“Is America Ready to Surrender?”
by Pearl Tiresias, with great assistance and care by my editor Steve Mo Fye
“I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can’t stay here with every single hope you had shattered”
~ Big Country, In a Big Country, 1983
To the tune of “Memory Gospel [Extended]” by Moby
Written on November 22, 2020, the 57th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and dedicated to his children Caroline and John, whom I had the privilege of meeting, along with their mother, former First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, in front of the Massachusetts State House in Boston in 1990, as well as to the memory of Nicholas Winterhalter, one of the best friends anyone could ever hope to have, who died of a heart attack in early lockdown in Oakland, California in the spring of 2020.
Slated to post on December 7, 2020, the 79th anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the beginning of the United States of America’s formal declaration of war against the Japanese Empire and its entry into World War Two. World War Two was the deadliest conflict in human history, ending the lives of between 70–85 million people worldwide, 2.3 percent of the world population in 1940, and directly responsible for the deaths of 407,300 US military personnel. The official death toll of coronavirus COVID-19 now stands at well over half that grim total in less than one year. Both World War Two and Coronavirus, COVID-19 demarcate the beginning and likely the end of US domination in world affairs, as the United States of America has been plunged into disease and chaos thanks to a 72-year stalemate regarding the issues of any type of truly comprehensive National Health Care plan, which you will see was on the minds of many of the leaders of the USA in that time period, but which given the monied interests of the medical-industrial complex, and entities like Big Pharma and the insurance companies, simply failed to materialize as a nation which placed more than one-third of its total budget towards military expenditures failed to consider that a national health care plan was a vital component of the defense of the nation. For how can we spend so much preparing for the defense of the nation with a willingness to engage combat across the world without considering that the defense of the nation should certainly include the health care well-being of all of its citizens?
May God have mercy on our souls.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
In the early morning hours in the month of January 2020, I would wake up each day and first on my list of to-dos following a long drink of water was to “Google Coronavirus.” And each day I did.
At the time I was working in the unlikeliest of jobs for me, but one that millions of others were doing at the time. While it was an unlikely job for me, given my background as a writer and editor, in a way it was the perfect job for someone always in motion: Driving for Uber Eats in Silicon Valley. From Palo Alto to San Jose, all over the South Bay in fact, picking up and delivering food for a work culture that had grown far too busy to actually eat a sit-down meal away from their desks, and distributing it to them at some of the biggest tech companies in the USA in one of the most expensive real estate footprints on Earth.
There is something to be said for living a life that is always in motion. For as we accelerate on the freeway to get our pickups and glide off the exits, and loop round the wide avenues of an endless metroplex of suburban strip malls with a McDonald’s on every corner, we learn that while “everything looks the same,” each restaurant and even a McDonald’s has different people working there and that each one has a story and each one is part of the nation as a whole…
In January, I had many things to consider. I was homeless then and living in my car, waking up each day to change my clothes from suitcases in my trunk, then entering the same Starbucks every morning to first go to the bathroom to wash my face and brush my teeth. Emerging clean enough and with my fresh clothes straightened, I would approach the counter and order an herbal iced tea and a scone, and then engage in casual chit-chat with the youngsters behind the counter; even homeless and without any certainty about anything in life at all, I had a job, a list of to-dos, concerns and a routine, and part of my routine in life is to gather the stories of others, and even back then, there was no exception to that rule.
One young man smiled dazzlingly at me every morning and said, “Your usual, Pearl?” and I would say “yes, dear, thank you,” and ask about how his life was going. He was going to college to become a nurse and working full-time at Starbucks, but his real passion in life was singing, and he demonstrated that commitment by being involved in no less than five different church choirs for his Presbyterian faith. Another was a young woman with purple hair and a glittering fake diamond nose ring, who was also a dog walker and would talk to me about her clients and their dogs, while a third with a name and a presentation of indeterminate gender who was ever so shy and yet just so adorable, was a volunteer for Project Literacy and taking classes to become a teacher.
I don’t think any of them were ever aware that I didn’t have a home and that I was living in my car, for while I love a home and a bed, on some level I have always felt at home in this marvelous world that we live in, and while there were big- picture issues that might have stopped me in my tracks, the job and the routine and eating every day was keeping me alive and moving forward.
If I had one true ache, it was from the loss of my wife less than a year before, and while we were together, the love I felt from her was so strong I didn’t even notice it. I didn’t realize all that it had brought me in terms of the freedom and the confidence to just be myself and chart a course for the future. And as the past lay in ruins and the future was so uncertain, the present moment was all I had, but while I never stopped working, I pursued love through sexual adventure and used drugs as an anodyne for the uncertainty and the pain.
Yes, I was a beautiful mess, but so was the world at that time, and I could feel it in the air, and when news of the Ccoronavirus reached me in early January, I felt like this incoming tsunami was exactly the disaster threatening the United States I had been sensing, like the crackling of tinder just before an uncontrollable fire erupts and engulfs everything around it.
So, loaded up with my first refill and hunger sated from my scone, I would begin a 12-hour day of pickups and deliveries, thinking most of the time about my wife gone and left me, along with my best friend who found himself in the middle and became a victim of my wrath and jealous rage when I found myself alone. In the back of my mind were the furies of the memory of three other dear friends from the past who no longer talked to me: One a brother since age 17, another a magical big sister who made some of the most amazing art I’d ever seen, and an old lover for but a moment who became a kind of everything to me, an extension of my mind and forever in my heart and all of them were refusing to talk to me at all.
Working for Uber Eats is the simplest job in the world for a person always in motion, allowing me to always be on the run and still be able to live and eat. My daily take of around $150 fed me, my car, and motel rooms in places like Sunnyvale or sometimes downtown, along with the occasional blast of crystal methamphetamine, not to keep moving but to be able to just slow down. And the endless search for sex as a substitute for love, and in such a gritty situation with no way out at all, a deadly pathogen from the other side of the world begins to look like what it became for me — salvation — and while over a quarter of a million of people now lie dead in the USA, in their memory, allow me to offer a bit of salvation to you also.
I have spent my life in and out of the indigent health care system of the United States of America as a Medicaid recipient, and I knew intimately and perhaps more than most that if and when Ccoronavirus reached the United States, that the country was not at all prepared. Not even my wildest imagination could have prepared me for what has happened in 2020, and where we stand with this crisis 11 months later.
Amid these real life concerns I had at the time, I was also developing interesting ideas around psychology and gender. For though I am male presenting, I am chromosomally an intersex hermaphrodite, and had been identifying on and off for almost a decade as a transwoman.
So one fine day, the 30th of January to be precise, after spending the previous evening in a Residence Inn in Palo Alto with my dealer and two beautiful young Fillipina women blasted on crystal and engaged in a rather lurid orgy even from the view of my seasoned repertoire of sexual possibility, I found myself in my best blazer and a pair of nice slacks at the Stanford Oval entering the Psychology building to try to figure out a way to present my ideas regarding an interdisciplinary understanding I was calling Transgender Psychology.
Even then I was aware of the absurdist irony or enormous sense of privilege or brazen brass balls I had under my imaginary girly skirt to approach the Psychology department of one of the most prestigious universities on the face of the Earth, with the suggestion that I might have something of a interdisciplinary revolution to offer that would tie together psychology, endocrinology, and gender studies all at once.
On my way into the building, I received a most unexpected text. I was a homeless male-presenting intersex person with a girl name and a heady theoretical idea, living in my car and still dazed from sexual hijinks on speed. The text came in on LinkedIn from someone I had met in the early 1990s who became an enormous figure in iPhone app development, making millions for himself and the companies he worked for, and now a distinguished Microsoft fellow, and all around me I felt both the elation and the sting of the absurd yet oddly beautiful contrasts of my absolutely wonderful life.
I called him back and we talked about his children, heading off to Berkeley and Harvard, and his latest projects in augmented reality, and because I have known this man so long and also because I am quite well-known for having very little guile in regards to where I have been in life and where I am at whatever moment you happen to reach me, I told him the truth — that once again I was down and out, but working on this very interesting idea to keep me warm and to keep the wolves at bay. I told him what it was and where I was, and as he knows me very well and respects me very highly despite the chaos of my life story, he was wonderfully cordial and encouraging about all that I was considering.
As we rang off and I was alone again in the Stanford Oval, I was left to wonder just how it was possible that someone like me could stitch together ideas from three different disciplines without any other credentials than a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing, and yet still and all and perhaps even forever, my life itself had always been such a spectacular shit show.
I headed towards the evening’s place to stay, an AirBnB in Palo Alto, but on my way there I pulled over and fingered the final bits of crystal in a small plastic bag and hit it hard enough to find a means to lightly drift away and watch the sunset, beautiful and warm. The sky turned to grey and then darkness and I felt alone and so pleased with everything regardless of whether anything ever reached fruition anywhere at all.
