<
>
Chapter 4 -- continued
< --- Chapter 4, Section 1 Whistleblowers:
Analyzing the Co-Optive, Imprisoning Power of Our "Common Narrative"
 While imprisoned in
Beaumont, I spent quite a number of hours contemplating how
to replicate in the reader of Meditopia my own experience.
That is to say, "How can I internalize, for the reader, the
intellectual intensity, the clarity, of the experience of
our world, our culture, as nothing we have been lead to
believe? What tools can I use to get the reader to break
through the bondage of our common understandings, the
'propagandistic fog,' and see that we truly DO live,
imprisoned, in a kind of 'Matrix'?"It was not until I was
later exposed to the work of C. Fred Alford that
I found the missing piece that would seamlessly connect
my experiences with a new vision, presentable to the
reader in such a way that all the diverse elements of
my observations, when placed juxtapost the absurdities
of the Medical Industrial Complex and its monolithic
set of deconstructable mythologies, would fit together.
In this way, with the cognitive disonance of our culture
exposed and removed, I could take my reader to a new place,
with a new vision of the world.Instead of
presenting Book I of Meditopia as an Epiphany in
my own life -- with the reader acting as passive observer,
I could assist the reader in having one of his own.
I wanted to be able to provide an experience that was as
potent and as life-altering AS my own.This would be
an awesome challenge.I understood this.It would be
like the authors of books I had read on the experience
of botanical entheogens (like peyote, ibogaine, or ayahuasca . . .
what the uneducated on this subject call psychodelics)
attempting not merely to report their "other worldly
experiences," but actually impart that experience
to the reader!How would or could you
even attempt such a thing?To achieve
this we will
have to momentarily digress to a place where others, such
as myself, have been allowed (again, using the language of
The Wizard of Oz) to "see the man behind the
curtain."Our next stop on
the journey to Meditopia takes us to a place with
which all are vaguely familiar, but only few truly
understand. This is because the vast majority of world citizens
are like television travel hosts, who talk about places
they have never been. Their knowledge of things is
only surface deep, and much of it incorrect.We're talking
now about whistleblowers.
C. Fred Alford is
a Professor of Government at the University of Maryland,
a respected teacher and political scientist, and
prolific author,
primarily dealing in what he fashions to be "moral psychology."In 2001 he published
Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power,
which deals with his own experience
with people who "blow the whistle" on corrupt, illegal
activities: on the part of the government, large corporation,
or other large organizational entity. In the vast majority
of cases, it isn't money or fame or adventure that causes
the whistleblower to step into the limelight. It is the
deep affront against conscience that inaction would
initiate, born of the most primitive sense of
moral obviousness.The impetus behind the
book was that Alford's experience with whistleblowers was
consistently contrary to the common myths that have been generated
about them -- so contrary, in fact, that he was compelled
to investigate how and why this disconnect originates
in the first place.On the one hand you
have "almost twenty books on whistleblowing . . . available
through Amazon.com, and more than a hundred articles . . .
on the topic," he writes.
[ 3 ] These largely represent a homogenous view
of whistleblowers, as a group, and whistleblowing, as a phenomena,
which reflect and reinforce our common mythology on the subject:
that whistleblowers are noble people with strong morals "who
stand up for what is true and just. They suffer substantial
retaliation, and while most are vindicated, a few are not.
But even those who are not triumphant in the end know they
did the right thing. They are richer and better for the
experience, even if it will always pain them. Almost
all would do it again."
[ 4 ] What resides in the common mythology
of whistleblowing is that good usually wins in the end, the
Rocky-esque figure rises above overwhelming obstacles,
David beats Goliath, Phoenix rises from the ashes,
Job beats the Devil, the Turtle beats the Hare,
Count of Monte Cristo gets his
revenge, Gladiator kills the evil Emperor
(in hand-to-hand combat, no less),
the sheriff in the white hat beats a hundred
bad guys wearing black hats -- with one hand tied
behind his back --
and justice wins the day. The proposterously
improbable only seems improbable --
so take heart, noble citizen!Moreover,
this archetype saturates Modern Civilization
at every level: the leading religion of our culture
may have helped make Christmas (the birth of a Savior) its most
prized commercial event, but its most compelling message
is that the Creator of the Universe sent his only
progeny to earth to blow the whistle on original sin,
and even though he was crucified on a cross, he
resurrected into Heaven and now reigns supreme,
offering eternal redemption to all accepting souls
who scurry forth on bended knee . . .
