I thought the painting incredibly soppy and sentimental, if well-executed in a greeting-cardish sort of way. And knowing Hitler painted it is no surprise — most mass-murdering dictators have huge sentimental streaks, instead of being the cold, calculating motherf***ers everything thinks. No, think about it: you can approach a cold, calculating person via reason, but how can you reason with someone who gets teary-eyed over the idea of Mein Volk!. They base all their plans for everyone on their emotions. This is why I get a cold chill up my spine whenever I go into someone’s house and see a collection of Precious Moments figurines.

Now isn’t this true? Haven’t the worst people you’ve known in the world been the ones who have some sort of sickly obsession with some sort of gruesomely kitschy stuff like those hideous Precious Moments things, or unicorns, or Pokemon, or something like that? Maybe this explains my aversion to most anime — something that exaggeratedly twee can’t be healthy, and the people who are into it have to have something wrong with them somewhere. But it occurs to me that Hitler’s ideal “Aryan race” was something like a living Cute Thing — in other words, kitsch in human form. A race of people who look like Dresden figurines. Interesting that Kitsch is a German word too, showing that they aren’t always so self-unaware. Anyway, we must fight sentimentalism wherever it appears. Watch out for its cousins bathos and schmaltz.

(PS: who knows where I got the title of my post? If you put the correct source in the comments you get — well nothing, except me saying “You’re right! Congratulations!” Oh wait– you get validation, that’s it. Yeah.)

I know that sob sisters like Alpha Liberal (ed. — one of Althouse’s particularly obnoxious commenters) find this hard to believe, but the insurance system is not structured to handle chronic, long-term conditions — and it shouldn’t be. Insurance is supposed to take care of unexpected, one-time events, like a heart attack or injury or other life-threatening condition that needs emergency care. Any chronic condition one has, like diabetes, or like the possible long-term effects of a sudden illness is different and the costs of dealing with those need to be met in some way other than insurance. Health insurance is, or should be, no different from any other insurance: automobile, homeowners, etc. Those types of insurance take care of catastrophic events connected with those items, like damage from a car accident or hurricane damage to a house. They aren’t for taking care of getting oil changed in the car or any of the many little problems that come up if you own an old beater, for example. And no one thinks there is anything wrong with that. (No one sane, anyway.)

The things people are complaining about — the fact that insurance companies won’t pay for pre-existing conditions, or that they dump you after an expensive illness — are normal procedure for insurance companies because the insurance system isn’t a care-for-life system. This is the bad fact that no one seems to be talking about. What people want the insurance companies to do is the equivalent of asking them to extend your auto coverage to regular oil changes, new tires, and so on. This is why tying health reform to the insurance companies is a bad idea.

What people really want is a payment plan for health care so they don’t have to think about things like medical bills when they are sick. The reason for this is being sick makes us to a degree like helpless children. Feelings of helplessness engender fear which in turn causes anger, which is why you get all the “My child with diabetes! My mother with her chronic bad heart! All those people with cancer who can’t go to the doctor! I had to wear my sister’s dentures!” sad stories instead of reasoned debate on what we have to do. Maybe the answer is to set up some sort of Medicare-like system for everyone in the country — but this is going to cost money, money that thanks to the shenanigans of our government is rapidly disappearing. All the screaming about mean, poor-sick-people-hating Rethuglicans isn’t going to change that.

*****

To continue in that vein: the problem we have in this country with people not getting the health care they need isn’t because of the lack of money, it’s because of the aforementioned tendency of human beings to become childlike when they are helpless and sick, along with the fact that people’s priorities are way screwed up in this country. Also we associate going to the doctor with being sick, which means we don’t want to go for regular checkups when we feel “fine.” (I am as bad as everyone else in this regard.) But I do wonder at all the “poor” people who “can’t afford” health care — how many of them have cable? And there are already plenty of charitable and government organizations to help poor people with their medical bills, and in any case even if you are flat broke and you get sick or hurt you’ll be taken care of — if that wasn’t true we’d have piles of dead homeless people all over our major cities. Forcing people to buy health insurance isn’t going to change anything, except we’ll all be even poorer and even more of us will be able to make the excuse that we can’t go to the doctor because we “can’t afford it” — which refers to things like not being able to miss work or not having the bus fare or money to put gas in the car because we’re all being taxed to death to pay for “health care reform” fans to feel good about themselves.

Maybe I’m just cynical. But I don’t believe all these people talking about what a great musician Chilton was. Maybe he was, I don’t know — but “The Letter,” his biggest hit, wasn’t a Haydn opera, it was just a short pop song that stuck in peoples’ brains long enough to become one of those one-hit wonder things that will always be on the Greatest Pop Hits of the Sixties compilations. Which means: it was short and pleasant enough not to annoy too many people. Great art it was not.

