'Traditional' French/Italian leftist violence takes permanent root in America… (blog, 11 Dec 24)

It’s a cold Sacramento day in mid-December…26 degrees F. day at 6AM this morning in our back yard…and the latest news reports inform us that the authorities have just indicted a 26-year-old male suspect for the murder of United Health Care CEO, Brian Thompson, who was apprehended after an intensive manhunt of several days duration.

The 26-year-old’s name is Luigi Mangione and he hails from a wealthy and influential Maryland family. He is also reportedly quite bright, well educated (having received a Master’s grad degree at an Ivy League college), and a prolific reader, so we are told. Friends of his in Hawai’i reveal that he had some sort of back injury, treatment for which he sought through an unspecified health HMO (presumably United Healthcare).

Mangione is accused of walking up to the 54-year-old United Healthcare CEO on a New York street and shooting him in the back with 5 of 6 rounds fired from his 3-D printed (untraceable) pistol, killing him more or less instantly. Reports indicate that he then fled the scene and was later identified by an employee at a McDonalds where he was eating, some 180 miles or so from NYC, at which time he was picked up and taken into custody.

The above is by now all pretty common knowledge. What is still unclear is why he carried out this act of…retribution?…and for what?

When he was picked up by authorities he had a pre-printed, several-page statement citing his anger and perceived ‘betrayal’ by the American health care system. While not a lengthy statement, or a message as sophisticated as that found in Ted Kaczynski’s ‘Uni-bomber’ manifesto, he clearly has a serious issue with the quality of American health care, claiming (correctly) that it is the most expensive health care system in the world, yet ranked 42nd best in customer satisfaction and efficacy of patient care.

Latest revelations suggest that in addition to his own HMO claims that were rejected (related to a back injury he sustained) by United Healthcare, his mother (to whom he apparently was quite attached) also had some serious neuropathy problems that he alleges United Heathcare either mismanaged or tried to dismiss as being of purely psychosomatic origins.

At 26, despite being ostensibly well educated (Penn State, BS, MS in computer engineering), Mangione presents as do a preponderance of his age-peers who are highly idealistic leftists, disgusted with an American political/social/economic system that is principally controlled and manipulated by powerful corporate (for-profit) organisations.

And also characteristic of his age-peers, he feels/felt that the required changes to this status quo of oppressive corporate capitalism in America need to be made immediately. Regrettably, another characteristic of this age group, with their uniform disinterest in all that has preceded them (historically speaking), is impatience and a desire for instant rectification (i.e. change). To a multigenerational aggregate of this cohort, having a high standard of living ‘gifted’ them by America’s relative collective wealth and superior standards of living, such changes often appear to be not only possible but reasonable.

These naifs remain largely unmindful of the prime dictum underlying all human history (i.e. George Santayana’s famed admonishment to those who fail to learn from the past, etc., etc.) since true social change is almost invariably a slow, tedious and protracted process and seldom is anything ever tossed on the dustbin of world events overnight.

There have been several noteworthy major exceptions to this, of course (e.g. the French Revolution and the Russian overthrow of the Tsar) but otherwise change most often occurs slowly and painstakingly.

Ironically, awareness of this is long in coming and hard-earned, requiring both years of direct experience with life and a further familiarity with the frustrations of human society. But when one is still in the early stages of life’s race to the finish line (the end of life), such broader awarenesses and deeper understandings are frequently illusive and sometimes completely ungraspable.

As has already been pointed out by several astute observers, assassinations of individuals rarely if ever achieve the desired change in the immediate short term. These events may serve as catalysts for change, certainly, but seldom result in immediate reversals of an existing status quo (if only due to the same complexities alluded to earlier, pertinent to the extreme difficulties of coordinating/polarising mass opinion, sentiment and/or commitment). But youth, ever impatient, idealistic and highly energized by their hormones and their intrinsic youthful naiveté, tend to remain oblivious of all this. Thus young, bright and resentful Luigi Mangione has impulsively given vent to his rash radical impulses and ‘taken out’ United Healthcare’s CEO, Mr. Thompson.

