No, My American Friends, Smug Is Not The Word
I spent New Year's in San Francisco at a fabulous party on Treasure Island, shuttled there by limosine. We danced to a live band, drank free booze, ate free catered Mexican and Asian food, and watched a showy fireworks display from across the Bay, the Golden Gate bridge all lit up, Fisherman's Wharf sillouetted.
It was postcard perfect.
But it was also a little bit like a scene from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel with the majority of guests facing unemployment and substantially reduced standards of living as they rang in the New Year with their hosts, an incredibly successful young couple - one of which is actually Canadian.
There's nothing quite like being an ordinary/average/working Canadian (as in, taxpayer) talking to "middle-class wealthy" Americans (a million-plus dollar house in San Francisco is still pretty middle-class in San Francisco) at the end of 2008. Smug isn't the word, because who knows how badly the American Depression will affect us - and these were the sorts of people who read Harpers and vote Democrat, anyway.
I wasn't afraid for them, exactly, because they all have parents, boomer-aged parents, with money and they're all well-educated. But you just need to drop it down to the next class of American citizens to get nervous about what the future holds - for all of us. Because those people are in trouble and the United States doesn't have the social infrastructure that we do, up here in the Great White North, to weather this one out very well.
So, although I mostly listened to my new American friends talk with great concern about the American economy (they all had the sorts of financial jobs I don't understand - which is why I still have money - I stick to GICs and ignore the markets because I don't understand how they work), I did most of my own talking to a young man on the plane (poor fellow - he was from Iowa living in San Francisco, curious about Canada, had no idea about our own ridiculous politics of the day, and he was sitting beside me) who started our conversation by telling me about a recent healthcare experience. He'd gone to the doctor with a rash, but because of the litigious nature of American society, one can't simply have one's rash looked at and part with a couple of hundred dollars. Oh no. One must have pretty much what we would call a routine physical and part with close to a grand in order that the doctor can be assured he won't be sued for negligence because you came to see him about a rash, but it turned out you had high blood pressure, too.
So I told him about my recent trip to a clinic as a result of an episode of vertigo. In and out in half an hour, no money down, a prescription for a generic drug in hand. I'd been seen by a doctor with 22 years of emergency room experience who knew what I had before even looking in my ears.
His jaw was literally in his lap. Then he asked about access/wait times for more serious diseases - and I told him about a family member's year of cancer treatment involving chemotherapy and radiation with no wait time between diagnosis and treatment, access to MRIs as required, regular follow-ups, and most importantly - no money down. I also told him about triage and how a broken arm will wait for treatment if there are other priorities, but eventually your arm would be set and you'd be sent home with a prescription for painkillers. And most importantly for me and mine and everybody else I know in my middle-class life - again - no money down.
But because he was so starry-eyed about Canada, I felt obligated to tell him about the unrelenting and constant pressure from the Right in this country to have American-style healthcare. I told him about our impossibly stupid New Conservative government led by Alberta Separatist Reformers, its obsession with the free-for-all, trailer park to Whitehouse mentality of the worst of American politics and its desire to transform our country, through stealth, into the unregulated economic mess that gasps and wheezes south of the border.
He was fascinated. He had no idea of our thuggish Prime Minister and his proroguing of Parliament, his disbelief in climate change, his hope that abortion would be re-criminalized, his contempt for all things Canadian and the social infrastructure that has insulated us from the sort of awful crash average/ordinary/working (taxpayers like us - except with no guarantees of government services when they need them most) Americans are experiencing right now and will continue to experience for some time to come. When he told me about his boss, who was part of an stem cell research ethics committee on which Bush appointees actually sabotaged scientific data, I told him about a civil servant/novelist who worked for Environment Canada having his book reading cancelled by the New Conservative government because his book - his fictional novel - was called "Hotter Than Hell" and the government felt it might unfairly imply that climate change via global warming - WAS REAL!! And I told him about how the regulation of our banking system had pretty much saved our asses but that even now the New Conservative Right was trying to deregulate it. Then I told him about how the Prime Minister was supposed to have been an economist of some kind in his previous life, but he hadn't seen the economic meltdown of the closing months of 2008 coming - even in the closing months of 2008.
No, my American friends, smug would definitely not be the word.
