By Beau Elliot
This is the week that was; Congress will decide to be cutting-edge and exciting and make all video games free on demand. Hah, Congress will say. Hack that, Putin.
OK, well, no. That was fake news to its core, not that it had a core. What? You thought it was an apple?
And besides, when has Congress ever been cutting-edge and exciting?
No, the Senate this week will attempt to vote on the GOP health-care proposal. Yeah, we know. We all will be on the edges of our seats, because the debate promises to be inflammable. Or at least as inflamed as the Senate ever gets.
Crickets. No crickets ever get scorched in an “inflamed” Senate debate. They die of yawning too quickly.
And yes, Virginia, the word is “inflammable.” The prefix “in” in the word does not mean, well, “not.” It means, in highly technical grammatical terms reaching back many centuries to the Latin roots of the prefix: Yo, buster, no open flames around this “stuff,” because it will blow up in your face. Which, in your case, might be an improvement.
(Those Latin guys had such a way with words. That’s probably why today Latin is a “dead language.”)
Which brings us, as life so often does, back to health care. And baseball. Many Americans, it seems, according to no scientific research whatsoever (that’s the American way), view health-care bills and baseball as dead languages. In other words, boring. (There those crickets are again, still not scorched.)
Our extensive research appears to show that the only people who believe baseball is boring are themselves boring. Who could be bored, for instance, when a batter faces the ballet count? You know, 2-2.
Baseball is, at its heart, existentialism. There are many outs, but, as Sartre pointed out in his famous essay on baseball, no exit.
Health-care bills, on the other hand (depending on which hand you started with) tend to put people to death by yawning. In which case, they no longer have to be concerned about health-care bills, which might be the point.
The current GOP health-care bill appears to face some uphill rowing, though why people, even senators, would try to row a boat on a hill remains unclear. Depending on who’s talking, the bill is DOA. Or it’s going to pass on a 50-50 vote, with VP Mike Pence riding to the Republicans’ rescue in a great-white-hope move and casting the killer tiebreaker. And we do mean white. Not to mention killer.
Or the GOP health bill could disappear down the proverbial rabbit hole to reside with Alice in Wonderland. (Note: Alice doesn’t live there anymore.)
OK, it’s a tad more complicated than that. So what isn’t?
The GOP health-care bill is highly unpopular, according to many polls. This, apparently, comes as a major surprise to the 13 or so older, white, wealthy senators who crafted the bill in secret for many weeks. The bill could cause 22 million or so working-class and poor people to lose health insurance while giving older, white, wealthy people some juicy tax cuts. People who don’t have any worries about health insurance, except that poor people might get it, too.
What could possibly be unpopular about that?
Actually, we’d rather talk about cut fastballs, though it does seem as if Republicans are throwing nothing but cut fastballs.
Meanwhile, speaking of existentialism, Amazon will buy Whole Foods, thus spawning such headlines as “Organic robots seize foodie icon.”
Hmm. As Sartre says, no exit.