Wise Up the Marks, as William S. Burroughs Put It

     I hate Paul Ryan more than I hate Donald Trump.  They're both loathsome, but one has become so familiar--Trump's grotesque personality splashed daily for many successive months across
news/entertainment mediascapes--that I regard him like I do a bunion; present and annoying but felt as an irritation that will someday go away.  Granted, Trump's self-profiting agendas are bad for the nation and for the world's peoples, but he fits in philosophically with the "muscular" Americanism plaguing the world for the years of this century and many of the previous--Hillary Clinton in that regard would have been no different.
     Domestically, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a Republican congressman from Wisconsin, represents a real, existential threat to millions of Americans.  His ideas on health care "reform," derived from his obsession with the Objectivist selfishness-based philosophy of Ayn Rand, an author whose nutty fantasies fit perfectly with the mindsets of sociopathic politicians crafting policies to fuck over and kill the poor, threaten the well-being and lives of millions, like myself, who have benefited from Obamacare, i.e., the Affordable Care Act.
     Ryan, like his Republican colleagues in the House of Representatives and the Senate, have long sought to repeal and "replace" the ACA, warning repeatedly of its alleged drain on the economy, of its inevitable "implosion."  They would have us believe that even a health care plan, crafted actually by the right wing think tank Heritage Foundation and put in place in 2010 by President Obama as a compromise--something to work on to make better in the future, but a relief for the time being to tens of millions of uninsured Americans--is a great trial for citizens, something to be reviled.
     Having the past seven years to come up with an alternative, Republicans, led by Big Pharmaceutical industry whores like Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, have finally drafted a draconian plan revealing their true natures.  They call it the American Health Care Act.  Put the word "American" on it to bless something evil, a proposal that will, in the next decade, cause approximately twenty-four million Americans who now have health insurance--thanks to Obamacare--to not have health insurance.
     Republican politicians attending Town Hall meetings in their home districts have lately been jeered at, chanted at, and booed by constituents woken up to the fact that their representatives in Washington seek to weaken their health and kill them.  President Trump, in his recent budget proposal--a brutal document characterized by military spending increases while sacrificing funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, social programs for the elderly and poor, public television, and other things that make American lives better, but also sharp State Department cuts--didn't touch Medicare.  He knows to not fuck with Medicare.  The atmosphere of rebellion against horrible policies by shitty politicians grows in this country.  Feckless Democrats, though, obsessed, along with supposedly left wing news media, by Russia's allegedly effective tampering in the 2016 election, even though the FBI also tampered with it, and Hillary Clinton and the DNC also tampered with it by suppressing Bernie Sanders, don't present a convincing front of resistance to the Republicans led by Trump and Ryan.
     It's doubtful that Democrats will approve Ryan's "American" fuck you America health care plan, that it will actually pass into law as it is.  Trump has expressed his doubts about its success even while claiming to be its champion.  Typical Trump: say two or three different things on the same subject in the space of a day or two.  He is truly adept at using politics as a form of logrolling, shifting his weight back and forth on an unstable rolling platform, keeping his opponents glued to what he does and says.  Most of what he does and says isn't worth covering as news, anymore than it was when he ran for president or earlier when he would call into cable news programs to gripe about Rosie O'Donnell, who had the temerity to imitate him unflatteringly, incurring his eternal ire.
     As for Paul Ryan, who, had 2012 been different, would have become vice president, it remains to be seen as to how far he can shove Ayn Rand down America's throat.  There's a wising up going on, I think.  The politicians who say they care about the common man and woman are finding their masks aren't holding on tightly to their faces.  Curiously, Donald Trump got elected president because he spoke plainly.  He lacked Hillary Clinton's inability to speak like a normal person.  Because of his communication style, identical in many ways to what one hears in a bar at midnight, he convinced ordinary people to relate to him; a great con, of course, since he's a privileged rich fuck who's never done an honest day's work in his entire life.  But he is vulgar.  He reminds me of the supporting characters in Hieronymus Bosch paintings, grinning at the tormented Christ, eyes filled with avarice, and if we could hear them speak, their words would be idiotic and cruel.
     Ryan seems like a normal, civilized person, but his words are calculated, technocratic, designed to lay out plans of utter destruction for the lives of millions of Americans who rely on the gift of an albeit imperfect health care system that, in 2010, replaced a previous system of nothing that I, among many millions, had to suffer under.  Ryan's goal, like Trump's is to make rich people richer, for they supposedly, in Ayn Randian fashion, deserve more.  This deliberate push on Ryan's part shows him to be an evil man, and the news media drop the ball when they don't call him that.

                                                                              Vic Neptune