Health Care: Time to Facebook Reality

Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most visited website in the world.

Accordingly, I am now using Facebook to gather all my information.

For instance, check out this nugget of wisdom about health care reform, which originated from God-knows-where:

"This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

"I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

"After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by NASA.

"I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to drop my kids off at the public school, and to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

"After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to various law enforcement agencies.

"And then I log on to the Internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how Socialism in medicine is bad because the government can't do anything right."

I could not have said it better myself.

Of course, conservatives reading the above are likely to miss the point, which is that we rely on the government all the time to protect our rights.

"Rights," in our society, are defined as that which we've decided all people should have, regardless of personal income. Things like roads, safety, and education fall into this category.

A hundred years ago, no one would have dreamed that access to doctors and hospitals would be a "right." You expected half your kids to die of typhoid, smallpox, or massive goiters induced by witchcraft, and you more or less accepted that, even if you were lucky enough to find a doctor, there was not a damn thing he could do about it, anyway.

Nowadays, if a man shows up at the emergency room with third degree burns, they treat him, even if he's broke. We've already decided that health care is a right.

Yet there are plenty of people who are not "broke," and still can't afford to hire their own oncologists. How do we pay for them?

The same way we should pay for all our other rights: by taxing the hell out of Google and Facebook.

Tales of Fail

To honor my new favorite website, failblog.org (it won’t disappoint you, I promise, unless you’re one of those demented freaks who gains no pleasure from others’ mistakes and misfortunes), I have decided to compile my own list of incredibly stupid behavior.

Thanks in part to Failblog (whose content is not always 100% wholesome, just be forewarned), current slang calls such acts “FAIL.” The word “failure” is no longer necessary, Mr. Webster.

I’ll start with a letter that I received recently from a company called Oriental Trading, a company I'd never heard of.

I tore open the envelope because the words “pay to the order of” showed through the window. Sweet!

Turns out it was only a voucher fort ten dollars off my next purchase of $30 or more. I’m so disillusioned!

The attached letter was addressed to my wife. Good thing, because her name is easy to spell. I, on the other hand, have often been called “Chuck” or “Carles” in these correspondences.

I went by “Charles” until 4th grade, when Mr. Betterly caught me standing in the back of the classroom, urgently but discretely scratching myself in a personal area. (FAIL!) He announced, with all the discretion of a recently-divorced drill sergeant, “If you’ve got something to take care of, Charles, you probably ought to use the bathroom.”

Since then, I have gone by numerous aliases.

Anyway, I don’t use my wife’s name in my column, because then she might have to start using aliases, so I’ll just pretend the Oriental Traders letter is addressed to me. It says:

“Dear Charles,

You know the old saying, ‘New friends are like silver but old friends are like gold?’ Well, that’s how we feel about you. You’re an old friend we haven’t seen in a while. And frankly, we miss you!”

Somebody get me a Kleenex.

To drive home the idea that I’m special to them, a fake stickie note appears at the bottom of the page, with phony handwriting offering the chance to “enjoy exclusive savings when you sign up to receive our weekly emails.”

This, somehow, fails to entice me.

People, if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: you can set your blender on crush, puree, pulverize, blend, liquefy, dismember, obliterate, masticate, humiliate, or incinerate, but, at the end of the day, it’s just some metal blades whirring around really fast so you can enjoy a relaxing fruity beverage, and that’s all.

My next example of Fail comes from Scrabble, where my friends and I compete at the highest level, measured in terms of our effort in convincing everyone how awful our rack is at any given moment:

“I’ve had the worst luck. I have all vowels.”

“Yeah, well I’ve had six Ps and a Q for three turns in a row.”

“That’s nothing. The last four turns my rack has held nothing but nine V’s, two Chinese symbols that look like a hot dog stand, and a small sample of llama dung that I’m pretty sure contains some e coli.”

Lately, I’ve taken to playing Scrabble on Facebook, which allows you to cheat unabashedly.

It’s a shame that a whole generation of Scrabble players might grow up without learning the gamesmanship involved in playing a word like “blurve” on a Triple Word Score just to see if an opponent has the gonads to challenge.

“Sure, it’s a word. I keep seeing it in my junk mail.” Since no one but me reads junk mail, it works every time.

Join My Mafia

Sitting at the red light, I spot a car directly across the intersection with its left blinker on.

Here we go again.

As you know, when the light turns green, that left-turning driver, whether driving a Sentra or a school bus, will try to squeak through the intersection before oncoming traffic.

This is why I’ve equipped my car with a steel jousting lance about five feet long. Many a miscreant motorist have I speared while seizing the right-of-way. I just continue merrily along, bringing my alarmed and distraught traffic scofflaw with me.

See, all those late nights I stayed up to watch “Battle Bots” weren’t wasted, after all!

Sigh… if only this story were true.

Fortunately, Facebook offers a place where I can act out my violent fantasies.

For those of you who are hopelessly over 40 years old, I should explain that Facebook is a website for social networking, where you can create a profile for yourself and keep in touch with distant friends, relatives, high school classmates, and people you’d just as soon never have contact with, but you can’t figure out how to tell them that.

Facebook’s trademark is the “status update,” where you can type in what you’re up to at any given moment, as in:

“Chuck is about to go make dinner.”

“Chuck is tired of shoveling out after yet another snowstorm.”

“Chuck has something in his ear… no, wait, it’s gone.”

As if this isn’t bad enough, there is now a service called “Twitter” that allows you broadcast text-messaged status updates to anyone who subscribes to you on his or her mobile phone.

The upshot of all this is that we’re seeing a generation for whom being in constant contact with one another is the norm.

“Leave a message and I’ll call you back” is so 20th century.

Teenagers don’t experience solitude, because even the most awkward and geeky of them and can find enough “friends” through the inhibition-thawing conduit of technology to muster a few superficial conversations.

In person, seeing someone’s glasses, acne, shabby clothes, facial tick, or sawed-off shotgun with a rabbit’s foot attached to it might be cause to reject someone. These qualities often don’t show up online.

Not only that, but kids are growing up constantly entertained. When do they take any time to just sit and think, without being entertained by some device? No wonder they’re completely out of touch with themselves and psychotically insane.

Fortunately, Facebook has a solution. It’s a game called “Mafia Wars,” in which you adopt the persona of a gangster and try to grow your empire through real estate dealings and violent acts.

That’s why my status currently reads: “Chuck just looted a shiv.”

The more people who join your mafia, the more powerful it becomes. I’ve been pestering all my friends to join, even though most of them have no interest in the fast and dangerous lifestyle I lead, in which success means making $30,000 an hour and blowing it all on Tommy Guns.

So there is no reason to let life’s little frustrations, like someone else’s poor driving decisions, or endless futility at developing meaningful relationships, debase you to the point of extreme behavior.

Get it out of your system. Join my mafia.