At around 7 p.m., I received a text from the AirBnB. The pipes had burst and I couldn’t stay there after all, and I thought, well goodness, now what? And so I drove up to San Mateo County to park my car in front of a friend’s house, and sat there scanning the Internet from my phone for reports on Coronavirus until well past midnight.
Around 2 a.m., I got a text from someone else, someone I knew from around the dark corners of the world I was in and out of everyday, saying he was having a sex party, and to come on down to Redwood City and hang out and spend the night. Though I knew I was high, I didn’t really know how high until there were red lights in my rearview. And I blew a zero, because I hadn’t had a drop to drink, but they knew I was blasted from the smoky soot on my hands, and they took me back to the station for a blood test that I knew that I would fail.
I spent two days alone in a jail cell, my only friends a week’s worth of newspapers, and I read every story at least twice but paid particular attention to the few that were already appearing then about Coronavirus, and I knew that if I couldn’t get out of here I would catch the illness in jail and die, as it appears that so many in California have by now. I knew that if I did manage to get out of jail I had to go to the country with the best public health care system on Earth that I knew about, and a desperate call to my father finally reached him and he set me free and saved my life. Within a week’s time I had given away almost everything I owned and used my last $650 for a plane ticket to Bangkok through Taipei, arriving on February 7, 2020.
Now it’s almost 10 months later, and I have a home here. I have two cats named Dali & Jazz who provide me with the love I’ve always wanted, given freely in exchange for a place to crash and some food and some treats and a little petting here and there. I have gone all out for them and built them a garden on my balcony, and at night we just sit together, listening to music on YouTube. We play Miles Davis a lot here in the Garden Oasis of Dali & Jazz, and we have some very interesting conversations about just how surreal the world has become.
When I first arrived I couldn’t find any drugs, and drug possession in Thailand is a very serious crime. I drank a little at first, but then became frightened, as it is easy to go off the rails in Thailand because there really aren’t any rails here, and this is why Westerners love to visit because here we feel so free. But in a place without any rails, you must learn how to build your own, and I am doing what I can to deconstruct what I was before I came here, while carefully constructing what might be of real value to me now and perhaps in the near future.
Each day is full of activity as I seek to engage now in my fiftieth year all that has happened to me and for me in my life and how to make sure that whatever happens back there never happens again for me. It is a time of self-love and renewal. I briefly had a relationship but I let it go because it was holding me back from the kind of introspection and contemplation that only aloneness can bring.
Tonight after a rather hard day of loneliness and the sense of always being misunderstood that has characterized my life in the shadows of the world, I blasted around Old City on a motorbike, and stopped off at a 7–11 for a bag full of items that get more refined and particular all the time.
As I stepped into the elevator in my building, I was joined by a mother and her two noisy and inquisitive children. The eldest, a girl of eight, spoke surprisingly fluent English, which I learned after offering the standard Thai greetings of Sawadee Khob and Sabai Dee Mai, and said, “Khun Chu Arai, poo ying dek?” which means,”How old are you, little girl?”
She snapped back almost impatiently,saying,“Your Thai isn’t very good at all, do you speak English?” And I smiled and said, “Yes of course” and she said, “Are you from England?”
And I said, “No, I am from the United States of America, near San Francisco in the Bay Area of California.”
She responded, “Well, I don’t know anything about San Francisco or California, but I know about America, and it’s a very strong country, and it has done very well with COVID, don’t you think?” I smiled slightly and turned away and caught the eye of her mother, starting to consider what to say to a child that would be appropriate regarding what COVID-19 has done to the United States of America in the year 2020.
As I turned back round and looked at the girl who was still smiling brightly, she burst out with these words that put me in the kind of twilight zone that can happen to you in Thailand if you stay here long enough. In fact, it is precisely these moments why those of us who find this place and decide we love it will put up with anything to stay in this perplexing paradise of contrasts that is called the Land of Smiles.
“Now I think what happened before you came here, is that you broke out of jail,” she said speculatively, like a detective with second sight and a third eye under her bangs. “And you came here and finally found safety from all of that. And you know, the very same thing happened to me once, and now I can never return. And you can’t return there either, but that’s alright, you know, because there’s so much more you have to see.” And the elevator stopped, and the doors opened, and they all got out and she said, “Goodbye — and don’t worry, we’ll see you again.”
As the doors closed again, I pressed the button to my floor, and felt the tears in my eyes form but I didn’t let them fall until I was safely inside my apartment.
* * * * * * * * * *
From my perch half a world away, when I look back at the country where I was born and which ultimately pushed me out again and again for being unable to rectify the falsehoods and the contrasts presented to me the entire 50 years I lived there, and gave me the grist for my mill of understanding so many things about the USA and the world, I am rendered speechless by those who wish to tell me that the trouble began and will end with Donald Trump or Trumpism by proxy — for I know better and so do you.
