Maybe there are things I would have liked about. or at least had in common with, murdered insurance executive Brian Thompson, although it would appear that everything from geography to the United States’ invisible systems of class and caste would keep us apart in almost every way. We are the same generation, though, if that counts for anything. Maybe it’s not hard to imagine that he quoted George Carlin (he had a lot more “stuff” than me, though, I bet,) or that his grandma had a picture of the old guy with the praying hands, too. Maybe he also used “The Ref” to close out his holiday season, too, although I kind of want to think that somebody who knows what a nightmare it would be to “kidnap my fucking parents’ would be more compassionate. Maybe there is a relic like that that reminds him of a youth that was supposed to end up differently, even though it seems like he had everything a suburban kid was taught to want, and exponentially more, besides. There is money and clout in presiding over Americans’ health nightmares.
Certainly, far more than there is in wanting those nightmares to end. This is where some right-winger would channel somebody’s nightmare junior-high mother and say the real problem is that I’m jealous. I’m torn up because I don’t get to use my education to deny hundreds of claims every day (I may be upset that what I do is considered less valuable than that, but that is another posting…many other postings, actually, that many of you here have already read, I imagine.) Point being, though, Brian Thompson was just a guy. Like many activists, I’ve read off and on about the “banality of evil” without fully reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann book, but when I saw Thompson’s chubby-cheeked photo, I thought maybe I had a homegrown example. He still looked enough like somebody I might have met that I could picture him having a minor victory lap from choosing the salad over some option with gravy on the last hotel dinner of his life, because statins don’t work if you don’t change your diet, Brian. Guess it wasn’t worth it, though.
(I should say that maybe they would…there is a split right now, among ordinary people on the right, about how much suffering really is enough. Third-string MAGA have been on hold with health insurance claims in their own rights. Even in trying to see something in Thompson, I’m still tempted to ask his widow to fax some thoughts-and-prayers request form in triplicate and reject it a few times, just so she can see how it feels. But whether Mrs. Thompson was sweet or bitchy, torturing her wouldn’t change a goddamn thing.)
They had some choices, but it’s the system they are cogs in that is the real problem.
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