This isn't insouciant insolence by an Unbeliever,
it is Christianity stripped bare to this overwhelmingly
ubiquitous archetype, loaded as it is with inspiration
and hope, but largely co-opted for mass consumption
and manipulation at ever other level.This construct may
be good (or convenient) for maintaining social order and
generating good feelings among the citizenry, but none
of this comports with Alford's own investigations, and
none of it squares with my own parallel experience,
having seen "behind the curtain" of our common narrative.Instead of
conjunction with this archetype, what Alford found
was that whistleblowers are deeply shattered by their
experience, unable "to assimilate the experience, unable, that
is to come to terms with what they have learned about
the world. Almost all say they wouldn't do it again --
if they had a choice . . . "
Alford presents you with a variety
of diverse examples: the inordinately
large percentage of whistleblowers who lose their spouse
and children and find themselves bankrupt; those
that consider committing suicide; the majority --
who almost always find themselves having so
short-circuited their career by "doing the right
thing" that they make a fraction of their
former, pre-whistleblowing paycheck; and
then there are the unforgetable stories that
shock the conscience (like the physicist who
blew the whistle to prevent a nuclear disaster
and has been so hounded by forces more powerful
than himself that his life has been reduced
to that a pizza delivery boy).Even at this point,
the reader should be able to see the connection between
the cracks of the myths generated by
the Medical Industrial Complex and those perpetuated
about whistleblowing. And yet even close friends of mine
were perplexed when I told them about Alford's findings.
After all, aren't there hundreds of laws protecting
whistleblowers against retaliation? Oh sure, there are.
All believeable mythology requires props.
And Alford recounts a sampling of these laws.
[ 5 ]The problem is
that, like the rest of the crown molding that lines
the edges of our culture -- even democracy itself,
which I address in the adjacent sidebar --
such window dressing exists for show. It has no
substance. Whistleblowers have, for instance,
won only four of almost ten thousand cases
to reach the federal courts under the Whistleblower
Protection Act of 1989 -- a dismal record when
one considers that the very purpose of the act
was to protect those who come forward with evidence
of government or corporate wrongdoing.
[ 6 ]Alford
details the many tools that large organizations
have to destroy the lives of those who even attempt
to let their wrongdoing be known outside the
workings of the "inner circle." One only becomes
acquainted with these tools and tactics AFTER
they have crossed the line and entered into another
world -- a kind of "Through the Looking Glass"
dimension that only whistleblowers share.This is
what Maurice Blanchot calls knowledge as disaster.
"Not knowledge of the disaster, but knowledge
as disaster, because it cannot be contained
within existing frames and forms of experience,
including common narrative."
[ 7 ]To come to terms
with what the whistleblower uncovers in his life and
in his world, he would "have to give up what every
right-thinking American believes in." And just what
must the whistleblower forsake in order to "hear
his own story?"
Alford closes this
litany by stating, "Not only is it hard to come to terms
with these truths, but when one finally does, it seems
that one is left with nothing . . . What is the
satisfaction in being right if as a consequence one
has to give up everything one believed in?"
[ 8 ]It is difficult
to put into words what this transition feels like,
if you've never been through it.
I remember in February, 2004, while I was still imprisoned
in Lafayette, awaiting to see what kind of charges
the Federal Government would come up with,
my wife sent me a letter from the Business Advisory Council,
an arm of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
In it, the announcement was made that I had been
"chosen as Louisiana Businessman
of the Year," and that, as such, I was to be honored
and presented "with your award at a special ceremony . . .
in Washington." Along with this came
a
four-color, signed, frameable picture of
President and First Lady Bush, a copy of an "agenda,"
and other Republican Party paraphenalia.Now, of course,
everyone knows that such gimmicks are part and parcel
of political fundraising. This isn't unlike getting
nominated for inclusion in a Who's Who in America,
or some similar "vanity publication." I could have
just insouciantly brushed it off, or maybe passed a
joke to my "cellie" about "finally earning a weekend
furlough outta here" (never happen), and in any other
situation, something equally non-chalant would
have been my response.But it wasn't.I was having to
deal with something I wasn't prepared for.
I spent the next twenty minutes after that mail call
sitting on my prison bunk, going over the materials
from that letter, attempting to come to grips with
these new feelings, as if I were reading correspondence
that belonged to somebody else -- as if I had
confiscated somebody else's mail and were naughtily
reading the interception. It wasn't that I just
couldn't relate to the disconnect between the way
the leading political party -- what had been MY
party, in MY country -- was treating me juxtapost
the outrageous events that lead me to prison.
It FELT like I was another person. It FELT like the
damage to any faith I had in the common narrative
had been so fully demolished that any reference
to the person that lived in my body PRIOR to my
imprisonment wasn't even addressing itself to me.
I was not the same person. I would never be the
same person. And no matter how hard I tried,
I could never go back.However,
there has been concilation in knowing that I am
not the only one to have this experience.For those
who find themselves in the crosshairs of the Medical Industrial
Complex, as I did, or Jason Vale, Michael Forrest,
James Kimball, Mike Witort, Dr. Marilyn Coleman, or any of my other friends
and acquaintances who, as a result, have "seen behind the curtain,"
there's a new reality that is equally as challenging
to reconcile with the common narrative as it is
for Alford's whistleblowers. It leads
to an internal conflict that is no less harrowing.
And what must WE forsake in order "to hear our own story?"
To understand the truth about health care in the
modern era, one must be willing to accept . . .
Co-Opting Our Human Need
for Purpose and Meaning "How could
these things actually be true?" you might ask.It is not the case that if
Power actually functioned in this way it would be too
difficult to conceal from the Masses?Hideous
and morally repulsive, though it be, Power works
to harness our own basic need to find
positive meaning and purpose against us.
For those
who understand mind/body connection, it goes without
saying that the health of an individual is integrally
connected to his "sense of purpose" -- that good
mental health is upheld by a deep-seated "meaning
of life." It is this basic need -- essential to
healthful, human living, that those in Power
exploit and co-opt. They know that it is possible
to create mechanisms of power and control that the
People will be disinclined to believe exist, even if they
see it with their own eyes. This is what makes it so
easy to create a Matrix -- a field of human energy
that exists to be harvested by a select few.
The importance of
finding "meaning" in one's life is brought to life in
the account of
Dr. Victor Frankl,
whom we touched upon in
Chapter 3.
Frankl, the famous psychiatrist who lived through the
Auschwitz Concentration Camp during
World War II, was struck by the one common
thread that marked all those who survived:
they all had a strong and enduring sense of purpose.
They knew that they would survive because their
lives had meaning.Frankl went on
to found "The Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy"
(behind those of Freud and Addison), known
as Logotherapy,
based on his lifelong personal and clinical findings.
The most basic tenet of logotherapy is that
the striving to find a meaning in one's life
is the primary motivational force in man --
in fact, our main motivation for living is our
will to find life's meaning.
[ 8c ]On the surface, this
may seem self-evident. A more cynical mind might suggest
that "meaning in life" is the stock-in-trade of the
world's religions and most of its philosophical systems.
But even Freud -- an avowed atheist --
wrestled with this question and came up
with "love and work," as the meaning of life.
It is this position that Alford uses as his key to
unlock the barred door that the Halls of Power attempt
to keep closed: for "what happens (thusly) when the
world (around us) becomes unloveable and our work
impossible?", he asks. "If love is not just a psychic
discharge but a way of being in the world, then that way
of being 'demands that the world present itself to us
as worthy of our love . . . If love is not just a feeling
but the force that makes the world go around, as Freud
speculated . . . then loving the world and being able to
love the world because the world is lovable are two sides
of the same coin. We make the world meaningful with
our love, and the world makes our lives meaningful
by being lovable. When one partner fails, both do.
The meaning of life depends on our ability to remain
in a love affair with the world. Like any long-term
love affair, this means that the world must love us
back, even if this only means remaining worthy of
our love."
[ 8d ]Only when one has
seen "behind the curtain" does one learn that the world
which a select Elite has created is not worthy
of our love. To what extent will the Common Man go
to cling to a vision of the world that is artificially
created -- full of worn cliches, feel-good slogans, and
heartfelt, misleading political sound bites -- all intended
to co-opt man's need for meaning?Very, very far . . .
so far, in fact, that even whistleblowers, who have seen
first-hand what lies behind the theater curtains, are
loath to believe in their own perceptions, to "hear
their own story."Such is man's
ability to exclude from his field of vision that which
would deny him a psychologically healthy sense of the world.When Christopher
Columbus first approached what is, today, the Bahamian islands,
his men were surprised to learn that the local Arawaks
could not see their ships. There was nothing wrong
with their vision. They did not approach in the dead
of night. The impediment was mental: the very existence
of such sailing vessels was so out of touch with
the natives' "common narrative" that they literally
failed to see the ships. They weren't trying not
to see them. They just didn't see them.
[ 8e ] As it relates
to the current volume, my contention is that most
citizens of the Western World are no different than
the Arawaks: they cannot face what Modern Medicine
really is. For contained therein are "vessels"
that do not comport with their fabricated vision
of what the world is supposed to look like.
The soil of Elite power out of which such
a hideous vine grows is not compatible with a healthy sense of
meaning. Even worse, it suggests incorrigible
perversions in the very foundations of
our Western culture, the close examination of
which requires a stoutness
of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual courage
which, I believe, few possess.Confronting the Defects in
Our Cultural Operating System Cultures are
molded over time, and the course they take is
determined by those best predisposed to make
changes upon the passively -- or perhaps
not so passively -- concensual.
In our era, such individuals are those who
have best taken advantage of those assymetrical
systems of accumulation such that a select minority
can determine what is best for the majority.Cash is king.And yet I find
such an obvious conclusion distasteful and even
unhelpful, and not because I fear the wrath of
those who might say that such language has
unsavory political overtones. Somehow, I find that
a deeper understanding is required that demands that
we examine the roots if we really want to know
why the flowers are dying.Such a quest
must be thoughtful and not given to jump to
conclusions. If you consult with the
anarcho-primitivists, they will tell you that
the defect lies in civilization itself -- (see sidebar).
[ 9 ]I don't rule out that
such arguments are not weighty. They simply do not serve
our purpose.While in prison, I
happened to come upon Howard Zinn's A People's History
of the United States: 1492 - Present.
[ 10 ]
It isn't the tome provided by Barzun, documenting
500 years of decline in the West
[ 11 ]; nor does it exist to provide a vision
of doom we get from Spengler
[ 12 ]. This is not to say that
Zinn wastes time with pleasantries: he begins the book straight away
by recounting the atrocities of Columbus and his men -- and his
fellow Spaniards who followed. Mass genocide. The
expunging of entire cultures, peoples, languages.
The enslavement of entire populations of indigenous peoples.Exploitation is central to accumulation.Immediately, if you are
not familiar with the work of de las Casas or other
non-revisionist historians of that era, you are caught --
like our whistleblowers -- in a conflict with the "common narrative,"
for nothing Zinn presents is designed to feed
a common mythology, with its blessed discovery of
America and the consequent "civilizing" of two continents of
barbarian hoards."History is the memory
of states," Zinn states, stopping to quote Henry Kissinger
and lay the foundation for the rest of his book. And then
he lays forth his purpose.
It was at this point
that I realized that any journey through Meditopia
must take into account that the common narrative of
medicine in our time is reinforced by a history that
is the "memory of the Medical State," and we, indeed,
cheat ourselves if we "accept it as our own."What would happen
if the History of Medicine were not told by the point of
view of its financial promoters? What would it look like
if it were told by the point of view of the patients?
How much different would the History of Medicine look if
those recounting it were those who were footing the
bill for the last few thousand years,
instead of those pocketing the money?I came to the conclusion
that no reconcilation with this massive "Tear in the Matrix"
could come about without providing a historical perspective
for my most imporant conclusions, and this is the
subject of our next section.However, before we
being a study of "A People's History of Medicine," I feel it
is important to bookend this chapter with one specific
historical case that ties together the important lessons
just covered: the richness of the "suppression pattern,"
the refusal of orthodox medicine to accept the best
therapeutic approach(es) when it threatens it power,
profit, or privilege; the co-optation of indigenous
healing techniques, and the final acknowledgement of the TRUE CURE
only after the Truth is so self-evident to the Public
that further suppression can only be counter-productive.We examine first
the perverse common narrative on what, as school children,
we were taught about another ailment with which
there are numerous parallels to cancer: "scurvy."
|
 The parallels existing
between the "mythology" of whistleblowers (who report organizational
malfeasance) and that of organized medicine are numerous
and form the backbone of this page's content.
[ 14 ]
The standard story
line -- that brave, high-minded individual fights soulless
corporation or government entity, is persecuted, yet triumphs in the end
is "seductive and pervasive."Here's the parallel
storyline by organized medicine and its military arm at
the U.S. Food & Administration:
brave, high-minded
medical authorities fights soulless alternative practitioners
and their allies who are only out to make a buck and bill you
for their quack medicine. The quacks may win temporarily,
but ultimately organized medicine wins and justice prevails.
Hurray for the good guys!Sound familiar?It's complete rubbish.
Dr. Peter Rost
(The Whistleblower:
Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman) is a good
example of a whistleblower who has yet to "hear his own story."
His situation is worth examining, first, because most of
his professional findings are consistent with the current
volume, but secondly, because he has had one of the BEST
outcomes of a whistleblower I have ever heard: as a result of
disclosing criminal activities by his employer first
Pharmacia . . . then Pfizer, he got what most whistleblowers only
dream of: plenty of time to testify on Capital Hill [sic - mine],
media exposure by the tonnage, accolades and words of praise from
legislators, mainstream journalists and thousands of adoring
fans, and honorable mention on too many internet blogs to mention.
The outcome? (Keep in mind this is about as good as it gets).
He got slandered, then demoted, then fired by his employer.
His book sits at #2,300 on Amazon -- admittedly better than
Alford's #103,000 rating, but still a far cry from his paying
all the bills. The Department of Justice has refused to take
his highly meritorious case, and . . . he's without medical
insurance (says he can't afford it), unemployed, and
will probably never work in the pharmaceutical industry again.
(Okay . . . my mistake -- maybe his life IS ending on a upbeat note.)
And the cause for which he made this great sacrifice?
The right of U.S. citizens to have drug reimportation?
Whatever happened to that?Nothing.The very goal for
which Rost gave up everything is not one inch closer to
becoming a reality.The book
itself ends reviling the current system
as "not what our founding fathers envisioned," a slide from
a democracy in to a "kleptocracy", and offers a prediction
of the coming of a second American revolution. He does, of
course, fail to see the current system is a result of the first
revolution, or that the current system is EXACTLY along the lines of
what the Founding Fathers envisioned: plenty of class
stratification, exactly where it belongs.Living on $13,000 a year
unemployment, instead of his original $600,000 a year salary
as a V.P. of Pfizer, Rost is one of the few whistleblowers who
will tell you that "he'd do it again." (And, yes, I question
the 84% figure in a "study of 233 whistleblowers" who say
they would blow the whistle again. So opens Rost's book.)
Our libraries are
filled with books that touch upon the fraud, greed, and
corruption that saturate modern civilization at every
level. The present volume touches upon that slice of the
pie where the saturation impinges on health care.
And even to this point the reader can see that my approach
is more reformatory -- at least as it relates to working
with a civilized, social structure. So are most of these
other forementioned works. What is sought is a complete
transformation; not across the board annihilation.
Or, to put it another way, the sweeping away of an
unfixable system of medical care is not the same as
advocating the destruction of civilization in toto.
