Friday Follies

I'm gonna hold off on a full Trumpcare rant for a bit while the cartoonists catch up, but Michael deAdder nailed it for me.

My cancer treatment was covered by Medicare, but the casual relationship with my primary care physician was built earlier, under the Affordable Care Act.

That is, the testing was touched off by a transitory symptom that I wouldn't have bothered to mention if we hadn't already had a good enough relationship that I would ask him an "Oh, and by the way ..." kind of question.

Which is how preventive medicine is supposed to work.

So, yeah, Obamacare saved my life and, without it, by now I'd be pretty much at the point of the woman in the cartoon.

Which I guess means I'm not neutral on the topic and probably shouldn't comment on it.

Which, in turn, brings us to Lalo Alcaraz's commentary in which I wish I had more faith.

For all the outrage and despair I'm seeing on social media, I've excluded a lot of people from my feed who are probably dancing and singing and drinking watered-down foreign-owned Clydesdale urine along with the GOP.

And, based on the timelines within the bill, once they find out what has been done to them, the 2018 elections will be over, and some changes won't even come about until 2020.

Add in the delayed awareness factor and a period of conflicting anecdotal bullshit and I don't think we'll see the kind of shock and revulsion from this that could alienate Trump fans in time.

Particularly since plain facts didn't have an impact in the last one: It didn't matter that the Democrats were promising job-training and alternative industries for coal country, because the Republicans promised to bring back jobs harvesting a product with no market value for use in plants that had long-since converted to natural gas.

And exhortations not to let a demented toddler appoint Supreme Court justices fell on equally deaf ears.

The hope for 2018 has not changed: Those who might have done more in 2016 are going to have to get off their asses in 2018 and the most that yesterday's vote can accomplish is perhaps get them more motivated.

Anyway, I'll say more later as the picture becomes better focused.

If the thing does clear the Senate, I wish they'd amend it to kick in sooner and harder, but I don't think they're that stupid.

Self-dealing, gutless, heartless, unpatriotic and cruel, yes.

But not stupid.

 

Juxtaposition of the Day

(Non Sequitur)

(Red and Rover)

Wiley bemoans the death of authoritative journalism, and it's a common complaint these days, but I like his approach because one of the first things that was said when on-line news emerged was that people would focus entirely on their own interests and would never stumble across the rest of the news.

At the time -- late 80s and early 90s -- the issues were about what headlines they would click on at their local paper's site, or arrange to have "pushed" to them, but that has morphed with the growth of algorithm-driven aggregators, so that you now have complaints of "Why isn't the media covering this?" when, in fact, it is covered but it isn't clicked on often enough to make it even visible.

Certainly, in the print days, there were people who turned straight to the sports or the women's page or the comics and never bothered to look at the national and international news, but most papers were not such behemoths that you wouldn't at least flip the pages and perhaps see an unrelated headline that drew you in.

You can tell Red and Rover is set in that non-specific past time. Even if we still had little boys delivering newspapers today, they couldn't fling the tiny pamphlets from the sidewalk to the house, and if one did reach a window, it would bump off harmlessly and fall onto, not "into," the hedge.

Perhaps if he put a stone in each bag ...

 

So anyway ...

So, anyway, in the meantime you might want to start paying attention to Arlo & Janis, where it looks like a substantial long-form story arc is developing. 

Their now-grown son and his wife have offered them a chunk of land on the farm where they could build a snug home and be close to the kids, but, as seen today and for the last several, it's an uprooting that has raised emotional conflicts.

Arlo & Janis has always moved on a timeline that admittedly happens to match my own, but beyond that, I think that, if comic strips are going to appeal to an aging demographic, they should at least do so with some thought and relevance, not just by repeating the same familiar gags over and over. 

Arlo's constant fretting over growing old has been a nice mirror, even though, given the chaos and churn of my career, I never really had a rut from within which to foster a midlife crisis.

Now, however, as they consider settling in for the home stretch, I'm completely sympathetic.

I'm also pleased from a critical perspective to see Jimmy Johnson set them out in what promises to be a fun, productive direction, since the strip has recently seemed a little bogged down.

Mostly, though, yeah, I've reached something of the same point in life.

I've recently wished -- in a vague and mostly nostalgic way -- that I could have the house we lived in back in Colorado transplanted to the town we lived in near the shores of Lake Champlain.

Which nonsensical idea of combining the best house with the most congenial location does not rise to the level of a plan, but, rather, reminds me of this sequence in 8 1/2 -- the absolute best mid-life crisis movie ever -- where he imagines all the women he has ever made love to living happily in one big house together, a fantasy that quickly, hilariously dissolves.

Thus it also reminds me of this:

 

Comments

[Bob]

I had the experience of breaking a window when delivering my papers a few decades ago. Of course, it was the paper from the city 2 hours away because, as you said, the local paper, even on its heaviest day, wouldn't knock down a stack of dominoes. It cost me only 3 weeks' worth of collection money from that house, but I didn't have to clean the glass at 6:00 a.m. All-in-all, I got off easy.