If the rampage of Coronavirus wasn’t enough to wake you up, then surely the election should have been. But all great tales of any consequence are presented as trilogies, and whether it is a three-volume set or a three act play, the first part sets the stage, the second part shows the conflict and the development of the characters, and within the third part there is the conclusion. But in the case of what has happened in the USA, I predict that the third act will not be a resolution at all, but rather, a reckoning and a realization — perhaps even, a moment of clarity.
I say this not with bitterness in my heart, nor sadness, nor even pity. The 20th & 21st centuries of American life have demonstrated an unbelievable epic drama of human achievement and tragic failure, as well as lies, subterfuge and deceit. And for any one person living within it trying to put a stop to the gestalt of where it was headed as I thought I could see 26 years ago in 1994 in San Francisco, they were as quickly engulfed as I was by the enormity of the wave that was building, sucked in by the undertow and smashed against the rocks, a casualty of vision in a place where visionaries need not apply, unless their vision dovetailed with capitalism rather than in the purity of ideas, and the understanding of those ideas for the benefit of all within the principles of humanism.
But there is still hope. For there is always hope, and now especially as the wave has finally crashed upon the shore.
It is now close to 2 a.m. in Chiang Mai, in the time zone of Indochina, a place name developed in the 19th century to indicate the area of the world informed by the civilizations of both India and China. It is also known but not fully described by the term that is Southeast Asia, and Southeast Asia knows all too well about the entrenched polarization present within the American mind, something I become aware of when I first visited Laos in 2008, and happened upon “The Museum of the War of American Aggression” in the timeless and idyllic capital city of Vientiane.
It was there that I began to really unravel the images I knew from films like “Apocalypse Now,” not just about how the Viet Nam War was an unjust war, but how it was a terrorist abomination, born from the kind of mind that can design and fund a building like the Pentagon for engaging warfare against others all over the world. But that very mind of aggression towards others is also the kind of mind that also fails to develop the collective reasoning and concern of all involved in the enterprise of national defense, to make it a priority to place universal health care within the national defense budget, for isn’t it pointless to defend the nation if you are not doing all you can to protect its citizens from sickness and disease?
Though it has been said that Worldometers is not the most reliable source of information, it has been my go-to since March for getting a general bead on the status of Coronavirus in the USA and worldwide since sometime after my arrival in Thailand. Today’s death toll was 600 people for a total of the now 262,390 deaths from Coronavirus. The US case count is now at 12.5 million with just shy of 23,000 in critical condition.
The number of US deaths from COVID-19 in just eleven months since it began is now well over half the number of deaths of US service personnel killed in the deadliest conflict in human history known as World War Two. The number of US dead from Viet Nam was around 59,000 and the USA surpassed that in early May or June.
We can argue this way or that about who was responsible, but anyone claiming this lies at the feet of Donald Trump alone is a liar and a fool.
Since the end of World War Two, there have been 12 Presidents including Donald Trump at the very end of the list, and these men have come from both major parties, and yet this nation in which diversity, multiculturalism and plurality offers so many strengths, cannot and has not yet managed to sit down at the table and say once and for all that people matter more than the profits of the healthcare & medical industrial complex that includes Big Pharma and the insurance companies who line the pockets of both parties with campaign contributions, and where recently the Speaker of the House of the Democratic Party had the unspeakable gall to claim that it was “the left” that cost the DNC so many down- ballot losses, and that “socialism” could never be uttered again by the Party who now holds the keys to the White House front door.
Couldn’t it be, Speaker Pelosi, resident of Pacific Heights, one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities on this planet that those down ballot losses came because no one believes in the Democratic Party anymore? You speak out of both sides of your mouth, claiming to be interested in “the people” of America but having no real interest in an agenda that includes single-payer universal health care — particularly after this disaster and this cowardly failure of leadership across the entire political spectrum for the past 72 years?
72 years ago, at the end of World War Two, and following the United States’ adoption of the Marshall Plan in 1948, the United Kingdom made great haste to develop the system of National Health Care. And at this point, the US, which prior to the arrival of COVID-19 could easily claim the status of the largest economy on Earth, is the only Western democracy without meaningful health care for every citizen in the nation, and that is unspeakably obscene.
