Blame the Victim and Privatize the Grief

If You're Wrong, Go with the Big Lie

June 3, 2018. I got my t-shirt at 22nd and Spruce.

There's a well-worn playbook that's been used by the tobacco and asbestos industries and now seems to be an integral part of virtually any reactionary movement that deals with ideas. The basic principle is quite simple: Deny the premise. If scientists are saying that tobacco causes cancer, find some scientists who are willing to disagree. If argument doesn't work, go buy some scientific research that backs your side. If the war goes on long enough, found think tanks and give your best propagandists fancy, academic-sounding titles. (For background on this topic, see Wendell Potter, Deadly Spin, 2010, chapters 2 and 3. See also Jill Lepore, "The Lie Factory," The New Yorker, September 24, 2012.)

There's another template that came to my mind recently, after the shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Back in the 1920s, a new-fangled contraption called the automobile was busy slaughtering children in the streets of our nation's cities. And many people were unhappy about that, and they protested - there were marches, all kinds of things. (See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic, 2011.)

The auto industry and its allies were taken aback by this uproar, and so they organized on a number of fronts. In particular they got state legislatures to change the traffic laws to make it illegal for pedestrians to cross in the middle of the street. This was a novel idea, and so "motordom," as it was called, didn't just sell it to the lawmakers. It also mounted a huge public relations campaign, even inventing the term "jaywalking."

With the law on their side, the auto lobby could then blame the victim. Little Johnny shouldn't have chased that ball out into the street. Or, what was he doing wearing dark clothes at dusk? On it goes, and it still goes on today. When a Duck boat driver killed a pedestrian down by the Reading Terminal Market, here in Philly, there was much tsk-tsking about how the pedestrian lacked sufficient situational awareness.

I wish I could say that the media have not been complicit in all this, but they are. Let's face it: Car ads are a huge category for print, television, and online media. Last year, for instance, a local television station did its best to blame a 14-year-old girl who was hit by a car while walking in a crosswalk in suburban Abington. (For a story on this, click here.)

In the end that driver was charged. In the Philadelphia Duck case, it was the insurance companies that finally shut the company down.

Okay, so blaming the victim is the setup punch. And here's the money punch. Motordom can say, with a straight face, that death on our roads is a private matter, not a concern of public policy. Mothers just need to do a better job keeping their children inside, playing violent video games and getting fat. The government doesn't need to do anything. Shouldn't do anything.

And by the way, speed limits are an un-American infringement of citizens' God-given rights. So our political class needs to balance freedom and death.

And the same thing happens with guns. Here the NRA has the advantage of the Second Amendment, which the Supreme Court has obligingly interpreted in a profoundly screwy way. So they've got the law.

But I don't think they're doing very well on blaming the victim, and we need to make sure that that continues to be the case. Because if they ever do get traction on that, then I think they'll have a good shot at privatizing the grief and removing the issue from the public agenda.

Fortunately, I think the NRA is playing a weak hand. Wayne LaPierre's famous statement that "The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun" is problematic on a number of levels. First, we now have many instances where a good guy with a gun was present and failed to prevent mayhem. Second, there are alternatives, like seeing that the bad guy doesn't have a gun. In a school setting, LaPierre's dictum also conjures the image of giving guns to kindergartners. Even the idea of arming teachers takes many people to a place they don't want to go.

At its core, the NRA's vision is profoundly dystopian, and their argument for irresponsible freedom only appeals to certain people.

That leaves them with raw power. But power in America almost always comes cloaked with virtue. Naked, it's a tough sell.

I think that leaves a very large gap for the kids from Marjory Stoneman Douglas to rush through, and I think the rest of us should follow. Call us the Utopians, or maybe the Shining City on a Hill Mob.

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Guns Without Responsibility

We Were There All Along

The chattering classes seem to have reached yet another consensus.  This one has to do with what happened to the Obama army after the 2008 election.  Briefly the narrative arc is that we felt our job was done, and we pulled up stakes and went home.

That's not quite the way it was.  We were sent home.  We were undeniably weary, but we were ready to continue.

My wife and I labored for Obama in 2008, as well as this year.  After the inauguration in 2009, we even held a healthcare house party,  filling out forms and mailing them in, as requested.  We received a polite thank-you, and then basically nothing.

