The Daily Babble

Bitter Mysteries

The buzz, the chattercable shows are thrashing the issue of poor medical care for soldiers, first in the outpatient services at Walter Reed Hospital and now with congressional hearings into Veterans Administration "facilities." And of course it's all being treated as if it is startling news.
Despite the fact that leftie blogs like E Pluribus Media have been on this issue for months and months, the fact that lots of people have known about this and have been trying to get attention paid to these neglects and abuses for years, including the folks at the GI Hotline as well as veterans groups, this is being treated as a sudden revelation and immediate scandal.

VA hospital care has been notorious since at least Vietnam. Didn't anybody see Oliver Stone's movie, Born on the Fourth of July, or read Ron Kovic's book? It was there in living color and living prose. The excessive bureaucracy as well as neglect and substandard care is yet another reason that the people who nobly call for a new military draft are insane.

But why now? The Washington Post article seems to have sparked this attention, but that couldn't have been predicted. A lot of stories in the Post and the Times and other newspapers are ignored. Nobody paid any attention to the scandal of poverty increasing in a time of economic expansion--McClatchy newspapers found that the number of Americans in severe poverty--with half or less of the income that defines the poverty line--increased by 26% just between 2000 and 2005. And this isn't an exception. According to their report:"Worker productivity has increased dramatically since the brief recession of 2001, but wages and job growth have lagged behind. At the same time, the share of national income going to corporate profits has dwarfed the amount going to wages and salaries."

But even on this topic, all the stories about the scandalous neglect and treatment of soldiers--from the lack of body armor and armored vehicles, the lack of training and the abuse of the National Guard--as well as about treatment once they're back, have been ineffective in sparking this kind of outrage.

Probably the Democratic takeover of Congress has a lot to do with it--that, and the immediate hearings the Democrats are holding, gives permission to our media to do the story without feeling they'll get killed for being unpatriotic. And the Post story was easy to photograph. Still, the Zeitgeist remains a bitter mystery. The other story the babblechannels are hitting hard today is video of a couple of teenagers giving tokes to their siblings, two and four years old. I guess Anna Nicole finally is dead.

Then there's the noisemachine manufactured controversy over the speeches Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton made in Selma, both of them using different--and "southern"--cadences and vocabulary. Pandering to the audience! Hypocrisy! Of course if they didn't fall into those rhythms they would have been "out of touch!"

Above all we want to forget about the human element. Haven't you ever been to a place where people speak differently, and found yourself adopting their speech rhythms and accents? I do it during a telephone call. Please. Can we get serious? I know it's a rhetorical question.

It's also like the headlines about the "medical miracle" of Barry Bonds requiring larger shirt and shoe sizes. Maybe it is evidence of steroidization. Or maybe it's looser shirts (which have become the style in all sports) or swelling feet. My athletic shoe size went from 8.5 to 10.5 or 11 partly because shoe and foot people are now recommending bigger sizes (with more inserts, and more room), and partly because as you get older, your feet swell up more with exertion. But it's spring, and Barry is probably going to be baseball's big story this year, so let's find something to get outraged about preemptively. Because we don't have enough real problems.