Over at the News Blog friends are pinch-hitting for Steve Gilliard, who’s just undergone open-heart surgery resulting from a dialysis-related heart-valve infection. This is one of the ever-present dangers of dialysis and the reason why I’ve been fighting it tooth and nail. All his friends and family and well-wishers from all over the world, and they are many, are united in hoping for his swift recovery. Let’s hope too he gets the kidney he needs soon, because the subject of donor kidneys in the US is a troubled one:
In the United States alone, more than 63,000 patients are waiting for a kidney, according to the National Kidney Foundation. The kidney waiting list of the United Network for Organ Sharing currently increases at a rate of 20 percent a year, and the list will be 100,000 to 150,000 patients long by the year 2010.
One of the excellent writers filling in at the News Blog is Lower Manhattanite, who I’ve always wished would start his own blog. Steves’ hospital stay got him thinking about hospitals, and veterans’ and military hospitals in particular, in light of Steve’s own interest in the topic:
[…]
That symmetry hit this weekend as I drove my kids to their Grandpa’s house for a visit. Grandpa lives not far from my folks in Southeastern Queens, and getting to his house takes you past an odd neighborhood called Addisleigh Park—a weird, little enclave in Jamaica where Black entertainers like Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and James Brown all owned homes. And just across Linden Boulevard from Addisleigh, was the big V.A. hospital—a mean, imposing place where sullen men drifted in and out for treatment that always seemed to be—well, according to them, less than good. Driving past there, I remembered the old OTB parlor and the bars dotting Linden along that brief stretch near the hospital—funny how those places wound up so close by, and how those places always seemed to be overfull of, to the point of spilling out onto the streets, of angry, apparently ill-treated men. There was a comic-book store us kids frequented on that block, and on those sojourns you would always hear the men carping and ranting a litany of V.A. hospital horror stories—sometimes in front of the aforementioned sad haunts, but also in the luncheonette/comic book store we hung out at where they’d come in for ciggies and cheap cigars.
“I got better care in the middle of the f*cking jungle than ten minutes from my house” I remember one gaunt, afro-ed outpatient growling to a friend at the counter one day. I Briefly dated a girl who lived in Addisleigh, and I noted one day sitting on her porch that we only seemed to see the patients coming in and out of the place–never employees, and how I never saw the doctors out on the Boulevard.
“They ain’t crazy.”, the girlfriend pointed out. “They come in and go out the back way, otherwise some of those dudes’d jump ‘em. It’s a rough place, and they hold the doctors responsible. One got f*cked up at the bus stop a few years ago, and ever since then, they go out the back door—and get the bus a few stops back ithe other way.”
I hadn’t thought about that conversation until this (Sunday) morning. What kind of treatment would lead patients to wanna whip a doctor’s *ss? And move not one doctor , but drive ‘em all to use a crappy back door near a loading bay for entry and egresss? I shudder to think of what had so many of those olive-drab clad vagabonds who wandered up and down Linden so incensed about that hospital. Well, at least I used to shudder.
And then, about a month ago, in my usual late-night movie crawling on cable, I stumbled across Oliver Stone’s “Born On The Fourth Of July”—a movie I’ve seen every scene of but never in one continuous sitting (much the way I’ve seen “Dirty Dancing” at least nine times, but never in one uninterrupted shot) I figured I’d sacrifice a drowsy workday morning to see the damned thing that late night, from start to end, and put bluntly, the film was a revelation. Stone worked a bravura turn at the helm—with the usual visual genius he fairly oozes, and with the performances he got out of his actors. Cruise was I think at his best ever in it, as he made the trek from callow youth, to wounded, cynical adulthood (as opposed to Cruise’s usual “Callow-Youth-to-Smarmy-Thinks-He’s-Cool-F*ck” turn) as Ron Kovic. But the sh*t that struck me about the movie was the sequences in the V.A. hospital. Those harrowing, Hieronymous Bosch-like scenes of the hell that a V.A. hospital could be kind of haunted me. They were jarring as all f*ck, but…as much as I appreciate Stone’s talent, I figured he was ramping up the ugly for dramatic license, as he is prone to do—his Achilles Heel–sometimes to creepy excess.
