Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“And even in their lies, pain which cannot forgive falls manifesto by manifesto upon the insurance industry, until in their own terror, against their will, comes fairness through the awful vengeance of hate.”
– Aeschylus ca. 2024 {enraged after his claim was denied for an eagle dropping a tortoise on his head}
Maybe someday, I’ll run amok. What the hell. As one grows older and affordable life-sustaining options dwindle, there seem worse ways of entering eternal nothingness. What’s more, since I’ve been issuing print, radio and TV manifestos for decades my motives would be immediately fathomable to law enforcement. It would require a single man-hour for a Chief of Detectives to conclude that, like Luigi Mangione, I possessed “some ill will toward corporate America.”
Regarding anyone else’s public proclamations, I have no writing advice to offer apart from this… the key point about drafting a manifesto is to draft it. No one knows the precise moment when the edge will be above you. And the last thing any of us should want is to attempt a rampage and end up shot 347 times by the Panzer division of a city’s finest, only to leave behind a meandering rationale open to interpretation from your jerk neighbor across the street and bug-eyed Cable News criminologist Casey Jordan.
Unfortunately, ours is an age of simultaneous atrocities. Respites for reflection are few and outrages have, long ago, opened a collective tab on our attention spans. We are a people denied the one quality required to make sense of it all – focus.
So to see the minds of Americans laser focused on the intrinsic evil of health insurance companies is a truly wonderful thing. Wonderful, that is, except for health insurance companies, politicians, and that vast swath of legacy media hellbent on point missing.
The United States has, uniquely in the world, sought to permanently monetize the human condition. Healthcare in this country is a bipartisan crime. An ongoing scam devoid of rules or boundaries. Bewilderment by design. There is no other hand on which to counter any of those facts.
But something cyclical and potentially exhilarating is going on in America today. When Charles Guiteau assassinated James Garfield in 1881 we were a nation of disappointed office seekers. Today we are a nation disappointed in offices. In authority. In official pronouncements. In institutions. In all those who would profit from the indefensible status quo. This is all to the good.
This moment should have made Bernie Sanders President. Instead, it made a charlatan President. Twice. The Democrats – the Party of the workers – the Party with their ear to everyday concerns – responded to this moment with Kamala’s Medicare vagaries and Scranton Joe’s “Gold Plan” drivel. They were preceded by the original sin – Barack Obama’s abandonment of Single-Payer lest the clerical workers mailing out death notices on behalf of BlueCross be ushered into a career change.
I doubt any of his PodSave lickspittles will ever mention to the Democrats’ Great Sayer Of Words that Lincoln’s decisions put more than Plantation Overseers out of a job. Obama’s timidity on healthcare was the moral equivalent of not fighting The Civil War lest the dockworkers of New Orleans need Indeed.
The New York Times, seeking to fill an imaginary jargon hole on its Op-ed page, saw fit to give Andrew Witty, CEO of UnitedHealth Group, essay space to prattle of healthcare being “very complicated” and his company needing to improve “how we explain what insurance covers”. Regrettably for shareholders of BlatherCrap, Commenters instantly understood that everything simple at its core is always described as very complicated by the forces who install and profit from the complexities. There were 1,987 rebuttals. It was a Margin Call on bullshit and The Times, predictably, closed the Comments section.
Yet for dedicated manifesto drafters it was the attitude of every print, network, and Cable News pundit which sent you to Staples for extra reams of 8.5 x 11. There was a visceral desperation for propriety. Andrew Ross Sorkin was floored that anyone would offer a rationalization for Thompson’s murder. Tablefuls of CNN explainers were very disturbed by the reaction to the killing. Snide references were made to Mangione’s little 3 page note, to his rantings and ravings, his aberrant thoughts.
These people get their media paychecks for a reason. Had they been in Louis XVI’s employ in May of 1789 they would’ve spent the tumbril ride to the guillotine reassuring each other that polls show most peasants are happy with their bread ration.
But my personal favorite was when CNN went live to the Huntingdon County Prison for an in depth discussion of, and I am not making this up, that day’s menu. Apparently, Mangione had access to Pizza Bean Soup. No word as to when Beefy Cheesy Nachos and Yoo-hoo would be options.
However, you would’ve searched Cable News in vain for a Forensic Psychologist’s diagnosis of Corporate America – for what manner of inner depravity is required to engender avoidable diseases and deaths simply for additional profit.
Ken Klippenstein, who published the shooter’s Manifesto, was obscenely attacked for encouraging Copycat Killers when, in the time it takes you to read this sentence, there’ve been multiple Copycat killings attempted by the industry Brian Thompson represented.
And now politicians have come forth vowing to restore order. Josh Shaprio, last seen literally autographing missiles to send to Israel, announced that “In America we don’t kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences.”
And I do fully expect Congress to take action. Insurance Executives will be protected. Targets will be hardened to match the impenetrable thickness of their company’s hearts. Under the guise of personaI safety, I expect an erosion in the rights of speech. I expect legislation placing anyone who disputes an insurance claim on a Terrorist Watchlist. I expect a concerted effort to make the entire issue of for-profit death merchants disappear in a swelter of more prioritized issues.
And for manifesto drafters I expect one thing more… Writer’s cramp. Maybe we’ll file a class action suit.
The post Notes on Drafting a Manifesto appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