I submit to you that viewed from several different perspectives, Mangione is both right and wrong in his personal worldview. YES, American health care has become a nightmare of miss-managed inadequacy to minister to and help its millions of subscribers, but NO, killing the immediate single human target of your personal or ideological frustrations typically changes little in the subsequent short term.

As a retired medical person who was both trained in health services administration academically and who professionally worked in the cardiovascular and pulmonary medicine field for over 40 years, I, perhaps more than many ‘average’ Americans, fully recognize the inadequacy of the managed healthcare system America now operates under. Famed Austrian priest, theologian, economist and social critic Ivan Illich (not to be confused with Leo Tolstoy’s fictional subject in his 1886 novella) addressed a number of so-called ‘Western Medicine’ tenets in his many treatises, and recognized that far too often, western medical practices themselves cause or exacerbate unhealthy patient outcomes (e.g. ‘Iatrogenic medicine’ if some needed context is required, here).

While there is no ultimate medical modality or school of healing that perfectly resolves myriad human ailments and suffering, in modern America, due both to capitalistic enterprise’s drive for financial profit and to the legions of co-dependent legal professionals (read: attorneys, barristers, lawyers, et al) that work closely with medical corporations and related (for-profit) corporate enterprise to facilitate their aspirations (e.g. the Insurance Industry and Media Marketing organisations), America is today dominated, largely subjugated by, and nearly wholly controlled by these powerful institutions.

With this unholy cartel of corporate commercial businesses has come about what is euphemistically termed ‘managed healthcare’ ('mangled healthcare' would appear to be more apt!) in which resources and treatment options are rationed strictly by for-profit corporate organizational managers with the unstated aim of prioritising financial profitability above direct patient benefit. American managed healthcare (best known to the average American as the ‘HMO’, or ‘health management organisation’) carefully parcels out treatments and care, based upon profitability factors. United Healthcare, Humana, Dignity, Kaiser and several others are all major corporate players in this arena, all of whom offer ‘packages of combined health care benefits’ in cooperation with Federal MEDICARE (and in California, MEDICAL) mandates.

In the case of so-called ‘seniors’, this consists of what we know as ‘Senior Advantage Plans’…a cutely marketed buzz phrase that conveys to older Americans the impression that they are going to benefit maximally under such agreements. The ugly reality that lies under the surface of these cosmetically contrived and alluring-sounding HR descriptives is altogether something quite different than the ‘pie-in-the-sky’ promises of optimal HMO care for the ‘oldsters’ among us.

When the managed health care system concept took over the traditional American medical establishment system of private (MD) practitioners, roughly back in the 60s, forcing private practices out of business in the doing, America’s medical care environment began its progressive decline from a patient-care based system to a corporate-based system. Newly graduated physicians soon found that, faced with paying for the exorbitant educational costs incurred during their medical training, their only real option was to join up with an HMO. This was a radical course change for American professional medicine, wherein physicians were formerly largely private practitioners who enjoyed a status at the top of the health care provision pyramid.

Sensing further profitability in the new status-quo, the rise of the medical insurance industry simultaneously contrived to underwrite escalating patient healthcare costs, thereby making it somewhat less burdensome for client/patients to bear the charges incurred for medical care by reducing the so-called ‘out-of-pocket’ share consumers had to pay. This allowed the exponentially increasing cost of professional Western medical care to literally skyrocket even further. Clearly, a win/win circumstance for both HMOs and the insurance industry. Not so much, as events have proven, for patients.

Further, nurses encouraged by the rise of the modern women’s movement of the 60s and 70s who had grown frustrated with their role as subordinate ‘chart-bearers’ and handmaidens of the MDs, began organising to radically elevate their status (and professional worth) as ‘co-providers’  of healthcare and achieve recognition as apex co-equals with MDs. Given the huge numbers of professional nurses in nurse unions and nursing associations, their voices were not to be dismissed out of hand. All of these changes, plus the rising incorporation of sophisticated diagnostic technological systems and diagnostic instrumentation, caused healthcare costs to accelerate even further and faster.

Today, young individuals contemplating a career in professional medicine (e.g MDs) have become so disenchanted with the existing managed healthcare system that college graduates are increasingly choosing to NOT pursue a medical degree. And of those who do, the number of women in medical training programs is today disproportionate to the number of male physicians, almost in a ratio of 2/1. Add to this the present profound shortage of doctors (MDs) in America and the deceitful (and in my opinion, dishonest) ‘over-subscribing’ practices of many HMOs and you have the makings of a chaotically dysfunctional American health care system, that simply continues getting worse! All of these changes mean more bad news for patients.

The above dynamics, often viewed separately and discretely, together comprise a massive sea-change in America’s health system, almost none of it good and certainly none of it in the best interests of patient-clients. Unfortunately, far too many have now been impacted by these shortfalls in effective care provision (both intentional and coincidental) and a substantial number of individuals are standing up and loudly voicing their dissatisfaction with the status quo. Mangione appears to be but one of those on the far left who feel that the time for rational colloquies is over and done with, and that more direct action is called for.

To return briefly to Luigi Mangione and his (apparent) homicidal rage against this monstrously frustrating healthcare system that Americans must contend with, it has been pointed out by several observers that as never before, medical malpractice, ‘iatrogenic’ medicine effects, and deficits in basic ‘adequacy’ levels of healthcare received are today rampant. Doctors working within these healthcare entities have also become hugely dissatisfied with the constraints and restrictions imposed upon them by their corporate masters, furthering apathy, that lessen the ‘human care’ touch (unless modulated somewhat by fear of potential tort liabilities); but again even their options and choices are remarkably limited and constrained by corporate mandates.

Manigone’s mother (so it has been revealed by investigators) was quite often told by her healthcare provider that her neuropathy symptoms were psychosomatic (“...in her head”), and therefore physically untreatable. Well, psychosomatic or not, pain and ‘suffering’ felt by a patient still warrant empathetic treatment and/or support. and must be dealt with both humanely an constructively.

Since patients have been conditioned to believe for at least the past 75 years or more that doctors possess almost God-like omniscience and infallibility in their medical knowledge and healing powers, care-receivers’ disappointment in the prevailing healthcare options offered them is therefore understandable, as patient dissatisfaction with care offered becomes widespread. Doctors are, after all, mere human beings with a somewhat larger and broader knowledge base in medicine, but they vary one-to-another in so many ways that the patients’ expectations of their doctors are often quite unrealistic, and sometimes unreasonable. Most importantly, they are indeed fallible…especially when forced to perform at a certain level of care that prioritises profitability above addressing basic human physical and emotional needs.

More recently, the traditional medical/healthcare philosophies of the Far East (China/Japan, et al) have been incorporated into American HMO clinical care and added to their treatment regimens, but again, there is no single absolute gold standard approach to dealing with human pain and suffering. No ‘magic bullet.’

Mangione is his brief manifesto uses the word ‘Allopathy’, which is a word most Americans remain unfamiliar with. It means, simply, “following the conventional Western manner of medical treatment”, often referred to simply as Western Medicine (versus Eastern Medicine). But again, whether ‘Allopathic’ or ‘Homeopathic’, none of these disciplines provides a completely effective approach to dealing with human pain and suffering.