Few health care reformers would sign on to this.Not so with the anarcho-primitivists,
from which I believe that John Zerzan is currently
the most eloquent spokesman.
[ 15 ]
For them reform is out of the question.
You cannot have transformation of civilization without co-optation.
And why would you even attempt it? Civilization, when examined with a cool,
unbiased mind has brought nothing positive qualitively
to human evolution that rises
above the life quality of early hunter / gatherers -- worse: its contribution
is socially and ecologically subtractive in the extreme.Not just our civilization.Any civilization.While the rest of
us wrestle with issues of transformation, the anarchists have already
made up their minds. They've thrown in the towel.Reformers, like me, are naive,
they would say.
I take issue with the
anarchists on several fronts, but I am far more predisposed to
giving them the respect they deserve than are my fellow
brethren in the reformatory community. In fact, I go much farther:
I do not believe that you can examine the reform of health
care without taking into account the weight of their arguments.
They bring a "gravitas," a hard edge to their polemics, backed
by a strong, factual foundation, that makes it difficult for
thinking people to dismiss them out of hand. I have recommended
the work of Zerzan to all of my associates, for I feel that
if the positive goals addressed by the anarchists do not
find themselves in the calculus of a final solution to
our current crisis, the result will be temporary,
co-optable patches that only delay the inevitable.It is far more
dangerous to ignore the anarchists than it is to
seriously consider their diagnosis, even if you
don't agree with their treatment. To consider
another course could be the most serious
suppression of all -- intellectually dishonest
and morally reprehensible.The
necessity of this approach is reinforced
by elements that are evident in the current
chapter -- more times than not I find myself
unwittingly reinforcing the anarchists'
arguments. In fact, if we restrict ourselves,
for a moment, to this chapter's presentation,
it is easy to be lead to ask : when HAS
civilization -- as it has manifested itself
in modern medicine -- given more to humanity
than it has taken away from more primitive,
uncivilized human existence? That even I cannot
come up with arguments that conclusively
defeat their position shows how daunting
the problem is. We are dealing with solutions
on the level of some semblance that COULD
exist, but haven't existed. We are dealing
with civilization as something that
COULD be unexploitative, but hasn't been --
as something that COULD be healthy to man's
ecology: internal and external, but hasn't been.
We are making recommendations that exist
in theory, but have never existed in practice.
Thus, we find ourselves -- or I find myself --
in the uncomfortable position of having to
deal primarily in a theoretical framework,
the same mindset to which I accuse medicine of
excessively resorting. It will be up to my critics,
and those who follow me to help implement
the recommendations that come later in this
book, to determine not only
if a Meditopia has been achieved . . .
but if it were ever possible for our
species in the first place -- at least
in our current state of (under)development.
If Alford can be
credited with decisively demonstrating that the
"common myth" concerning whistleblowers is
proposterously out of touch with reality,
then Zinn should be credited with something
even larger:
[ 16 ]
His deconstructive
approach takes the reader to a place where he
realizes what an outrageous crock the
conventional view (read : "the version they teach
you in the American educational system") is
concerning the History of the Americas.
Euphemistic, self-serving, biased to the Elite;
suppressive of the extent to which minorities,
indigenous peoples, the working poor, and
immigrants have been mistreated -- these define
the character of our "common narrative" as
it relates to our history. We cannot be
honest with the world, because we cannot be
honest with ourselves.
One of the things that
most struck me about Zinn's book was the degree to which,
on close examination, democracy has been, throughout history,
little more than a tool to control the public and provide
some forum for deceptively convincing the common man that
he has some control over his life. That government didn't
simply exist to serve a privileged few.That democracy exists
to "serve the people," turns out to be as mythological as the
notion that Modern Medicine exists to serve the patient.
In the U.S., to grasp the Truth of the matter
the serious investigator must return to the crime
scene: the founding of the Country and the creation
of the Constitution. "When economic interest is seen
behind the political clauses of the Constitution, then
the document becomes not simply the work of wise men trying
to establish a decent and orderly society, but the work
of certain groups trying to
maintain their privileges, while giving just enough
rights and liberties to enough of the people to ensure
popular support."
