Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Then it hits me like a ton of bricks

I have it. The terrorist solution to health care.

Take all the terminal cases who, for whatever reason, have found a distaste with the health insurance industry. Teach them how to make bombs. Provide them with information on where the executives and decisions makers within this industry live and work. Have them walk into these establishments and detonate.

Simple solution.

While the average American isn't whipped into religious fanaticism, I think their potential is overlooked. One just needs to frame their concerns, their identity, and their discontent in a way that drives them to action, one last fiery action.

I spent a summer working for a rich couple, landscaping their back yard. The man was too cheap to hire the professionals, so he would show me a picture that he saw in a magazine and have me recreate it. Then he'd take back the magazines for a refund. What a fucking cheapskate. Besides spending a lot of time thinking while I shoveled rock and dirt, I seared an image in my mind. I imagined myself setting up a sniper post and awaiting one of the area's most destructive and influential developers to leave his house. I just wanted to kill him.

You kill the person, but you don't kill the ideology. To mangle a quote by Kenneth Burke on this issue: "ideology sets up in a body and it goes about dancing to the ideology's tune."

Sure, my call to arms is ineffectual in that it enlists terminal cases to do the bidding of another ideology, an anti-capitalist ideology. Let's keep in mind that ideology and body are co-extensive in the realization of ideology. Words, ideas, systems of thought mean nothing sitting in a dusty book on an forgotten shelf in a dilapidated section of the library. They need bodies to house them and do their bidding. If you scare the bodies that house the other ideology you might be able to send their ideology back to some dusty book on a forgotten shelf in a dilapidated section of the library.

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