Two further aspects of the dysfunctional American system that have contributed substantially to our present healthcare crisis are the rise of massive corporate pharmaceutical giants (that produce and market) drugs, and the role of the ‘fellow-traveler’ corporate (broadcast media) news in America. Anyone who still watches so-called ‘free television’ broadcasting media in America (assuming that average viewers are still capable of reflecting intelligently on what they watch), knows how annoyingly pervasive the commercial advertising ‘messages’ are and how ‘dumbed-down’ they tend to be. The alert viewer (that is, not yet ‘asleep-at-the-wheel’) may also note the frequency of marketing advertisements by the major pharmaceutical companies (remember the famous tag-line? “…ask your doctor!”) on television. In fact television advertising on these ‘not-viewer-subscribed-to’ channels may be divided into three major categories: 1) advertising by lawyers and law firms, 2) pharmaceuticals, and 3) 501(c)(3) charity foundations (such as Shriners, Wounded Warriors, Saint Jude's, etc.). These corporate industries annually spend billions of dollars on those annoying television commercials that stations subject you to each day, unendingly, in order to mold and shape your attitudes, your outlooks and of course your spending habits (favorably for them), playing on your sympathies to loosen your purse-strings (“Only $19 a month shows that you Care!”)

The most insidious aspect of what the ‘average’ American is exposed to on ‘The Hungry-Eye’ (commercial television) is the nakedly brazen but sub-rosa socializing processes that go on, prompted by the commercial corporations’ elitist adoption of leftist progressive ideological dogma. Corporations thus subject you to a very sophisticated (but more subtle) form of what was called during the 50s Era Korean Conflict, “brain-washing”, providing you, the viewer, with an infinite range of carefully ‘pre-cooked’ stereotypical impressions of social reality to digest. Viewers watch these unquestioningly, unconsciously assuming them to be accurate reflections of genuine reality. In fact, they are most definitely not.

Television advertisements formerly constituted less than one-quarter of each hour of TV programming; today that ratio has increased drastically, with programs (and your increasingly attenuated concentration) being rudely broken into every 4-5 minutes by jarring, sophomoric commercial ‘testimonial’ skits that are in reality more like little biblical morality plays; the sole difference being that morals aren’t the object, but rather raw exhortations to consume material goods.

With each retreat of individuals away from direct interpersonal contact with others and further advances into insular ‘remote’ social media connections and peer contacts (as their replacements), the new emerging ‘reality’ is not what you are likely to observe in public, up-front and personal, but the highly disingenuous stereotypes commercial advertisers WANT YOU to embrace as legitimate social reality.

The combined impact of all these television representations of ‘purpose-contrived, artificial reality’ are no longer a reflection of what you directly experience each day, going about your daily affairs outside of or away from your home, but rather what consumer product exemplars ‘inform you’ are appropriate expectations, desires, wants and needs. It is a hopelessly false and dishonest barrage of commercial fantasies that average (TV-viewing) individuals are force-fed each day. And it is this dystopian state of fantasy American life that is deliberately and ruthlessly set before us to absorb, willingly or not.

Ever wonder why there are so many violent television crime-programs on TV in which formidably armed police, SWAT or otherwise, stalk lethally motivated, violent criminals? Not many viewers do, as they hungrily eat up all the violent action. Most people just watch these programs unreflectively and reflexively, since there’s little else on the ‘tube’ to watch.

A European visitor watching American ‘free television’ would quickly assume that America is one of the most violence-prone, dangerously unsafe countries in the world. And of course, increasingly, we are, but programs that obsess on ‘Law & Order’ and violent criminals (starring youthful, impossibly handsome and sexy, buff actors, simply stoke the fires of social dissociation that already exist and communicate the message (to perhaps marginally bright viewers) that resolving conflicts with guns and deadly violence is a desirable social norm.

Consider here a collateral to human healthcare concerns, the exponentially increasing veterinary care charges that pet-owners are forced to cope with presently. In a manner not unrelated to corporate human healthcare trends, corporations such as VCA (Veterinary Corporation of America) have been buying up private vet practices across the country, thereby effectively exerting a rigid monopoly on pet care.

Good luck finding a vet these days who isn’t associated with VCA (to use that convenient example, given their status as the largest corporate veterinary care provider in America), a company that dictates veterinary practice standards and remunerative fee schedules to its ‘owned’ affiliates, not to provide a higher quality of caring service but to insure profitability for the corporate stock-holders and investors. “We care about you and your pet.” No, instead let’s make that, “We care about making money from your obligation to take care of your domestic pets.”

