The Stupefaction of Values

In his op-ed column concerning health care reform in today’s New York Times David Brooks writes:

“The bottom line is that we face a brutal choice.

Reform would make us a more decent society, but also a less vibrant one. It would ease the anxiety of millions at the cost of future growth. It would heal a wound in the social fabric while piling another expensive and untouchable promise on top of the many such promises we’ve already made. America would be a less youthful, ragged and unforgiving nation, and a more middle-aged, civilized and sedate one.

We all have to decide what we want at this moment in history, vitality or security. We can debate this or that provision, but where we come down will depend on that moral preference. Don’t get stupefied by technical details. This debate is about values.”

I love it when conservatives employ national metaphors for their clumsy hands are inevitably all over the place, like men who have awakened in a pit of fire ants. Brooks believes that America will pay so much for health care that we will become a less youthful and vital nation. Presumably he thinks we are still, in economic terms a strapping youngster of a nation state–a Paul Bunyon-like state roaming the hills in search of the Whisky Rebellion. As usual I have no idea what Brooks is talking about save that by metaphorizing America into a neo-Victorian “either-or” sequence of metaphors he manages to delude himself and perhaps more than a few readers (who knows?) that the United States is still a capitalistic rough and tumble “kid” among nations–a rascally, lucre attaining greenhorn who must be freed of pesky social concerns. This is the Victorian hand: reform of any kind will make for a less vigorous state, for the state is solely conceived as a sequence of statistics, all devised to promote the acquisition of capital.

Let us leave aside the metaphor of the body politic and its figuration of prospective wealth. One may be stupefied as Mr. Brooks puts it, for he imagines the moral debate in terms of making a decision about the health of American capitalism versus the business of looking after the health of our citizens. Always this canard from the conservatives. Always this idea that investing in the decency of the nation will cost us so dearly we will be ruined. Always a red herring. Always wrong. Always.

S.K.  

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto