Читаем After America полностью

You may think you object to ObamaCare because the Federal Government forcing you to make health-care arrangements that meet the approval of the state commissars is unconstitutional, but it’s really because you think that that wise Latina on the Supreme Court should be turning down your hotel bed and leaving a complimentary hazelnut truffle on your pillow.⁴⁷

You may think you object to ObamaCare because its absurd bureaucratic insistence that you need a doctor’s prescription in order to pay for your Tylenol from a health savings account will waste untold hours of doctors’, patients’, and pharmacists’ time, but it’s really because Barney Frank reminds you that you’ve always been slightly confused about your own sexuality and at the back of the desk drawer you’ve still got the phone number of that guy who wrote back when you put the “Bi-Curious Male Seeks Similar” ad in the classifieds, and to be honest when Congressman Frank gets butch and beats up on those bank executives it kinda turns you on.

I can’t speak for the rest of you racists, sexists, and homophobes, but I’ve opposed government health care in Canada, the United Kingdom, Bulgaria, and anywhere else I’ve been on the receiving end of it. And in Britain no blacks, women, or gays were involved in its introduction, just pasty-faced white blokes. In Canada, it was just pasty-faced white blokes with a pronounced hint of maple. In Bulgaria, it was swarthy Slavic blokes with impressively hirsute monobrows. Okay, that is racist, but only mildly so. And in any case when it comes to Slavic monobrows I prefer the women.

Okay, that’s racist and sexist, so I’ll quit while I’m behind. But the point is, throughout most of the western world, government health care has been the creation of white males of drearily conventional orientation.

Yet, if you write for the New York Times or teach race and gender studies at American colleges for long enough, it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that a difference of opinion over health-care policy is being driven by nostalgia for segregated lunch counters. Invited by National Public Radio to expound on the use of “racial code words” in “the current opposition to health care reform,” Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton, informed her listeners that “language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.”⁴⁸

“Personal responsibility” is racial code language? Phew, thank goodness America is belatedly joining Europe in all but abolishing the concept.

“Code language” is code language for “total bollocks.” “Code word” is a code word for “I’m inventing what you really meant to say because the actual quote doesn’t quite do the job for me.” “Small government”? Racist code words! “Non-confiscatory taxes”? Likewise. “Individual liberty”? Don’t even go there! With interpreters like Professor Harris-Lacewell on the prowl, I’m confident 95 percent of Webster’s will eventually be ruled “code language.”

Faced with public discontent about the statist agenda, the Condescendi look out the window at the unlovely mob in their “Don’t tread on me” T-shirts and sneer, “The peasants are revolting.” You oppose illegal immigration? You’re a xenophobe. Gay marriage? Homophobe. The Ground Zero mosque? Islamophobe. If that’s the choice, I’d rather be damned as racist and sexist. The evolution from -isms to phobias is part of the medicalization of dissent: the Conformicrats simply declare your position a form of mental illness. After firing commentator Juan Williams for some insufficiently politically correct observations about Muslims, NPR exec Vivian Schiller suggested her longtime colleague needed to see a psychiatrist.⁴⁹ That’s the polite version of dismissing him as just another one of those “fucking Nascar retards,” the elegant formulation Eric Alterman (Distinguished Professor of English and Journalism at Brooklyn College, and Professor of Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism) used on the in-house “JournoList” to describe those Americans who disagree with him and his fellow media professionals.⁵⁰ Juan Williams seems an unlikely Nascar retard. He is not only liberal but black. Had a conservative hinted that an eminent African-American Democrat had mental health issues, he’d be the one headed for the funny farm. But, of course, in briefly wandering off liberalism’s ideological plantation, Mr. Williams had behaved so irrationally that, as in the Soviet Union, only a medical condition could explain it. Don’t worry about it, Juan. Just let the men in white coats get the straps around you, and shoot the needle into your arm, and you’ll soon be feeling much better, and thinking just the same as everybody else.