There's something of a rush on in America to reform the country's ailing health care system - talk of helping the poor and the forty million uninsured and the many millions more insufficiently insured and of course most importantly relieving stressed businesses that can't afford the rising cost of employee benefits - all very laudable I'm sure and also conveniently a perfect prop for the aspiring leader to hang his or her heart on in a show of sympathy before the cameras and it's assumed the undifferentiated mass of creatures lurking behind.
As I said, no doubt laudable and I'm sure inimitably Christian, what with helping the poor and improving the bottom line - hell, if Christ were an American, and at this point I don't see how he can't be, I'm sure he'd have a health care plan so who am I to be sceptical, faithless good for nothing fop that I am [yes, fop I say, fallen humanist Elizabethan jackanapes! - get thee to an alehouse, whoring wassailer, mocker of all things holy!]
Still, I 'd like to make one point which no one seems to be making or even have noticed: Americans are fat, they have horrible diets, they are addicted to the constant consumption of quick and empty calories as long as those calories are sufficiently larded with various saccharides and lipides, they like to sit for many hours at a time on soft couches watching TV and playing video games, they abjure exercise with the lazy devotion of a fin de siecle French monarch - and they love a bargain. You're telling me that onto the bonfire of these vanities you want to throw the gasoline of cheap and readily available health care? If these people think they can easily fix or reverse or subdue or cover up or make themselves oblivious to whatever damage a non-stop diet of donuts and Dorritos consumed at the foot of their HDTV altars can do then they will most certainly pursue that damage to its logical conclusion and believe me the conclusion they pursueth unto will definitely not look like Angelina Jolie [that seems like a gratuitous mention of a Hollywood starlet, no? Something of a rhetorical letdown, only marginally germane as it were? Why not 'invading hordes of Chinese locusts swarming over the flaccid, cellulite ridden corpus of a fatigued giant'? Nice ring to that].
In a world where ultimately nothing good can happen the wise proconsul will expect the worst and punish his people accordingly.