This atrocity is not the fault of just Donald Trump. It is the fault of a system of cowardice and convenient blaming of a failure to educate and capture the hearts and minds of every American citizen regardless of race, class, gender, and conditions of privilege or oppression. A failure to bring every last one of us to the table for an agreement that is painfully obvious to every other country on Earth who have had to avert their eyes from the hubris of American arrogance, ignorance and greed in 2020.
So for those who have the solid brass sack to accuse Donald Trump of being an incompetent bully, recognize that all of you who accuse him are cowards because we all know that the leading opposition party now holding the keys to the White House cannot offer anything more than “nothing will fundamentally change.”
What a breathtakingly thoughtless and arrogant statement of purpose in this moment of crisis in our nation.
At this moment, the country is divided almost evenly in two. It is a national psychotic break, brought on by the national disgrace of more than three generations of a nation with cowardice in their leadership — and more than a quarter of a million people dead. It is likely that number will double before it is over.
In the nation-state where I find myself today, here in the Kingdom of Thailand, the political scene is so dizzyingly complex that when I am asked what I think of it, I can only say, half-jokingly, that I cannot comment on it because “I am not a Thai.” Thailand is all at once a constitutional monarchy with a Parliament and a prime minister, a deeply entrenched and ancient theocracy, and a military dictatorship.
So who really calls the shots in Thailand? I have absolutely no idea. I talk to people wherever I go and I collect what stories and ideas that I can, but even high-society kids from international schools who attend universities abroad in the USA and Europe and who can bounce back and forth between the Thai mind and the Western view without missing a beat, and who can speak fluent hi-Thai from Bangkok and at least four of the 56 distinct dialects of the Tai language group, as well as fluent English and usually French, and perhaps other languages also from their European excursions, I don’t think even they know who is really in charge here either.
There are massive pro-democracy rallies taking place in Bangkok as there often are in Thailand, as was the case when I last spent a good bit of time here in 2010. But as the US Embassy and the State Department issue warnings to citizens of the USA that “as we are guests here in the Kingdom, we suggest that you do not attend any rallies, protests, or demonstrations,” I do not. Because while I am an American, and I do believe in “freedom” and “the rights of the individual,” it is very difficult right now for me to say with a straight face that I really believe in democracy and that Thailand should have it also, when my own nation, “the birthplace of democracy” in the modern era, finds itself engulfed in such a spectacle of globally witnessed division and disgrace.
Here in the Kingdom of Thailand, there are public hospitals and there are private hospitals, and I have been to both. Private hospitals tend to be preferred by foreigners because we are much more inclined to be greeted by staff and tended to by doctors who all speak English. But personnel shifts back and forth between the two systems and doctors have private practice for Thais and for foreigners too, and so the quality of care doesn’t really differ all that much, and in some respects, it is indistinguishable.
Public hospitals in Thailand are governed by the 30-baht rule, put into place by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra in 2002. And 30 baht is about one US dollar, and this is what you will pay to see a doctor in a public hospital, though surgeries and medications are not included. But if my own experience is any rule, surgeries are half the cost of a private hospital, and private hospitals are much cheaper than Western ones as Thailand has medical tourism as part of its overall tourism strategy. Prescription medications are very cheap because the Kingdom of Thailand does not allow healthcare corporations to set the price for their drugs, while the United States of America, the “land of the free” ensures that drug costs will be as high as a pharmaceutical company wishes to charge
This deplorable fact alone is not indicative of a nation that has any interest whatsoever in the healthcare of its citizens, and this condition existed long before Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, so do consider this actual fact when you develop your searing polemics of apologia regarding the weakness of Joe Biden’s approach to his campaign and likely his entire administration, and scapegoating Donald Trump as the one man solely responsible for the devastating conditions in the United States right now in the wake of Coronavirus COVID-19.
When I arrived in Bangkok on February 7th, within a few days while I was still in the capital, the Bangkok Post ran a front-page story with a photo of the Thai Minister of Health, with a quote that read “the dirty farangs won’t wear their masks, and this will accelerate the spread of COVID-19.” So I went out and got a mask immediately because while risk of deportation was foremost on my mind — though that threat was never implied — I had been to Thailand enough to know that while one can go off the rails here in ways you would never dare in the West, I knew that Thailand is Asia, and Asia means manners and protocol and kindness, so following the guidelines of the culture as best as you can while you are there is a good practice.
In referring to this phenomena within Thailand, I call it “cultural obedience.” And as the world has witnessed in 2020, America loves “the individual” and “freedom” more than the health and well-being of others and far more than a civilized nation should consider as important to still be considered a civilization at all.
