The Primate Press

Does anyone really think Republicans are going to vote for any healthcare reform bill no matter what’s in it? I don’t. While I truly applaud Obama’s above and beyond efforts to invite them into non-partisan cooperation, so far his efforts have done no good. Republicans vote against everything proposed by Democrats no matter what. That’s because it doesn’t benefit them politically to cooperate (or that’s their perception.) It only benefits them to oppose, oppose, oppose. Obama may do an admirable job inviting non-partisan cooperation in Washington, but it doesn’t make Republican voters waver for a second on what they demand of their representatives.

Ezra Klein with something of the same thought in the Washington Post.

So we may disagree about to what extent a Public Option would help — it would help me personally a great deal, being self employed and relying on not getting too sick for fear of testing the arbitrary limits of Unicare’s benevolence — but do any Democrats really think it would hurt? Even just to try?  This argument comes down to, as usual, team politics. Republicans oppose this legislation because it’s from Democrats. Republicans will find a way to oppose it after the public option is off the table.

Finally, Barry Obama is seeing the light. I think the reality has set in on what that public option would really mean to the United States of America, and even a closet communist like him knows he could never get away with it.

For an illustration of just what things would be like if a public health care option ever were to be adopted, I need only mention these three words: UPS, FedEx and USPS.

Once upon a time, mail in this country was handled efficiently and effectively for everyone. Back in Colonial times when there was only UPS and FedEx, two fine private, for-profit companies, everyone knew they would get their mail on time for the lowest cost. But some liberal in Washington was not satisfied with things working efficiently and effectively, and he came up with a public option for mail — the United States Postal Service, or USPS. I think that was Jimmy Carter.

Now, you have the situation of today. A giant, federally-funded, poorly run behemoth has taken over the entire mail industry, and is the only choice. No private company can compete when the playing field includes a cheater like the US Government, propped up with a free revenue stream of taxpayer dollars. So UPS and FedEx, once the champions of high quality mail delivery, with retail stores everywhere, quickly declared bankruptcy and disappeared from the landscape.

When’s the last time you got your mail without going down to the USPS station and waiting for hours? Some resort to flying to Canada to get their mail. And with the usual waste and mismanagement of a government bureaucracy, getting our mail costs much more than it used to when free market competition kept prices low. Remember the good old days, when it only cost 32 cents to mail a letter?

And God forbid you have a problem with mailing something. Calling the USPS with a problem is a nightmare. Its customer service is nothing like the fine customer service that naturally comes into being when the free market system is unregulated. It’s the opposite of the excellent customer service you get when you call, for example, the fine private company AT& T. The electronic voice is so sincere when it assures you “your call is important to us.” The real live people are so courteous when they transfer you to another department, or the wrong department, or tell you to call back at a different number, or disconnect you accidentally for the eighth time in a row. They’re so nice when they give you the phone number of the department they’re trying to connect you to, just in case for some reason you get disconnected. And it’s no problem at all calling them back over and over, because the wait time is never longer than 20 or 30 minutes before another representative comes on the line. They always speak perfect English. You can tell by their American names that they are local employees, and not slave labor outsourced to India at a dollar per hour, as the United States Postal Service does. And knowledgeable! These people are so knowledgeable when you have a technical question about your Internet service. Not only do they know exactly what department to pass you off to, they know all the special offers they are required to bombard you with after they haven’t helped you with the problem you called about in the first place! Now that is the unfettered free market system working to help the regular joe.

Nope, if the liberals in Congress get away with this Public Option, it will be the end of American life as we know it. A government competitor in a free market industry? It’s unheard of. It’s unamerican. It’s unnatural, and we have yet to see an example of it working in our country.

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What kind of man pins his hopes and dreams on a lawn chair made to fly by tying dozens of weather balloons to it? With milk jugs for ballast?

Someone sort of crazy, someone who’s a dreamer, someone “quirky”. Yeah. In the current Steppenwolf production of Up by Bridget Carpenter, Ian Barford’s Walter Griffin has all of those qualities. But still, something is missing. Somehow, it was still not this man that would do that. This production (and possibly the play) have a class issue.

There were many lovely things about the production, especially the sweet portrayal of the two teens, the staging of Phillipe Petit on his highwire, and the best moment of the play when 16 year old ** Griffin joins him up there on a high of love.

But always in the scenes between Walter and his wife, the actors seemed uncertain about how to proceed. That’s because the imagery doesn’t make sense without a certain indication of class. Who pins his dreams on something like that? Someone quirky, crazy, that’s  true — but also someone of the lower middle class. The shear futility of the dream, which is the beauty of it, is a characteristic curse of a certain class. The lawn chair, the desperation that drives such a need for escape, the fatal touch of one’s 15 minutes arriving too soon — on David Letterman — these are all images that make sense only in the context of a redneck.

Ian Barford just seems and looks too yuppy-ish for this role. In the role of his wife, Rachel Brosnahan is too North Shore, and Martha Lavey, as spectacularly refined as she is, is far too aristocratic for the role of a tarot card reading con artist. That down and dirty sense of class, something along the lines of what Mickey Rourke would do, is not only essential to the aesthetic, it’s essential to understanding the play. My favorite part about Superior Donuts was how Michael McKean was in such perfect register as far as class, ethnicity and age. I wish the characterizations in this play could have had that subtly of class register, not because they need to be faithful to the “true life” story, but because it’s essential to the expression.

This might be a problem with the writing too, I’m not sure. Perhaps Carpenter shied away from writing the truck driver that inspired her because it was not something she knew well enough. Certainly the Steppenwolf crew shied away from it, either because they missed that element, or because they couldn’t relate to it.

With that piece of the puzzle, I can see what inspired the writer to write about it. It’s a beautiful and poignant image of the futility of all of our hopes. It’s a sad and moving play, and, thank goodness, not bittersweet or quirky in the least.

Only with the element of class do we understand the desperation of the need, and the peculiar object of a flying lawn chair that is at once low tech, cheap and wildly independent. Only with that specificity does the image stir our own feelings of ultimate futility.