That is simply a nonsensical lose/lose situation.

All of the years I have been involved in the cause of promoting respect for human life, something has bothered me. It’s the practice of reductionism on both sides of the dispute -- the boiling down of an extremely complex issue to an almost simple minded set of slogans like “pro-life” and “pro-choice“. Those phrases mean nothing. Life always involves an unfolding progression of discrete, and uncertain, moral choices. In fact, common sense tells us that none of those who call themselves “pro-life” can be unfamiliar with the necessity of making morally imprecise situational choices any more than those labeled “pro-choice” are somehow incapable of respect for the living, born or unborn. What nonsense. The purpose of those mouse-trap-like catch phrases is simply to block out from our field of view inconvenient parts of the picture. They were invented, on both sides, to prevent us from thinking outside someone else’s narrow focus of vision.

And I find the appeals of people like Mr. Ciccocioppo when based on their supposed sensitivity to women’s issues to be less than genuine. It is no secret that the majority of pro-life activists unfortunately lean far to the political right. Or that the political right has worked tooth and nail to discourage the advancement of women’s rights. So, when he mourns “the lifetime of physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual damage abortion causes women,“ it can’t help but sound disingenuous.
And the fact that most right leaning activists are also vigorously involved in supporting the private insurance industry’s drive to maintain control of the health care market, means that anything said by people like Mr. Ciccocioppo needs to be taken with a very large grain of salt by those of us -- the majority of the population -- who are both opposed to uncontrolled abortion and in favor of universal health care benefits for every citizen.

That’s why he not so subtly linked “Move-On.org” to the candlelight vigil: so that he could attack the notion of national health care by setting up a sort of “gilt by association” in the minds of those of us opposed to unrestrained abortion. There were, in fact, suprissingly many of us who are actively pro-life who numbered in the ranks of those attending that candlelight vigil and fully support national health care because it is simply another aspect of the movement for respect for life. By listening to Mr. Ciccocioppo we are once again risking being politically manipulated by a small group of self serving and short sighted demagogues, and loosing out on what is arguably the most important domestic political issue of our times.

Yes, Altoona, There Can Be Pro-Life Liberals by jimmi malarky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at malarkyspond.blogspot.com.
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