Has Obama Killed Stephen Hawkings Yet?

The title is taken from the Investor Business Daily's assertion that the National Health Care System in Britain would terminate the life of someone as disabled as physicist Stephen Hawkings because he would not be considered valuable to society. The lesson was that Obama's Health Care reform would create the same situation in the United States. A problem--the great scientist is still alive as of this writing and continues to live in the United Kingdom where he has been all his life unmolested by the health police.

Stephen Moore's Club of Growth has been placing ads that say that the same British health care system terminates life when the medical bill hits $22,500. Maybe the British embassy should refute some of these little tales out of school. Much to my disappointment President Obama said he had no such plan to create the vaunted death panels so the bureaucrats would sit behind desks and judge disabled and crippled patients wheeled to defend their right to life.

For a political person such as myself, how is one to grabble with the lunacy pouring forth not only on this issue but every issue since the fall elections? The late, great Bayard Rustin, a friend and one of our greatest civil rights leaders, used to say whenever there was some black foolishness "When the brothers go, they really go." Maybe I should channel the smidgin of Cherokee blood and just say,"Those white people are just CRAAZZZYY." Because I can find no entry into the so-called political discourse. My son asked me to explain a comment by one of the frothing screamers at a health townhall meeting. I told him there was none--there was no discernible reason behind their statement.

Here we have the first President in my son's life that he can look up to--a young, classy guy with a touch of the nerd and articulate as hell--surrounded by a country I don't recognize. It's almost like President Obama is the only adult in a room that is peopled by whiners and complainers who all have more privilege and wealth than 90% of the country and now believe they are victims. Should my son be taught that America has gone insane?

Or maybe my attitude should be as a foreign correspondent or anthropologist watching a fascinating human society that on the surface defies our understanding of community. In this way, the current rhetoric would lack the emotive force to enrage. Instead from the observer's vantage point, we would watch with detachment some modern ritual of sacrificing the leader. These detached moments have traditionally failed. One only has to read V.S. Naipul's accounts of the South to know the outsider often fails to comprehend the magnitude of our derangement.

Perhaps imagining a writer's style will do it. Hunter Thompson would have loved today with the strange peoples dotting the terrain. What would he do with a conservative movement that takes its directives from an Australian paperbaron married to a Chinese woman and a woman who claims the President isn't an American, who is herself from Moldova and regularly gives interviews to Pravda? The whole term astro-turfing would probably end up to be one of his ESPN columns. But Hunter isn't appropriate. He amped up the quirks and visuals of the established figures of the 1970s and 1980s so we could see how truly depraved and bizarre they were, even while most people thought they were straight. Everyone today is over the top,you can't hype their style to make them any more real or understandable. And, poor Marshall McCluhan, television is no longer the cool medium--it's hot now. That's why I believe Obama appears a classic figure--he's cool and comfortable, while everyone else on the tube is amped.

Hunter won't do. James Ellroy might be appropriate for the hinky doings within the powerdrome but he too would fall short. A surprise candidate for capturing the full panorama of American madness might be Carl Hiassen. Carl's journalism has covered in microcosm some of the demented as it affects Florida, a state that almost becomes cutting-edge in the realm of mundo bizarro. Pythons freed into the Everglades; pension funds invested by the Governor in Lehman Brothers, which just vanish along the firm itself, 32-story condo buildings with a sole occupant because the real estate market has gone bust. Ghost towns of developments left by owners who would rather just give up the second home than pay the mortgage. His style, particularly his humor, might be the best antidote to the current madness.

It would be nice to say--It's all America. It's all good. But it isn't.