OK. Bottom line is that corporations…ALL corporations…are most emphatically NOT your best bosom buddies. They exist to suck, squeeze and soak-up whatever they can of your discretionary income any way they may, while still assuaging you with the big commercial lie that they are altruistic, caring, compassionate, virtual ‘co-protectors’ of your precious pets’ welfare.

Returning to our alleged young, highly idealistic (and cold-blooded) CEO assassin, Mr. Mangione, for a moment. That young man seems to share an antipathy towards modern America’s corporate oppressors with his mentor, ex-UCB Professor Theodore Kaczynski. Both, regardless of how righteously rationalised or skillfully intellectualised their convictions may seem, have transcended the socially ‘permissible’ threshold in violently harming innocent others in pursuit of their ideals. This crossing of a major ‘red line’ is a rising characteristic of the malevolent, nihilist, extreme radical leftist contingent that has come to prominence within the ‘new’ Democratic Party, consequent to the proliferation of Woke, DEI and Marcusian Critical Theory ideologies in the past 5 years.

Sadly, they feel (presumably) that the time for purely intellectual arguments and appeals to reason is now over with and that direct action is required. The question that remains unanswered is how they feel their violently anti-social acts will achieve the broader collective social awareness that they feel is so crucial to change the status quo.

It should be noted here that, to date, there is little apparent evidence of insanity on the part of either Ted Kaczynski or Luigi Mangione. Both were and are (seemingly) well aware, per the conventional legal definition of insanity, that what they were doing was and is legally and morally wrong. Instead, their arguments and expressed justifications for their acts of violence appear to be thoughtfully, calmly and intellectually expressed.

Begs the question, then: Which is more harmful, more insidious, more damaging to humanity in the larger context? The direct, immediate and violent taking of human life (or lives), or the guileful, dishonest, manipulative, deceit-filled socialization processes (of the corporations) that achieve their maximal effect over a longer-term and in far more subtle (but equally damaging) ways?

Although thus far, there’s been very little comprehensive psychosocial analysis of Mangione the young man, his motives and/or his expressed intellectual justifications for his action, one thing is clear. Given the effects of rapid dissemination and publicity of his action by the co-dependent broadcasting media, there will surely soon follow what we quaintly call ‘copy-cat’ perpetrators of similar acts of social outrage.

This is a distinctly deleterious liability co-facilitated by modern electronic media, whereby the latest breaking news is made instantly available everywhere on the planet, and nearly simultaneously. By now, probably everyone in the world has heard about this homicidal action by a young and passionately leftist idealistic individual (if we are to believe that he is exactly that, who doesn’t have separate ulterior, hidden motives, yet unrevealed and/or undetermined), and the danger resulting from this is that it will plant the seeds of creating similar outrages in the minds of others (who weren’t sharp enough to hatch such an attention-grabbing scheme themselves, without some encouragement). It’s a proven, repeating nuance of human behavior, copying the actions of another for whatever reason, whether impulsively or intellectually.

Thus far, we have learned from available reports that there is a remarkable wave of supportive public sentiment over Mangione’s actions by other (presumably young) people across the social media spectrum and of course, given their youthful naïveté and tender years, it is quite likely that Mangione’s original and unique transgression may soon have even greater far-flung consequences.

Was this part of his calculation? Was he bright enough to anticipate this sort of peer-support by fellow idealists? Or not? That all remains to be determined as the facts and circumstances underlying this event are made known. In the context of this last nuance (the rapid transmission of news media), a truly perceptive individual would have to question the ethical purity of the so-called Fourth Estate (journalism and news media) that permits rapid public telegraphing of extreme antisocial acts such as this under the disclaiming banner of ‘freedom of the press.”

But of course, this is one of the many prices we pay in a democratic society such as ours for the preservation and maintenance of our freedoms. A true democracy assumes and implies a commonly shared sense of social responsibility on the part of all its citizens to support, uphold and sustain the basic freedoms that it confers and sadly, this is clearly not the case in a nation such as our present one in which there exists such radical polar division and highly corrosive dissent between opposing partisan socio-political groups.

