The United States of Irrationality

 It is in times of crisis that one can see, if your eyes and mind are open and sensitive to empirical reality, the "irrationality" at the heart of many postmodern societies. Currently, thanks to the Coronavirus panic that is sweeping the globe, a panic leading to a run on N95 masks in the US and beyond, for instance, one can see the "irrationalities" at the heart of the United States and at the heart, in particular, of its health care system.

One of the "irrationalities" at the heart of the US is its health care system. Profit is at the heart of the American health system. This means that a significant part of every American dollar spent on health care, goes straight into the pockets of shareholders. It means that those who run the for-profit health care companies and who are at the top of the health care pyramid in the US, are making, thanks to consumer spending, thanks to government health care subsidies, and thanks to health insurance company spending, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in salaries and stock profits. Replacing this for-profit health care system with a non-profit one would, of course, bring down health care costs because it would eliminate the profit motive at the heart of the American health care system.

The American for-profit health care system is not only "irrational" because it is largely for-profit. It is also "irrational" because there are several centralised corporate for-profit health care companies and several for-profit centralised corporate insurance companies all doing the same thing. These for-profit corporations, which dominate the American health care sector, all have "irrational" redundancies. Hundreds of employees are doing the same thing in these several corporate medical bureaucracies, in other words. This means that a significant percentage of every health care dollar spent in the US is going to support redundant bureaucracies and redundant bureaucrats. Streamlining and rationalising these several economic for-profit bureaucracies would, of course, bring down American health care costs.

The American for-profit health care system is "irrational" in that millions of Americans are uninsured even in the era after the Affordable Care Act, a government/private health care programme that allowed and allows millions of uninsured Americans to obtain health insurance. Currently, even with Obamacare, many Americans simply cannot afford health insurance given its high costs. Many Americans, even if they have health care, may have insurance plans that have high deductibles. Many small businesses in the US do not offer health care to their employees or offer high cost health care or health care plans with high deductibles to their employees who, as a result, are unable to afford health care or allow them to go to the doctor when they are ill. Additionally, given that millions of workers do not get paid time off from work, this, along with the fact that millions have no health care or can't afford the deductibles in their health care plans, means that millions of Americans cannot go to the doctor when they are ill.

The fact that millions of Americans cannot go to the doctor when they are ill because they have no health care, they have health care plans with high deductibles, and get no paid time off from work, becomes particularly dangerous in times of epidemics and pandemics. This means that those who, for example, feel somewhat ill, as many with Coronavirus do, do not seek medical attention and are not put into isolation, spread the "disease". By the way, an additional "irrationality" in the US health care system, this time relating to public health, is the fact that in times of health crisis getting the things necessary to the continued health of those most vulnerable is left up to the market rather than to public medical professionals and public health organisations. All of this means that because the US does not have universal health care, whether of the British and Taiwanese public variety or the German and Swiss private variety,  the American public is put at risk. I give you mass irrationality.

The fact is that the US has the highest per capita spending on health care compared to other core postmodern nations, virtually all of who have universal health care systems, and the fact that the US has poorer outcomes--lower longevity rates, higher longevity rates for the rich and lower longevity rates for the poor, higher infant death birthrates, higher numbers of women dying during childbirth, higher numbers of needless deaths because of millions without insurance, deaths or disability from diseases that once seemed wiped out--for instance, shows, how irrational the American health care system is. It shows that not only could millions of dollars be saved by turning the American health care sector from a for-profit one to a non-profit one and by rationalising and streamlining the US health care system, but that millions could be saved and health care improved by establishing a universal health care system in the US.

Will America see the "rational" universal health care light? Perhaps the coronavirus outbreak will be the tipping point allowing Americans to see the "rational" obvious. Perhaps it won't. Humans, after all, are often incredibly "irrational" and millions of Americans are guided by emotions, emotions that are easilly manipulated by demagogues, than by the weight of the empirical evidence. Stay tuned.

The Books of My Life: The Cinema of John Ford

The late 1950s and the 1960s, an era that saw the rise of a youth counterculture all across the world, also saw the advent of a new kind of cinema, a new kind of auteurist or authored cinema. It was, for example, the era of the French and Czech new waves, the British Free Cinema, and the New American cinema. The era also saw the rise of a new kind of film criticism. It was the era of Sequence, of Cahiers du Cinema, of Postif, of Movie, of Pauline Kael, of Andrew Sarris, and of what some have called the little books, of the monographs published by Tantivy/Zwemmer/Barnes, the monographs published in the British Film Institute's Cinema One and Cinema Two series', and the monographs published by Studio Vista/Praeger/the University of California Press/Indiana University Press. It was the era of the rise of an auteurist film criticism focused mostly on directors but also writers, producers, and actors in the Hollywood studio system and its critics.

Hollywood director John Ford, who made 112 feature films between 1917 to 1966, would be one of the auteurs the new auteurist film critics would write extensively about. For John Baxter, author of the Tantivy/Zwemmer/Barnes monograph on Ford (The Cinema of John Ford (London: Zwemmer, 1971)) John Ford was one of the greatest directors of the film medium. Ford's films, Baxter argues, are forceful, exploit the medium, and had popular appeal. Ford, as Baxter notes, worked in multiple film genres--the war picture, the Western, the historical costume drama, comedy, and literary adaptation. Despite working in Hollywood mass produced genres, Fords's, films, Baxter argues, share a common viewpoint and a common attitude to character, a common Fordian viewpoint and a Fordian attitude to character.

At the heart of Ford's films, particularly in the sound era, Baxter argues, are intricate moral structures and insight into the relationship between humans, especially men, and their environment. In Ford's films, Baxter argues, character is at the heart of plot, society, in the form, for example, of the military and it rituals and drinking as a community ritual, is an expression of moral order, and the survival of this community is central. They are also infused, Baxter argues somewhat novelly, with Ford's Irish Catholicism. In Ford's films, argues Baxter, slanting morning and afternoon light, the gestures of his characters, landscapes given an emotional character thanks to their relationship to his characters, and exterior mid-shots and alternating exteriors and interiors, are all examples of Ford's authorial film style.

Baxter's book is an interesting study of John Ford, who is now regarded as one of the world's and of America's great directors. Not everyone, however, will find Baxter's auteurism convincing. Some will see it as, in the catchphrase of modern academic critics, too "romantic". These same critics are also likely to miss the fact that Baxter, like many other 1960s and 1970s auteurist film historians and critics, saw film as a collaborative "art" and, at the same time, and only in some cases, an authored cinema, given the straw man auteurism they tend to construct. For me, Baxter's monograph could have and should have been a paper rather than a monograph, as is the case with so many books on film auteurs. Baxter's "Introduction", it seems to me, nicely sums up Ford's authorial signatures and the chapters after it are largely padding on an already partially eaten wedding cake.