By the beginning of March, masks were mandatory in most public spaces, and certainly in stores and restaurants, but also in parks and in the streets. And by mid-March, word reached me that the country would soon go on total lockdown, so I established myself in a hotel room with plans to stay for the three months of April, May and June.
During the national lockdown here, all restaurants and bars were closed nationwide, and while leaving one’s residence to shop at 7–11 or other essential stores and the market was possible, there was a strictly enforced 10 p.m. curfew, strict rules on alcohol sales that eventually led to full prohibition, and a province-to-province shutdown whereby no one without credentials and special permission could leave one province and enter another for any reason. The national borders were shut down in every direction, with no flights in or out, and in some provinces, house-to-house testing was employed.
As of today, the total case count in the Kingdom of Thailand with a population of nearly 70 million people today is 4,107 and a total death count of 60. At 60 days of no new cases there were parties at various nightclubs and discos throughout the city, and also at 100, and the last time I checked Thailand was surpassing 170 days of no new “native” cases, meaning cases that originated here. The only new cases were found by testing incoming Thais and a few select foreigners who had been stuck abroad during the lockdown and were being allowed to trickle back in a strictly mandated protocol of testing and quarantine.
At this time, the threat of getting COVID-19 within the nation-state of Thailand is so low as to be almost non-existent, and mask wearing is only mandatory in stores and enclosed malls. Most people, Thai and foreigners alike, still wear one at all times in public unless sitting in a bar or a restaurant, but discos and nightclubs are packed every weekend with people dancing, with no social distancing and no masks at all.
I suspect all kinds of interesting and meticulous arguments can be made in regards to the issues of “civil liberties” and “freedom” in regards to lockdown anywhere in the West, but certainly in an overly litigious nation like the US. But in my view and certainly to anyone who lost a friend, a parent, a brother, a sister, a wife, a husband or a child to COVID-19 in the US in 2020, these “don’t tread on me” views seem shallow and hollow and deftly irresponsible when it comes to what has occurred. People willing to argue such points better be very well-paid attorneys living on large retainers with fat contingency fees to lead them to speak such nonsense,. The fact that these very talking points have reached the most ignorant people in the US isn’t evidence of their ignorance and stupidity in my view, but of a willingness of one side to feed them such nonsense, and the other side unwilling to create an environment where capitalism and commerce is less important than civic health and the education necessary for people to understand that the needs of the many are greater than the needs of the individual.
In this pandemic, either we are truly in this together or we are not. And the US that the world witnessed in 2020 showed me at last what I have always known in my heart to be true since the age of 20: The US is a nation where it is every man for himself. But as John Donne told us four centuries ago, no man is an island, and if your nation is every man to himself, then your nation is a sinking ship.
I was 20 years old in 1990, and I believe Donald Trump was still utilizing federal subsidies to build the skyline of Manhattan into one of the most expensive real estate footprints on the planet, and no one complained very much then about his capitalist vulgarity. And that is because Donald Trump was not then and is not now an aberration of American life whatsoever. He was then and he remains today the ultimate expression of what an American can be — a crass and gluttonous Kronos eating his own children or selling them off for a profit as we have in the US with our healthcare system.
Hillary Clinton actually hoped Trump would become the Republican nominee in 2016 because she thought she could easily beat him. But what she clearly wasn’t aware of is that whether Donald Trump lost more money than he made, his high stakes universe was only driven by profit and win, and not tempered by the principles of decency and humanity. I have been told by others that Obamacare was “the best that could be done” and it was her intent to extend it further, but I cannot quite recall ever reading that Hillary Clinton was interested in single-payer universal health care, and BidenCare is certainly not that at all. Because all of America’s political class is beholden to corporate contributions, and the only person ever to call bullshit on that in my lifetime was Bernie Sanders, to whom both Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi dealt a massive brush-off to in 2016, and then spent years blaming “the Russians” for that loss.
She actually lost because of the Electoral College, and then a failure to truly be inclusive of the Progressive agenda in 2020 almost cost the Democrats this election as well. “The left” cost you nothing, Speaker Pelosi — I can guarantee you Biden would not have won without them.
I recall a time between the ages of 24 and 33, when after a diagnosis of a serious mental illness at 24, I quickly encountered the reality of the non-existence of a healthcare system in the United States. In being granted this gift from Western Psychiatry, a discipline of inquiry into the nature of the mind just a little more than one hundred years old, I now had to see a psychiatrist once a month, take daily medication and it was suggested I see a therapist once a week. The horrific and grotesque tale of how I managed that and how I didn’t — like “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair for the mind — has not yet been written and might not ever be. The working title is “Crazy in America” and of course it had a double meaning. For its intent was to describe a situation whereby a person described as “crazy” was confronted daily with a medical system of absolute insanity, leading me to wonder often and as loud as I could complain:
“Am I really crazy, or is the system in which I find myself, far more crazy than I could ever be?”
