Here is an interesting essay that makes me think about just how much the elite of the health professions have changed over the last few decades. Herb has always been with the program, so he’s more exactly an outlier, but I recall the days when to be a physician meant Republican identity as well, for all but the DFH Peace Corps type dogooders. I’m reading that more and more physicians are embracing “socialized medicine” and I hope it’s a sea change that represents a general evolution of the field as a whole. Anyway, Herb made two points that caught my attention. He’s talking about a health care situation, but also applying his thoughts more generally:

I am flummoxed by the appeal of individual leaders. Pretty much everyone in the US with a reasonably well functioning central nervous system agrees that we are suffering from systemic corruption at the highest levels of business and government. It continues to amaze me that so many of these seemingly sensible people continue to believe that the way to rectify the situation is to find and select the right people to take on leadership positions in this abjectly corrupt system. How can that possibly make sense to people?

He goes on to answer his own question, sort of, by defining the two groups of people who are relevant to policy today:

Bureaucracies have well-known weaknesses when charged with dealing with the public. My experience is that well-meaning and thoughtful people are gradually replaced by narrow-minded and nasty folks, and a given agency turns inward toward self-protection and betrays those who it was charged to protect. This is one of the reasons why I am not a Liberal. It is just too rare for large bureaucratic agencies to act ethically and morally. The “nanny state” tends to become the “Hansel and Gretel state.”

I find myself having similar thoughts all the time about much of the leadership in the Dem party. I honestly don’t know what to make of most of them, except that it’s very clear the only thing that matters to them is staying or moving up the Village ladder. Party leadership is only just now waking up to how stupid a lot of the fighting is, and how much it’s costing them, and what it does to the next President’s chances to accomplish…anything. At the same time, virtually none of them are speaking frankly and logically about what is to be done about, say, the financial meltdown we’re currently in the middle of enjoying.

There is an unwillingness on the part of too many, to look at facts that matter instead of the distraction of the “news.” As Herb says and I agree:

the “news” is not news at all. It is just managed propaganda that carefully selects which outrages to focus on and spin off into Never Never Land.

That’s the part that has been sticking in my craw, a lot, of late. In the end, so much of the “what” part of “what we are talking about” doesn’t exist. I keep thinking of Roger Rabbit, and Toontown. Not being a Toon, I’m less concerned with what happens there, as you know, it makes no effective difference in my life. But over and over I find myself thinking, “it’s not real, what does this have to do with the fact that a pillar of the New Deal was recently destroyed and will really fuck with most people’s immediate economic reality? Or the war? Or…” You get my drift.

Anyway, for some strange reason I have always really liked grumpy old men who are loudmouthed and complain about how Kidz Today Suck. Just thought I’d share.