CSotD: Folly avoidance
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Amid a flurry of tepid cartoons about John McCain's not-so-great diagnosis, David Fitzsimmons keeps focus on things.
Yesterday, I ran into a friend who has, in the past two weeks, gotten word of an aggressive cancer. I gave her a hug and reminded her that I'd had the same bad news a little over a year ago and now I'm fine and that, whatever the odds, you're only one person and so it's not important how many others have fallen on this or that side of the line. Each roll of the dice is new.
I also passed along that I had told my friends I was in good hands and didn't want to hear about apricot pits and she laughed and said she's already starting to tell people to just stop that stuff.
But what we didn't discuss is another fallacy, which is in too many soppy McCain cartoons, which is that his iron resolve in Hanoi can be used to resist his cancer. Tying character to recovery is not simply stupid but cruel. Suggesting that succumbing to a disease can be prevented by character is blaming those who die.
Fitz — who, it should be pointed out, is from McCain's state of Arizona — does a nice job here of expressing concern and compassion for McCain while maintaining focus on the fact that we need to get health care straightened out.
Besides the "he's such a hero, he'll beat this" cartoons, there have been some saying that, in light of this news, Democrats and Republicans can unite for a moment to wish him the very, very best.
It would be better if they could recognize that every patient is someone they should view as a person and not as a statistic. If McCain's diagnosis has an upside, it would be to create, as Fitzsimmons suggests, a connection between that well-known veteran and Congressional colleague with the many faceless, nameless people who got that same bad news.
They're only faceless and nameless if you refuse to think of them as people. The notion of putting aside our differences for a moment to wish McCain the best is vomitous and would be better as an attack on heartless hypocrisy than some moment of glurge to be praised.
Of course I wish him the best.
But I wish them all the best.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Both cartoons in today's Juxtaposition are well-named, as the blind rush to let business go free range is going to involve a lot of reality checks.
Deregulation is based on the idea that restrictions on industry choke off productivity, but it's also based on the idea that we can trust corporations to make decisions in which the public good and profits are carefully balanced. The former assertion can actually be argued, but it will quickly come down to how you measure "productivity" in light of an ethical balance of profit and public good.
Mostly, it comes down to the fact that we have regulations because corporations can't be trusted and that's not theoretical: We have seen what unregulated industries are willing to do, both to their workers and to the environment.
And, yes, not every OSHA rule works as well on a construction site as it looked in a Washington office. You do need to tune these things up to make sure they are practical.
I heard the founder of American Giant on NPR's 1A last week, and he talked about how proud he is to make his $89 hoodies in America, but how hard it is to deal with regulations and with workers who refuse to work and have learned that they don't have to. Apparently, he has not been informed that nearly all welfare contains a work requirement.
And I'd be interested to know how many of his workers in those start-up jobs can afford to drop about twice the cost of a Champion hoodie on the ones they make.
And I wouldn't mind a peek at how much his company reflects this analysis of CEO pay vs. what the average worker makes.
Because I don't mind if he's getting rich selling the greatest hoodie ever, just as long as he's not whining about the workers without cutting them in on those high prices he gets for the greatest hoodie ever.
And as long as he doesn't sound like a personable, good-looking blue-eyed boy casing the place:
Butch Cassidy: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful.
Guard: People kept robbing it.
Butch Cassidy: Small price to pay for beauty.
On another source of folly
F-Minus takes a poke at the soulmate concept.
I had a GF whose Kansas farmgirl mother used to say, "There's a lid for every pot," which does in some sense suggest a "soulmate" but, with the downhome intent of most folksayings, was more in the vein of recognizing that there's no fool so obnoxious and odd that some other fool won't come along and marry him and they may end up perfectly happy.
Also that it's kind of none of your beeswax but you're permitted to shake your head over the wonder of it all.
That's not generally the way people intend the term "soulmate" when describing their current crush.
But it's more upbeat than another familiar phrase, "too good to be true."
I'll confess to being a bit jealous of people with lifelong, happy bonding, but they're not the ones throwing chipper, upbeat terms like "soulmate" around, perhaps because, after you've been married 30 or 40 years, you know it didn't happen by some great cosmic convergence, mostly because you're old enough to know how very little in this world does.
Anyway, if I have a soulmate out there, she's too cynical to believe in such poppycock and so I guess we'll just continue to frustrate the cosmos by being so well intended for one another.
Now here's your cynical moment of practical zen:
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