That brings me to another subject. I’m starting to see something that is increasingly annoying me: the resurgence of the need to be seen as young and hip. I thought we had buried that nonsense back in the 20th century but I guess I was naive. It used to be when we had less control over how we listened to music — before the internet, when we were hostage to the record companies in a much bigger way than we are now — being into independent, alternative bands meant something. Not as much as we, the alternative-music-fan crowd, thought, but it meant something to seek out obscure bands that were struggling to break though the many barriers the MOR-focused music industry placed in their way. Now anyone can make music and put it online and create their own cds — they don’t have to wait for a record company to do it. There’s still a difference between the financial backing and big media coverage a record label can give you and doing it on your own, but the gap between the advantages of one over the other is getting smaller every day. The adulation of obscure musicians like Alex Chilton is a leftover from those days when saying you liked someone few people had ever heard of was your key to the In Crowd. It was also a handy way to tell if the person you were speaking to was cool like you or just one of the mundanes who were into the likes of Billy Squier or Olivia Newton-John. The preferred reaction to your mention that “I once talked for hours with Tom Verlaine while waiting to meet Peter Murphy backstage”* is a look of admiring respect/relief that you’re a fellow member of the Inner Ring of alternative music fans. If you got, instead, a blank stare, you knew not to bother talking to that person any more, because he or she just wasn’t cool enough to be worth your time. My God, they might even have an Air Supply cassette in their car stereo, and be the sort of person who sings Carpenter songs while doing the dishes.

Anyway, I’ve been noticing that this attitude is back. But I’ve got news for you: owning an Apple computer and an iPhone and claiming Twitter is “over” and so on and so forth doesn’t make you any more special than any of the other millions of people on the internet with their favorite gadgets and hobbies. And if you’re over a certain age, you need to stop with childish crap like the need to be one of the Cool Kids.

Tomorrow our topic will be “How to be old and uncool.” I’m serious. That’s been a lifelong goal of mine, and now that I’ve nearly achieved it, I’d like to share my technique with all of you.

*This is a true story from my life. Tom Verlaine was one of the opening acts when Peter Murphy toured Florida with the Church. Tom Verlaine was in a band called Television, that every cool indie band in the Eighties claimed was one of their influences, and is one of those bands record magazines called “seminal.” Peter Murphy was in a post-punk pre-goth British band called Bauhaus. The Church was an Australian band that made it fairly big in the late 80s when Australian rock music was at the height of its popularity in the US. There, aren’t you impressed with my hip cool hipness? You may kiss my ring. It’s a plastic ring from a Cracker Jack box for the ironic reference to childhood nostalgia. Tom Verlaine was a perfectly pleasant guy, by the way, but his music sucked.

OK, I’ll leave out their habit of puppy eating (Fettucini El Fido; Borzoi Bok Choy; etc.)

(From an email sent to Kathy Shaidle)

This is just a tangential issue but it’s something that has irritated me for a while. I’ve got some news for her correspondent: puppies are just meat, just like lamb and bunny and all the other cute animals. I probably wouldn’t eat dog unless I had to, but I don’t have the same sentimental attachment to Korean table doggy as I would to, say, a dog of my own. But I do eat lamb (I’ve only eaten rabbit once, in Europe a long time ago, and it tasted good but it was very tough). I know people who won’t eat lamb because “Awww, cute!” Well if we want to keep on making fun of vegetarians who won’t eat “anything with a face” then we shouldn’t make fun of Koreans for eating something with a face that we Western meat eaters don’t.

I planned on filling all the checkboxes in.

I did what I had to do. What I had to do was make my own box, checked it, and then wrote white is a color, not a race on the margin. Then what I had to do was lift the tails of all three chihuahua’s and dab that thing on their little bho’s. It is in the mail.

I’m just going to staple my Federation passport to it.

To be honest I was going to put in ”Dunedain”.

Somehow I can’t see anyone in any other country reacting this way. Unless it’s in one of those formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe where some of the citizenry have learned what cooperating with the government gets you.

Frenemy's List?

Needless to say, I wasn’t exactly flattered. I don’t recall how I got on the Speccy’s email list — I may have read an article on their website from time to time, but I don’t remember signing up for anything. Then again, I think they’re one of those sites that have the annoying “please help us keep the lights on and feed our starving chillun!” advert boxes that pop up despite the ad-blocking software I have installed, and I may have clicked the wrong place on it in an effort to get it to go away. No matter — I doubt they’re conservative enough for me (I don’t think they’d agree with me on the necessity for a mandatory week in the stocks for people who keep sending you invites to join Facebook and then “friend” them, for instance) — so I won’t be subscribing, but if this is the future of conservatism in America we’d better get ready for a long, dark night of Democrat rule.

Make that a three-hundred-year coma.

Maybe some more coffee would help. Coffee is the everything cure for computer stuff, right? Including pouring a few ounces of the boiling stuff on the motherboard if it doesn’t work after this.