Now, I do believe, the entire world is aware of the answer to that question, but what leads me to consider those horrible days of my life is the issue within COVID-19 of the disproportionate number of deaths among low-income people and people of color in this entirely preventable situation.
More than once, in cities across the USA before I was able to qualify for Medicaid, with the qualification being years of demonstrated living below the poverty line, trying to live without regular psychiatry and meds made making a normal living nearly impossible, I would invariably find myself in an emergency room in various states of delirium. I would sit and they would calm me down, and take my pulse and my blood pressure, and I would inform them of my diagnostic history and my prescribed medication which had run out.
Generally this song and dance would last three hours at most. At the end I’d be given a three-day supply of these life-stabilizing medications, then given a list of referrals to city, state, or non-profit agencies that I could go to to find medication relief. Most of the time I would end up in the Skid Row neighborhood of whatever city I was in to stand in line at Healthcare for the Homeless, the kindest and noblest non-profit organization that has ever existed in the healthcare jungle of the USA.
Healthcare for the Homeless would set me up with medication and referrals to programs where I could see their psychiatrists and find sliding scale or sometimes even free therapy, often from psychology departments of various schools, but neither they nor anyone else could prevent those emergency rooms from glibly sending me a bill for usually around $3000 for that Band-Aid visit to an emergency room in a nation with the world’s largest economy on Earth, and without question, the largest military budget in the history of the human race.
I just threw them away — my credit rating was already shot by then, so “Fuck those bastards,” I’d say, laughing and , balling up the paperwork and tossing it into the trash. But I had nothing to lose, while millions of low-income people from all backgrounds have homes and children and they want that credit score, so they would either pay that profit-driven bill with ridiculous costs for a few hours — vital stats taken by nurses and usually less than ten minutes with a doctor and absurdly expensive medications — or they simply wouldn’t even consider going to a hospital until they were standing at death’s door.
Donald Trump created these conditions? Really, you say? What extraordinary power this one man had all by himself all those years to create this system of national self-destruction that has now hit rock bottom for all the world community to witness, and which has also massively disrupted the economic viability of the entire planet?
No. That Is Not True.
And it is a lie to say that it is. A massive and inexcusable lie.
Donald Trump is the product of a culture of presidential power held hostage by the medical-industrial capitalist enterprise and the seemingly unshakeable power of insurance companies that flowed from Truman to Eisenhower, Kennedy to Johnson, Nixon to Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and Barack Obama as well. And while I do believe at this time that the former President least interested in universal health care issues of any kind was George H.W. Bush and surprisingly not Ronald Reagan, this game theory exercise in political acumen walking through the minefields of corporate personhood is for artificial intelligence constructs that absolutely do not care about human life whatsoever.
And I feel it is important to note that in the dizzying struggle for universal health care in the United States of America at the level of the Oval Office, the dense chess games of either this move or that move and who gets what and who pays what is a mind-altering clusterfuck of how to make sure that private enterprise gets its cut and Wall Street calls the shots, and that the individual is confronted with enormously complex rules and regulations of extreme wonkitude like “Health Savings Accounts” and other makeshift nonsense, because in the United States of America, capitalism is absolutely without question far more important than our democracy and the principles of humanist progress. And that’s absolutely pathetic in my view, so if your P&L sheet matters more than the devastation that has occurred as a result of this searing misunderstanding of the nature of human priorities, I hope you rot on your private island in Fiji all alone with your offshore accounts in the Canary Islands to keep you warm and where your social media life exists only within the realm of your day trading account, your Bitstamp membership, and the lies and exaggerations of your hubristic life laid bare for all to see on your LinkedIn curriculum vitae.
So if you want to close the door on the America I left behind, then you need to close the door on the culture that created the conditions that made it possible for Donald Trump to *barely* lose, and to stop playing the blame game, and take responsibility for the past actions of your country, and come clean to each other and to the world at long last.
Because this is the reckoning of the third act of 2020, and it will likely last well into the next administration. So if Joe Biden wants to tell you that “nothing will fundamentally change” and Nancy Pelosi wants to tell you “we can never use the word socialism again” like a risen Margaret Thatcher when even the gloriously biased statistics of Fox News exit polls showed that the majority of Americans want a government-backed health care plan — a remarkable 72% percent, in fact, exactly 72 years since the Marshall Plan, isn’t that fascinating? Then you need to recognize as I have from halfway around the world that neither Biden nor Trump has really won at all, because the only one that can be called the winner is the one who has the courage to change the tune towards a vision that unites the nation and perhaps the world.
