Good Shooting. Bad Shots.
Celebrating the death of a CEO seems a chad churlish but to paraphrase Biggie, no one's really happy until there's blood all in your mouth.
“A penny for your thoughts!”
This would have been followed by the sharp report of gunfire and the man with the plan and the snappy sloganeer would go down in history as the pithiest almost-kinda presidential assassin ever. That being a one Mr. Arthur Bremer and his intended target was presidential aspirant and ardent segregationist George Wallace.
It was at a campaign stop in Laurel, Maryland, right after a previous campaign stop at Wheaton Plaza, a mall in Wheaton, Maryland where I spent idle summers shoplifting books. Bremer, of course, while failing to deliver a killer sign off did, indeed, manage to hit Wallace four times, paralyzing him and thereby ending whatever presidential plans he had had in 1972 and beyond.
The shooting sent Wallace, after a long period of recuperation, down a wholly different path where he repudiated his early life racism, and from a wheelchair both ran for the office of governor (and won) again, and publicly forgave Bremer. Bremer served his debt to society and was released in 2007, with his supervised release and probation ending next year, 2025.
And everyone lived happily ever after. The end.
I don’t know that many/any remember Bremer but I remember him and the trips to Laurel to try to see Wallace’s blood a few days later while I, with the white southerners who were my friends, celebrated Wallace’s near death. The religious ramifications of whatever had happened that day were lost on us pre-teens but it started a tradition that I’ve carried on until today: I asked for my enemies to be brought down low and so it was.
Obama…recorded Renegades: Born in the USA, while the rest of us on Planet Earth dealt with very real Planet Earth problems.
Years later while walking through the halls of hell at OZY Media, I brought the same kind of energy to bear. I hated the job and the people I worked for, so aggressively, that it was not unusual at all to find me staggering the 30 odd-feet to the men’s restroom in a stupor of biblically high dudgeon.
“Please G-d. Smite them. Smite them hip and thigh and bring this place down into a trembling pile of smoking rubble.”
Like the Jesus Prayer in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, I said this almost constantly. To the toilet. Back from the toilet. Some see Silicon Valley as a valley of outsized technological dreams. I just saw it as some sort of Jim Morrison’s petitioning of the lord with prayer.
Of course, one does this never expecting it will really work but the OZY boss of horror, now-convicted fraudster Carlos Watson gets sentenced (with a sentence that could be 37 years) for a wild variety of crimes on December 13, 2024, and I am very conscious of the fact that to whom great power is given, much is expected.
Now after former President Barack Obama completed his term, the seemingly most-pressing issue on his agenda was solved by his first and still most major post-presidential act: starting a podcast with Bruce Springsteen. President Jimmy Carter started Habitat for Humanity and built houses for the unhoused. Obama, thinking the best way to bridge America’s racial divide, was hanging out with Springsteen on the mean streets of wherever in New Jersey Springsteen parks his mansion, recorded Renegades: Born in the USA, while the rest of us on Planet Earth dealt with very real Planet Earth problems.
COVID, for one, which, while it probably healthily scuttled President Donald Trump’s attempt at a consecutive second term, yanked the cover off of the fact that our health care system, if you hadn’t noticed, was shit. Which is why, according to my doctor friend Dr. Steve Ballinger, we should all endeavor to stay out of the hospital as long as we can stay out of the hospital.
Advice I wish I had taken to heart when the public health practitioners at Sutter Health almost murdered me. But I didn’t and instead slowburned that the health care I pay $3400 a month for, fucks me every chance it does get, on the exceedingly rare occasions when I go there. For anything.
It’s not even a distant possibility that the big bucks Thompson was paid before he was gunned down was nothing if not true blood money.
So, yeah, it wasn’t long before my thoughts turned to imagining that G-d, if He would, could see His way clear to smite mine enemies and drive them before me so I could hear the lamentations of their women.
And just like that it happened and so when Brian Thompson, CEO at UnitedHealtcare, got publicly assassinated last week, I got a truer sense of the awesome, crushing power of answered prayers. Of course, this should not have been a surprise for me, and really it wasn’t. What was a surprise for me was the number of Americans whose obvious delight in this man’s misfortune went wildly and virally public.
Trump had ushered in an age of callous disregard, what-about-me’ism, and so-whatanetics, from both sides of the aisle that’s stricken America’s ability to get much done, and so we all felt quite comfortable having our singular thought and prayer be, “yeah, fuck that dude.”
The first canary in the coal mine? A friend, a sensitive soul, who called me one day in a panic.
“Eugene! I’m going to HELL!”
This for all of my known associates, should have been a given. But anything in particular?
“Yeah. I saw a meter maid get hit by a car today,” she said. “Right as I was walking by her and I just screamed ‘HAH! Serves you RIGHT!’”
Hell seems to be a place that eternally delivers punishments for crimes that are equally eternal so you may be exempt here. And so it was that she was, indeed, fine.
Totally unlike Brian Thompson who was using AI to deny paying for medical claims until people either died or had to sue for time-measured medical care. It’s not even a distant possibility that the big bucks Thompson was paid before he was gunned down was nothing if not true blood money.
“[A] complete shitheel, he was probably personally responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths and an incalculable amount of human suffering…” — Dr. Steven G. Ballinger
“UnitedHealthcare is the worst of the worst,” said the now-retired orthopedic surgeon who once described the insurance side of the medical profession as being like working for the “worst pimp” in town. “One of their memos was leaked that promoted delaying claims because actuarial tables showed that a six to eight week delay in treatment would result in significant savings as a certain percentage of patients would die during the interim.”
This take, with greater frequency, is appearing in articles about what precisely it was that Thompson wrought at UHC.
The solution?
“Complete liquidation and creation of a national health program modeled after Medicare is the minimum solution,” Ballinger said. “Turn medicine into a corps like the military would be the best long term solution.”
That’s the policy-side but here there are other dimensions. Like: is our attitude about the erstwhile Thompson going to send us to hell?
“This dude cannot have been anything other than a complete shitheel,” said Ballinger. “He was probably personally responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths and an incalculable amount of human suffering.”
Which is why almost immediately all of the “health” insurers scrubbed executive photos from their outgoing marketing. Loose talk about increasing security budgets — ya think? — abounded. And we all, Democrat, Republican, realized that we’re sick enough of just talk that we’re comfortably willing to murder those who are in a position to murder us before they actually murder us.
A penny for your thoughts, indeed. Well we’ll give you a whole pocketful. Straight from the heart. And even if they just replace one shitheel with another, it’s got to mean something.
Right? <wink wink, nod nod> Right G-d?
OK…So you have ordered the memoir A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight Into Murderer's Row, from Amazon…Or the Bookshop.Org dealie: Here?
Might you consider giving it a review in either of those places?
I’ve been told it matters, somehow. So please: review away! Unless you think it sucks. Then, maybe, just keep that part to yourself. At last count there were 73 reviews…so yeah…GET AT IT!!! Every one helps, if everyone helps. Or so they tell me.
If you’d like to book a book show? Please DM.
And FINALLY the new BUNUEL is creeping out….be about it. ON SALE DATE is OCTOBER 25, 2024. For digital. Vinyl, CD and cassette? IT IS OUT RIGHT NOW!!!
And now THIS…the monster live. For starters. This February. Be there. And if you were planning on going to ROADBURN in 2025 know that we’ll be there TOO.
