CSotD: One who got it, many who don’t
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A couple of weeks ago, I dug out my copy of Classic Theater to re-read "Servant of Two Masters," the play I was in as a college junior back in the spring of 1970, and found this Miss Peach tucked inside, acting as a bookmark.
My apartment that year had a wall with various things attached, the only specific ones I remember being a letter to the editor I'd written about the Green Beret murders and my summons to testify for the defense in a hearing about blocking the CIA and Dow at the college recruiting office (see page 13).
There was also some stuff about the Chicago Seven/Eight Trial, but I don't remember anything in particular, and there was also the "And Babies?" My Lai poster, and the Nous sommes tous « indésirables » Mai/Juin poster.
This cartoon had apparently been clipped to be there, too, but got stuck marking production notes for the play.
When I came across it, I chuckled over the gag itself, but I also smiled over the idea that Miss Peach, one of the first strips I remember actually understanding as a little kid, was still relevant to the long-haired, dope-smoking, semi-radical, guitar-slinging freak that little kid became.
I never thought of Mell Lazarus in the same breath as those other Old Guys Who Got It, like Benjamin Spock or Buckminster Fuller or Bill Mauldin or Gene McCarthy, and I have no idea what his politics were.
But he "got it" in the sense that a good artist gets it, beyond specifics.
What made me love Miss Peach when I was eight kept me loving it when I was 20 and, in fact, I remember, even as a little fellow, a sense of liberation in seeing kids like Marcia and Ira voicing iconoclastic cynicism at a time when kids in comics were mostly confined to swiping unattended pies from windowsills.
Mell Lazarus died the other day, but artists who "get it" live on forever.
Thanks for the laffs, man.
Laugh? I coulda died!
"Looks Good On Paper" offers a humorous rebuttal to the selfish rightwing Congressional lackspittles who keep promising to get rid of Obamacare.
They never explain why getting rid of affordable health care would be sensible, humane or good policy. They just keep repeating that we have to do it, as if we're supposed to know why.
I can think of many reasons it's a very bad, evil, not just anti-social but sociopathic idea, and the notion that anyone would promote it as policy brings to mind Jefferson's remark, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
Which is appropriate since, like Jefferson, I am at my most ardent a deist, and that only when the wind is north-northwest.
However, if the people who claim to believe in an actual God who personally directs cosmic destinies turn out to be right, they're screwed, because he's going to hold them accountable for things like working to prevent people from getting adequate health care.
Meanwhile, the joke in Dan Collins' gag is that, by the time someone is diagnosed and hooked up like that, the system will, however reluctantly and belatedly, provide.
Real health care means a system in which it doesn't get to that point in the first place.
Three specific examples of what I mean:
1. I saw a report on the news last night about a new diagnostic tool for identifying colon cancer. A woman who was successfully treated said she had avoided a colonoscopy earlier in part because of the expense, and I had had the same experience: I hit colonoscopy age and my doctor agreed it was a good idea, but the policy at my work wouldn't cover it.
I'd have had to pony up about three grand, and so decided against it.
How many others have decided they couldn't afford this standard diagnostic procedure and thereby missed the chance for an early diagnosis and a quick fix?
2. I have a granddaughter with Type 1 Diabetes, and she's got all sorts of magical high-tech stuff going on to monitor her situation, but that's because her folks have good coverage at work. However, it's not just paying for all the expensive monitoring and so forth: It's knowing she even needed it.
If they had poor coverage or no coverage, they might never have asked what was going on with her. She might still be wandering around feeling like crap, not knowing why, not realizing she wasn't average, not realizing she was headed for very serious issues.
How many kids are in that place? How many parents simply don't have the kind of relationship with a doctor where they would ask the right questions to begin with?
3. Similarly, I haven't made a big deal about this, but I'm undergoing chemo for bladder cancer, which will also involve surgery in a few weeks. While I've got some pretty rotten months ahead, it's probably going to be okay, though they tell me that is not guaranteed.
But here's the thing: I only know about it because I see my doctor often and so asked him about an odd symptom.
The symptom itself disappeared and, were I on my own for healthcare, I might well have not thought about it again until something came along that could not be ignored. My oncologist tells me I'd have died in two years without treatment.
Which makes me wonder how many people have no idea anything is wrong until everything is wrong.
Which, as said, makes me think these penny-pinching, heartless droids who shill for the insurance and medical industries had better hope the God they claim to worship does not exist, because, if he does, boy, he's gonna be piiiiiiiissed.
Juxtaposition of the Day
It's pretty easy to see why superheros developed secret identities, if you go back and see how routinely the girlfriends of guys without secret identities were kidnapped back in the 1940s.
With boyfriends like that, who needs enemies?
(The real hero, of course, being King Curtis)
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