The President at that time was in his post-partisan phase, cuddling up to the conservatives.  His focus seemed to shift inside the Beltway.  We saw the need for a permanent campaign that dealt with issues as well as elections, but the idea didn't seem to have any resonance inside the White House.

I asked my friend Wendell Potter,  the healthcare reformer and author of Deadly Spin, what I should do, and he suggested I contact Health Care for America Now.  I did, and in February 2010 wound up walking, as part of a group of eight, from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., in support of healthcare reform -- 135 miles, as I recall.

In Washington, we had a rally attended by a number of senators, including Majority Leader Harry Reid.  The White House was conspicuously absent.

I'm very glad the President now seems to have accepted the concept of a permanent campaign.  We were there all along, and so were the Republicans.

I think this was the greatest mistake of President Obama's first term.

Coming to Terms With It - Or Maybe Not

In February my employer of sixteen years – the CIGNA insurance company – eliminated my position. This event was hardly a surprise. Sixteen years is a good run at a place like CIGNA. As an executive told me shortly after I was hired, "Well, Bill, you've got the job. Now let's see if you can hold on to it." And so, as I joke to friends, I spent the next sixteen years playing Beat the Reaper, and doing a little work on the side.

So it wasn't a surprise when my number came up and I found myself tossed into that great metaphorical sausage machine called severance. Still it was a shock. I found that I wasn't angry, and I wasn't sad. Occasionally I had twinges of anxiety about the future. But mainly I was just at loose ends. Work had been the main thing in my life (large corporations demand this), and now there was a void on center.

Because I'd been at CIGNA for quite a while, I got a nice severance package – pay continuation for several months, subsidized medical coverage, even a seat at an outplacement agency, where I met people who were angry, sad, and sometimes just in a state of disbelief.

Gradually I began to come to terms with the tectonic shift in my existence, and I even began to discern the outlines of a new life. A rather pleasant life, actually. My retirement savings will be substantially short of plan, and my wife and I are definitely not buying a house in the south of France, but she still has her job. Is it possible that the Great Recession doesn't look like the Great Depression because of the two-income family? After all, lose one job, you still have one left. Just don't lose the second one.

I do want to get a job. I like to work, and we could use the money. The outplacement agency gave us classes, and I enthusiastically threw myself into the job hunt, but gradually, as the weather got warmer this spring, it became clear that I wasn't going to get a job anytime soon. This recognition came slowly, and I had time to come to terms with it. I keep looking, and I think one day I may fall into something.

In the meantime, I've discovered that there's plenty of work in the world, as long as you don't ask to be paid. I started my volunteering back in the winter, working on Michael Turner's campaign for district attorney in Philadelphia. Michael lost in the May primary, but my volunteer career continued to flourish. I became a volunteer runner at Back on My Feet, a running and rehabilitation program for people who live in homeless shelters. Billy, one of our members, recently completed the Philadelphia Marathon. I tutor at Mighty Writers, an after-school program for young students in South Philly.

And, after an interesting internal evolution, I started working for healthcare reform. I was helped in this process by Wendell Potter, an old friend and former chief corporate spokesperson at CIGNA, who started speaking out on healthcare reform in the middle of the year.

It's not easy to say that you spent sixteen years working at something, and that the result was failure. But that was the conclusion I came to. It may be hard for outsiders to understand how strongly we were focused on trying to control costs in health care. Let's face it: We failed. Time for another approach. I came to terms with it.

Still, to paraphrase The Godfather, it was nothing personal; just business. As I said before, I wasn't angry. Then the letter came. Because of my age, when CIGNA eliminated my position it also effectively made me a retiree. So, after a few months on COBRA (COBRA is health insurance for fired people, and the COBRA subsidy was one of the smartest ideas in the stimulus package), I signed up for CIGNA's retiree medical program. It is the only connection that I still have with my former employer.

CIGNA subsidizes a retiree's coverage through a complicated formula. The price was higher than I expected, but much better than the prices on the open market. I came to terms with it.

Then I got the letter. As of January 1, CIGNA is increasing my premium by 48 percent. There's a very complicated explanation for why this is happening. I actually ran the calculation, and it all makes sense, as long as you're living inside that algorithm. I don't live there any more.

I think I'm less annoyed than astonished. And I don't think I'll be coming to terms with this any time soon.