And then you see the news from the past week from Walter Reed, and realize that some 35 years hence, what Stone was depicting—those seeming nightmarish bins where our military wounded would sometimes end up…was a f*cked-up, and evidently chronic reality.
The shadows of the Washington Monument, Capitol, and White House fell across that pit of despair, Walter Reed every day. Yet the bleat, the simpering bleat of the truth-starved cowards on the right, a mewled “Support The Troops”, somehow passed their lips repeatedly, as they actually abandoned them twice over. First to an ego, hate, and hubris-driven war they were lied into—and then abandoned again when they came home with injuries from that awful folly in the desert.
Left to rust and seize to the point of discarding, like a careless mechanic leaving his hand tools in the damp—because in his mind, they’re cheap and can be replaced.
[…]
Exactly. Just more free-market fodder and there’s no money to be made from them or out of them now so fuck ’em, basically.
Then in the comments I came across this link in a comment by BOHICA:
For an expose’ of the old VA hospitals. From an old Kos diary.
Our Fogotten WoundedSun Apr 17, 2005
When I turned on the tube last week, I flipped to CSPAN for some reason and low and behold there was Senator Larry Craig – (R – ID) followed by Kay Bailey Hutchison – (R – TX) speaking against the Murray amendment for a $1.9 billion emergency supplimental increase in the VA’s budget. This was diaried that day by Ioo Screw the Vets, Let them Eat Cake. I contributed a shot of the cover of Life magazine from May 22, 1970 “Our Forgotten Wounded”.. I had received a copy of that issue the week before while volunteering at the American Friends Service Committee traveling exhibit “Eyes Wide Open. Between now and then I have scanned the article and converted to a PDF file which I will be printing and taking to my High School counter recruitment presentations. The file is too big for download (54 megs) so I would like to share the results with you in a diary. The pictures are downsized (still kinda big) and I have included the text of the article and captioned the pictures as they were in the magazine.The Article was written by Charles Child, photographed by Co Rentmeester.
—————————
Follow the link for all the gruesome detail. Should be required reading for all of congress.
Indeed it should.
As that ‘Life’ photo-essay shows, soldiers have never been anything but expendable; the myth that all the military are heroes (although many are, it’s by circumstance rather than design) is one carefully crafted by the services’ own advertising over the past 40 or more years – ‘Be All That You Can Be’ ‘The Few, The Brave, The Proud” and so on and so on, all of them carefully crafted by marketing hotshots to reach the required demographic.
It’s a manufactured myth that’s willingly participated in by all concerned, even those who saw the clusterfuck of Vietnam at first hand. They have to beleive in it justifies the horrors they had to do and see. anything rather than have to face the reality that soldiers are just disposable and that’s the way it’s always been. Those in the military have to willingly participate in the myth, or the futility of their way of life would be overwhelming: their entire purpose is to die when ordered. Who wants to think about that all the time?
So a more comforting narrative is needed: not one in which citizens who’ve volunteered to defend their country are used to further shabby capitalistic takeovers abroad, but one in which they’re defending the glorious homeland and being treated as heroes. But the recent reports about Walter Reed military hospital that Lower manhattanhite refers to show the eternal hollowness of that narrative and the ‘Life’ story linked to above shows that nothing’s changed since Vietnam and further back than that.
Soldiers are and always have been an expendable resource used to further the interests of the world’s rich by proxy, fodder for the free market. You only have to read Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon or even Kipling to know it has ever been thus.
Use ’em up, suck ’em dry, throw away the husks. They’re just proles, what do they matter in the glorious onward march of the neoliberal revolution?