262,000 have died over this failure of humanism in the name of greed.
And so many more to come.
Are you willing to act on their behalf?
Are they worth laying down your divisions towards a unifying principle of humanistic integrity on which to surrender your shame and defeat over this 72-year plan of callous disregard for human suffering?
It’s not as if Universal Health Care in the US is a new idea at all. It is simply that no one’s efforts have ever really been able to pull the insurance industry out of the puzzle and what we have is a piecemeal approach of cowardice and compromise rather than a covenant for every citizen, as lobbyists for capitalist interests have blockaded humanism in the American Experiment whose laboratory is now in a complete and utter shambles of a nitrogen bomb detonation of lies and bullshit and greedy principles that has destroyed your democracy and your standing in the world forever.
America, are you now willing to lay down your arms? Are you willing to recognize that despite whomever you supported in 2016 or 2020 or 2000 or 1980 that among all of you today there is a common ground within a universal healthcare system integrated into every aspect of your lives and is embedded within the sacrosanct inscriptions which make up the national defense budget, an understanding now of the issues of interdependence of the health and well-being of yourself as well as your neighbors, and that without a doubt that to prepare for war against others in the name of the defense of the nation is a useless polemic if it is not the case that you will do whatever it takes to secure the health care needs of every citizen within your borders?
.
America, the nation of my birth which took my family in from the Potato Famine of Ireland in the early 20th century, are you ready to wake up and look yourself in the mirror, and say out loud to yourself and everyone else in the room that you are powerless, and that you are ready and willing to do whatever it takes to have an awakening, and will it be just a rude awakening or will it be one that is tempered by the grace of honesty, integrity and surrender?
One day at a time, my friends. And while every single person on this planet is in possession of a framework of being whereby each and every one of us does the best we can with what we have, every step of the way, as someone who 26 years ago was diagnosed with a serious mental illness and in 2003 was declared 100% psychiatrically disabled by the Social Security Administration of the United States of America, I know that within each of us there lies a path of greatness that when sought and examined and confronted can lead to a Higher Power of universal integrity and breathtaking self-understanding.
It is my sincere hope that everyone in the world finds that path and does all they can when they reach the other side to look back upon those who have not yet found the way and offers a word or two to help them all reach that road upon which humanity must find itself to confront the grave and difficult challenges of our individual lives and our collective present and future.
Love in eternity to America and the entire world in this time of grave crisis. I believe we can move mountains — but only if we are absolutely clear that we are all in this together. The rest of the world has determined that Universal Health Care is a global goal by 2030 — do you think, my former fellow Americans that you can get it together to join the global community in this beautiful stepping stone of international cooperation for the health and well-being of every citizen on Earth, or will you simply dissolve into your tin-foil hat conspiracy theories about how anything that is decent in the world costs far too much money for your greedy nation to possibly consider as a necessary expense?
Wither the nation that was America, likely gone forever now, I am sure there is much money to be made upon the miseries of division and chaos that you are living in now. Enjoy. The civilized world will be thinking about interdependence as you stand alone with your piles of your US dollar now likely to be dethroned as the global currency standard thanks to your remarkable short-sightedness and your deft inability to see the light of human progress.
How many yachts can you water-ski behind? said Charlie Sheen in Wall Street in 1987. I was seventeen then and had become aware just one year before that Europe had health care plans for all its citizens, and I really do not understand why everyone else wasn’t as flipped as I was that we were spending one-third of our national budget on the military when it was clear then to me that if you weren’t protecting the health care rights of your citizens then what exactly were you defending with your military anyway?
A sick country, I was forced to conclude — and what a life I had in America for fifty years seeing so much of that sickness rotting the nation from within, and at fifty I now have the grace & understanding that I never have to return. I really loved the possibility of what America stood for but…well, such idealism belongs to youth, and I am not young anymore, but the world is still bright and risen for I know that what I left in February is a place to which I never plan to return. I do wish those who still remain the very best of luck — but I can no longer engage the fray of what Kathy Acker once called “The Empire of the Senseless.” I have so many other beautiful ideas to consider now. And yes America, there is beauty far more interesting than money, I know, it is so hard to believe from where you are, but I do intend to send wishes from afar that you shall find it as I have been able to do all of my life and certainly in the future.
