The Spanish Prisoner

Before you ask: no, I do not plan on seeing Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. I have better things to do with my time and money. I had a college professor who was an Ayn Rand disciple, and for a time I had a subscription to a “libertarian” magazine. That is about as much exposure to Randian bullshit – excuse me, “objectivism” – as any one person should have to suffer through in a lifetime.

It never ceases to amaze me that people can actually take Rand seriously. Her hero was a serial killer. She collected Social Security and Medicare benefits, while denouncing other people for doing the same. Her disciple, Alan Greenspan, helped wreak the U.S. economy. I guess this is what it takes to be considered a great thinker.

About that Ayn Rand disciple professor. Years ago I took classes at an underfunded state university in Massachusetts. One of the courses I took was in environmental science. The instructor was this fat, bald, baby-faced man. When he talked, he sometimes looked like an infant angrily working its mouth. I couldn’t help finding this comical. I would sit in the back of the class holding my hand over my mouth, but this didn’t fool him. One day, after class, he confronted me and angrily demanded to know what I thought was so funny. I pretended not to know what he was talking about, and I managed to change the subject by asking a question about solar energy. Even at that moment, I had to clench my jaw to keep from smiling.

Any way, one day this professor read to the class this long, mind-numbing rant by Ayn Rand, the upshot of which was that environmentalists are evil people who want to take away our electric toothbrushes. (Those fiends!) He also informed us that critics regard Atlas Shrugged as a great work of literature, although he didn’t say whether he had read it himself. On other occasions, this guy would urge the students to get into as much debt as they possibly could. He had this idea that if people got into huge amounts of debt and then defaulted on their loans, it would bring about the collapse of our mixed economy, thereby making possible the creation of a free market utopia.

Most of the students at this school came from working class or lower middle class backgrounds. Over the years I’ve sometimes wondered how many of them ruined their lives because they listened to this guy’s advice. Of course, Rand would have said that he was merely eliminating “inferior types”.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had gotten a job. What I didn’t mention was that it was a temporary job. After the Christmas rush petered out in January, I was laid off. My boss told me that the company laid off 167 people, so at least I knew I was not alone. (Misery loves company, as they say.) Since then, except for a one-week temp job, I have been unemployed. I check Craigslist every day. I send out maybe a dozen resumes every week. One day I came across an ad for a “Graphic Designer/Web Marketing Copywriter”. It said:

Local manufacturing company seeking graphic designer / web marketing copywriter for part-time position. Primary duties are to create product flyers and to create and upload web-marketing copy to our new site using a CMS interface. Please send resume and work samples for consideration.

Since I am a graphic designer who has done some writing, this sounded like something I could do, so I sent them my resume. The next day I got a phone call from a woman at the company, asking to set up an interview with me. I naively assumed that because I had gotten such a quick response, they must have been impressed by my resume and by my online portfolio. I soon learned otherwise.

It was a small company that made specialty audio equipment for recording studios and whatnot. I met with the company’s business manager. She told me that the company was dissatisfied with their website, so they had decided to build a whole new one. Someone had already made templates for the new site. Basically they needed someone to write text for it, as well as for some flyers. I told her about the writing I’ve done. She was unimpressed. She explained with a slight tone of impatience in her voice that whoever wrote their copy must have a background in marketing. The most logical thing for me to say at this point would have been: “Does it say on my resume that I have a background in marketing? Why are you wasting my time like this?” Of course, I didn’t say that. Instead, I smiled at her. A small part of my brain was clinging to the hope that I might still be able to get some sort of job out of this. After all, they had invited me in for an interview, hadn’t they? Surely, that must mean something?

The woman kept talking. Suddenly, she started saying that in addition to a background in marketing, the copywriter also had to have a knowledge of audio science. So, what they were really looking for was someone who had a double major in marketing and audio engineering. It was becoming embarrassingly obvious that this woman had no idea what she was doing. My smile must have looked awfully strained at this point. The corners of my mouth were starting to hurt. When I sensed that this “interview” was coming to an end, I asked her when she expected to make a decision. She said when she found the right person. “I’m interviewing a number of people,” she said. To which I should have said: “And I’m sure you will wast their time just as you have wasted mine.” Instead, I smiled.

This was the first job interview I’d had in months, and it was a complete joke. I’m starting to get desperate. I’m actually thinking about going to graduate school. Heaven help me.

The Mad As Hell Doctors came to the University of Oregon campus the other day as part of their campaign for single payer health care. There were nine speakers, all but one of them doctors. Paul Hochfeld, an emergency room physician, started off. He pointed out that, in a sense, we are already paying for health care for everyone. One of the reasons for the high cost of medical treatment is to pay for people who are uninsured. He said that under current conditions, the population is divided up into different “risk pools”: medicare recipients, medicaid recipients, veterans, employed people, etc. This makes managing health care in this country unnecessarily complicated and expensive. Under single payer, there would be one single risk pool that would include everybody. Michael Huntington, another emergency room physician, talked about how he sees people with advanced cancers. They delay seeing a doctor because they don’t have insurance. When they finally do see one, their cases are too far advanced to be treated successfully. Joseph Eusterman said that what we are seeing is “an American Holocaust”.

One point that was made repeatedly was that the number of primary care physicians is declining. This is because under current conditions, it is more profitable to be a specialist. It was also pointed out that the U.S. has the highest administrative and billing costs for medical care of any developed nation. This is largely because hospitals and doctors’ offices have to use separate software and billing forms for each insurance company. By contrast, they pointed that only two to three cents of every dollar spent on Medicare goes to administrative costs. They also argued that health care costs will go up under the health care bill that was recently passed by Congress. As for the “public option”, the doctors pointed out that this would be just another insurance company. It is not a solution.

The doctors urged people to organize to fight for a single payer system. “We need to be Egyptians,” one of them said.