I realized yesterday that I had forgotten one significant change in my Rip Van Winkle ruminations. No, I don't mean the price of a new car in 1987 or the best-selling novel or album or movie; anyone can google those facts in 2012 for him- or herself. This was a more Freudian seeming omission: what if the person who fell asleep in 1987 had been diagnosed with stage IV kidney cancer? There was no targeted chemotherapy for kidney cancer in those days. The med that I take, Votrient, wasn't approved by the FDA till 2009. Xgeva, the shot I take to maintain the strength of my cancer-infected bones, wasn't approved until the next year. Even now, the prognosis for stage IV kidney cancer is 10-11 months. With the help of the meds that I often complain about, I've doubled that. So someone who was diagnosed in 1987 and woke up in 2012 might be baffled by many things, but ought to feel mighty happy that s/he could benefit from 25 years of medical advances.
For two reasons, I was also thinking about the comments on the change in acceptable language on TV. One was that on last night's "Daily Show," the word 'shit' must have been used 40 or 50 times: first, on Jon Stewart's funny and very angry "Chaos on Bullshit Mountain" comments on Romney's 47% remarks, then during Pink's performance of "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" where the word is a staple of the lyrics (they did bleep out 'dick' in the phrase "whiskey dick"), and finally three more times in the closing conversation between Stewart and Pink. My parents would have turned bright red--in anger and embarrassment. And then I got two e-mails from a 70-year-old friend and his wife in France, both containing humorous, but unfettered illustrations and jokes. It has always struck me that the concept of a dirty word doesn't exist in France, at least not as it does here. I once heard an elderly woman affectionately calling her dog on a city sidewalk "mon petit trou de cul" (my little asshole), and my friend Frederic often called his dog, "ma petite crotte" (my little turd). I used to have a complete collection of the French hard-cover "comic books" Les Bidochon. "Bidochon" entered the French vocabulary as a synonym for the blundering, uncultured, and mockable--the Simpsons taken down a notch or two. When I retired, I gave my collection to the French department, though I realized that the jokes and the illustrations were so graphic that they'd be x-rated in the U.S. I remembered a big dinner party in Metz several years ago in which we discussed offensive words. The best the French could come up with was pourri, which just means spoiled. When I offered my example of the most offensive word in English (Naomi Wolf's favorite), the only other English speaker, an Irish Catholic (who had abandoned his wife and children to live with his French mistress), was shocked that I'd say the word in mixed company, even though none of the French speakers knew it and it carried no connotations of any sort.
As I type this, one of innumerable Romney spokesmen is trying to deflect attention from Romney's latest major gaffe to Obama's 1998 statement favoring redistribution of wealth. One of the many things that the Right is disingenuous about is that they must know that every monetary or fiscal decision has distributive consequences. It's just that the Right, especially Reagan, Bush 43, and now Romney, wants the money to flow to the top, an effort they've been remarkably successful at over the last three decades. Yesterday, for example, I got the statement from BCBS for the last time I had the full battery of tests at the Cancer Center. The total for the six hours I was there was $23,000. Of that, $13,200 was for one injection of Xgeva. When I began this blog, the shot was $11,000; a couple of months later that had jumped to $12,000, and now, all within a year, the price has gone up by another $1200. The increase can't be caused by research, since the drug is already developed, and anyway Big Pharma now spends more money on marketing than on research. Because I get this shot in the hospital as opposed to at home, 100% of the cost is covered by Medicare Part A or B. The anti-coagulant shot Mohamed gives me every morning ($100 per shot) is like other medication (chemo $6,000+ per month), covered by Medicare Part D. Since I quickly move to the "catastrophic stage" (after having paid a little over $5,000), I now pay only 5% of those costs. When in 2003 the Republicans added Part D coverage, the drug companies made sure that there was a provision that the government could not bargain for lower prices. Those who have get even more. This is unlike the VA program, which can bargain and thus has much lower drug prices than Medicare. Who pays? Why, obviously, the 47% of freeloaders. Who profits? Big Phama.
Also yesterday this year's Forbes list of the richest 400 Americans came out. The combined weatlh of the six Walton heirs (four of whom are in the top 10) is greater than combined wealth of the entire bottom 20% of Americans. Two of the top 10, the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, are from Kansas. I actually know the couple at #218 ($2.2B), though so far that doesn't seem to have done me any good except to get me in to a high-class bash for their son in Hollywood. And I see there's a Judy Faulkner just slightly farther down the list. I'm sure there must be a family connection there someplace, so maybe I should stop typing and start searching on ancestry.com. I'm an unabashed supporter of redistribution (from the top down), and why not start with her?
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