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Healthcare and Finnegans Wake
for release 11-08-09
Dallas, Texas
by Lightning Rod
Have you ever purchased an electronic device and the user's manual weighs ten times as much as the gadget it is intended to explain? This is the way that The Poet's Eye sees the proposed healthcare legislation that our government is trying to cobble together. In its lovable but maddening way, our Congress is creating a mangled manuscript that is over 2000 pages long with prose that ranges from the turgid to the confusing. It reminds me of Finnegans Wake.
It took James Joyce 17 years to write FW and almost nobody who reads it can tell you what it means. It is noted as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the English language.
"The entire book is written in an idiosyncratic language, consisting of multilingual puns and portmanteau words, which attempts to recreate the experience of sleep and dreams. Due to its expansive linguistic experiments, stream of consciousness writing style, literary allusions, free dream associations, and its abandonment of conventions of plot and character construction, Finnegans Wake remains largely unread by the general public."--Wikipedia
On this same theory our legislators are crafting a masterpiece of fantasy and legerdemain trusting that the general public will have neither the patience nor the puzzle-solving ability to read or make sense of it. I have tried to read Finnegans Wake, I really have. Somehow I assumed that it was my duty to literature. Several times I have tried to read it and failed. I have also tried to read several versions of the pending healthcare legislation to the same end.
Our government bureaucracies have devised a devilish school of literature which is designed to obscure a whole raft of venial sins such as incompetence, greed, cronyism and larceny. Only the most erudite can compose or comprehend this style. It is hardly the language of the people. Nor is it a language of our times.
In a world where most people who read and write do so in increments of 140 characters or less on Facebook or Twitter, it is hard to imagine that the common man can even attempt to decipher a 2000 page document without the interpretive help of a priesthood. This is why we have mandarin lawyers and expert talking heads on television. Fox or MSNBC can neatly summarize the contents of this talmudic screed in a five-point bullet list that fits on one screen. What's the matter with this picture?
The Poet's Eye doesn't want to see laws that are longer and more confusing than Finnegans Wake. The Declaration of Independence fits on one sheet of hemp paper. All ten of The Commandments were expressed on two tablets of rock. Why does it take otherwise crafty and intelligent legislators 2000 pages to define what nearly all Americans can say in a few sentences?-- Most Americans think that fair, non-predatory and compassionate delivery of healthcare to all is something that they want and something they feel should represent the American ideal. They don't want a bunch of bookies and pirates fixing odds and prices. They want the least possible separation between people in need of medical care and those who provide that care. It shouldn't take a tome thicker than the problem itself to enunciate the solution which ultimately can only be a universal, single payer healthcare system.
"But all they are all there scraping along to sneeze out a likelihood that will solve and salve life's robulous rebus"
---Joyce, Finnegans Wake
