OH, SAY, CAN YOU SEE?

Here are ten sets of important and urgent questions for right wing Americans.

1: What do you understand by the term ‘Socialism’? Do you imagine it is simply a synonym for ‘European’? In what ways do you believe President Obama – or any previous American president or indeed any current world leader – is or was a Socialist? (Write on one side of the paper only).

2: The party of Adolf Hitler called itself the National Socialist Party (hence Nazi). Was Hitler actually a Socialist as you understand the term, though? Could (for instance) Hitler, Trotsky, Gorbachev, Castro, Mitterand and Blair all be deemed Socialists? Is it possible for Obama simultaneously to be Socialist and Hitler-like? Discuss with illustrations.

Images like these are all over the net and the current health debate in the US

3: According to a Facebook entry by Mrs Sarah Palin (the former governor of Alaska and apparently thought to be a significant political commentator in the United States), the President intends to introduce a new health care system whereby senior citizens and the disabled “will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’, whether they are worthy of health care”. Never mind the carelessness with which Mrs Palin describes the disabled as “standing”; what do you imagine would in practice be the function of these death panels? What kind of public servants would agree to serve on a death panel? (“Hello, darling, how was your day?” “Oh, I had such a long afternoon on the death panel. Do you know we condemned 127 seniors and six autistic children to the electric chair”. “Poor darling, you must be quite exhausted”).

4: What do the letters NHS stand for? What does the NHS do? How many death panels does it fund? Do you really and truly know anything at all about the NHS? Have you seen any English people with teeth lately?



5: What do you think is the domestic political status of Daniel Hannan MEP? As he is a member of the European parliament, doesn’t that make him a European and hence a Hitler Socialist? Does the fact that his views were immediately repudiated by the leadership of his party mean that they are in some way unrepresentative? In any case, if he works in continental Europe, how much contact does he actually have with the NHS in Britain?

6: Does it trouble you at all that as many as 45 million American citizens have no health insurance and therefore cannot afford to seek treatment when they are ill or injured? Have you ever heard the pathetic appeals for help that are routinely broadcast on some public service radio stations? Isn’t there quite an embarrassing dislocation between the fact that the USA is the richest and, you don’t tire of telling us, the greatest nation on earth and the lack of a health system that tends to people who need it. Would you want a fire department that only came out to douse fires at premises that could show up-to-date fire cover, a police department that looked the other way if your policy protecting you against muggers wasn’t fully comprehensive?

Of course if you went through all the pix of any public figure – Ann Widdicombe, say – you could always find one that seems to mirror some gesture of somebody else's

7: How much cash has the health insurance industry put into your campaign? Does it ever occur to you that insurance is the most corrupt, self-serving industry in the whole capitalist system, little more than a form of sophisticated casino operation in which, as everyone knows, the house always wins? What do you say to this proposition: that the president wants to establish a public health system because he believes that Americans will benefit from it and that it is the right thing to do, whereas the insurance companies want to preserve their businesses because they make a vast amount of profit? Does that really sound like a fantasy to you?

8: Don’t you know that there is already a huge public sector in the American health system, just as in many other services you take for granted? Do you think that, unless you were a multi-millionaire, you would survive in a totally free market that had no public provision and no public regulation?



9: Isn’t it a little bit anti-American to attack your own president and government in the terms that you have been employing lately? Anyone being so extreme about Ronald Reagan or either of the Bushes would have been denounced as unpatriotic. Isn’t it time someone did a comprehensive exposé of the shock-jock fascists, the Fox News bigots and all the other detritus of the American commentariat who have no compunction about spreading the wildest of lies about anyone with a decent thought in their heads?

10: And finally, are you fucking insane? (You may need health care).

You can play this game with anybody

(PS: This posting is a little late; my server has lately been experiencing difficulty both contacting and maintaining contact with blogger.com. I don’t know why – no other internet address presents such a problem).