It therefore remains, in my opinion, to be seen exactly how much longer the United States of America, as a brave and singular experiment in democracy shall continue to exist. Given the abnegation by so many individuals of that all-important sense of individual and collective personal responsibility that is becoming so prevalent in America these days, one must wonder about our ultimate survival as a nation if basic freedoms are no longer morally and ethically modulated.

What seems clear is that the corporations in America that wield such enormous influence over us (for the Philistine purpose of assuring profitability for stock and shareholders) have reached a point, in their unholy alliance with media and the legal profession, whereby they have become virtual parasites imposing a ‘lowest common denominator’ quality of life upon all of us that reduces us all to little more than unreflective, drooling, reflexive and emotionally reactive morons. And why? In order to exact compliance and conformity to their unhealthy financial demands for greater, ever greater profits, from us dutiful little, unreflective consumers.

In this single context, Mangione has (regrettably) emerged as a shocking bellwether to point this out to us, regardless of the ethical morality of his murderous, homicidal act.

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POSTSCRIPT: It is interesting to note that Senator Elizabeth Warren has just come out with statements coopting Mangione’s outrage, removing it from its context of being merely an example of extreme leftist violence and transforming it into one exclusively related to her obsession with enhanced ‘gun control’ measures.[Control of gun proliferation is, of course, simplistic muddle-headed thinking; what is needed is 'CONTROL OF PEOPLE' (and their minds/attitudes). Any ideologue worth his Critical Theory street creds would confirm the veracity of this statement, LoL.]

Her statement selectively seizes upon the coincidental issue of Mangione’s use of a 3-D printed ‘ghost gun’ (untraceable) to augment her justifications for tightening gun control laws. Once all the smoke and obfuscation has been cleared away (most of it in Warren's mind), this appears to be yet another tired old refutation of the logical argument that “Guns don’t kill people; PEOPLE do.”

PS: Given all of the above aspects of the healthcare crisis briefly sketched in the above paragraphs, it should be pointed out that today’s HMO (managed heathcare) is structured to engage in what we used to call ‘Band-Aid and Aspirin’ healthcare. In other words, if at all possible, '...prescribe an NSAID analgesic (ASA or Ibuprofen, etc.) and put a Band-Aid on the problem, with a return clinical visit scheduled several weeks out if things haven’t improved.'

If the patient is still alive on that follow-up visit (eating, sleeping and generally thriving), repeat as necessary, ad infinitum. This is a farcically gross exaggeration, of course, but as with all clichés, there is a serious grain of truth hidden deep within it, unfortunately.

Furthermore, the older a patient, the less important he or she seems to be regarded, by the medical establishment (regardless of all the usual Human Resources propaganda spin that "We genuinely CARE for you!"), the unspoken implication being that since he/she (the older patient) “…will probably pass away soon enough, more expensive cures and treatments are most efficaciously spent on younger individuals who may still lead productive, income-generating lives (and therefore consume more corporate products and services, over time)”. This is also an exaggeration…or is it? [If there are any lawyers around within tort-distance, all bets are off. The foregoing statements will self-destruct in 10 seconds…]

We used to have an old ‘tongue-in-cheek’ saying that “…when a patient is sick, there are two viable options for treatment 1) See a doctor and take prescribed symptom-relieving medications for two weeks; 2) stay home and eat chicken soup for 14 days. Both regimens usually have equally successful outcomes…” More often than not, this has proven true.

PSS: Have a very HEALTHY holiday season but don't fail to recognise that more recent SARS/2-CoV viral variants are still lurking out there, to catch the unwary! And for Crissakes, stay at least 25 feet away from anyone who even looks like they may have the sniffles! [As for the idiocy of wearing a NIOSH approved N95+ protective mask while in the privacy of your car, when you are alone and unaccompanied by others...please get some immediate counseling! I have seen this laughable sight too many times on public streets and roads!]