[ 17 ]This is why one
can read something like William Greider's otherwise excellent
volume, Who Will Tell the People: The Betrayal of
American Democracy, and unless they have seen "the
man behind the curtain," they will miss the point.
[ 18 ]
Greider opens his introduction by making clear the
ubiquitous perversion of democracy. "The decayed
condition of American Democracy is difficult to grasp,
not because the facts are secret, but because the
facts are visible everywhere," he says.
[ 19 ]
Greider then spends the majority of the next 400 pages
showing just how head-spiningly grotesque
representative government has become in America.
But clearly Greider misses the point;
a point that Zinn understands far more clearly.Democracy
is not failing to live up to its potential.
In fact, today it is PERFECTLY living up to its potential.
Democracy is doing exactly what it was designed to do:
deliver the bounty to a select Elite and provide
an "outlet" to the masses to deter revolution.Greider, and
millions of reform-minded people like him, believe
in reform. They want to fix Democracy. But this
isn't possible. You can't
fix something if it is functioning precisely in the
manner in which its designers intended. There
isn't anything to fix.Normally, one
in the West associates this kind of dialogue as
forged on the anvil of Marxist thought.
And if it has anything to do with that merry
band of leftist thinkers, there couldn't possibly
be any truth to it, could there? And yet, even
the most conservative, capitalist papers will
occasionally fail to filter out the obviousness
of this reality. I remember while I was in prison,
I had my subscription to the Wall Street Journal
mailed to me. In July, 2005, an article appears
in the Op-Ed section, entitled,
"The
Export of Democracy. Written by Christopher Hitchens,
the piece drew, no doubt, from the research of his own recent book,
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.
[ 20 ]
The disdain -- even contempt that the founding fathers
had for true democracy is revealed therein.
And in quoting this piece, please keep in mind that
Jefferson was probably the most "liberal-minded"
(and I use that term in the 21st and not the 19th
century sense of the term) of his fellow founding
fathers. (The reader may remember Jefferson's quote about
the sorry state of medicine in his time
on a previous page).
And yet, as Hitchens points out, it is
simply ludicrous to associate Jefferson
with democracy:"If hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue,"
says Hitchens, "then the frequent linkage of the name 'Jefferson' with the word 'democracy' is impressive testimony, even from cynics, that his example has outlived his time and his place. To what extent does he deserve this rather flattering association of ideas? "To begin
with, we must take the measure of time. The association would not have been considered in the least bit flattering by many of Jefferson's contemporaries. The word 'democratic' or 'democratical' was a favorite term of abuse in the mouth of John Adams, who equated it with populism of the viler sort and with the horrors of mob rule and insurrection. In this, he gave familiar voice to a common prejudice, shared by many Tories and French aristocrats--and even by Edmund Burke, often unfairly characterized as an English reactionary but actually a rather daring Irish Whig. 'Take but degree away, untune that string,' as it is said in Troilus and Cressida, 'and hark what discord follows.' The masses, if given free rein, would vote themselves free beer and pull down the churches and country houses that had been established to show the blessings of order. I cannot find ANY non-pejorative use in English of the Greek word 'democracy' until Thomas Paine took it up in the first volume of The Rights of Man and employed it as an affirmative term of pride [in 1791]." (emphasis added)
"We're not a democracy," former U.S. Attorney General,
Ramsey Clark,
has stated, "It's a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea
of democracy to call us that. We're a plutocracy in the Aristotelian sense. We're
a government of wealth. Wealth has its way. The concentration of wealth and the
division between rich and poor is unequaled anywhere."
[ 21 ]
This is not a recent development.It goes back to the beginning of America's founding.Perhaps to its Hellenic roots.Or maybe anarchists are right after all:
it began with the founding of civilization itself.The evidence for it is, to
borrow from Greider, "everywhere." We have only to look : it
confronts us for the "embarrassment of riches" that it is.If there is no true democracy,
then in society's manifestations of health care there can be
no political symmetry between those who provide care and those
who receive it.In such a society,
medicine is incapable of ever rising above exploitation.
Such a system cannot be fixed. It can only be overturned. |
