Pie Fight!

by Brian Howard

While cramming to get up to speed on the Oscar contenders last week (I failed), I caught Quentin Tarantino's revisionist, Nazi-killing carnival of blood, Inglourious Basterds. It's a whopper of a film and, as CP's Sam Adams astutely surmised in his August review, "It's too much and not enough all at once." It's got two incredibly gripping plot lines, neither of which is fully explored.

I'll not spoil the ending other than to say that Tarantino plays fast and loose with der Führer. Which is, sadly, sort of en vogue these days. To wit: I spent Monday morning in the press section at Arcadia University as President Barack Obama addressed an extremely friendly audience while drumming up support for what is shaping up to be his administration's bellwether legislative cause: quagmire of quagmires, health-care reform.

I, like most of the assembled press corps, was furiously Tweeting the event. My own updates get picked up on my Facebook wall, to which about 1,000 people from various points in my past are privy. An old high school friend glommed onto my characterizations of the speech, and the audience's fervent reaction (this is what Facebook is for, no?).

At one point, I found it amusing that BHO's off-hand reference to the oft-derided single-payer system became an inadvertent applause line, and I wrote: "Ref to 'gov't run health care system' gets big applause." To this, the aforementioned old classmate, whose politics ... well, let's just say they're vastly different from my own ... dryly noted that dear ol' Hitler himself had proposed government-controlled health care in his run for Chancellor.

This, of course, is flagrant reductio ad Hitlerum, the ad hoc logical fallacy under which elective democracy is also an inherent evil. As another Nazareth High alum pointed out: "Five-yard penalty and repeat of down. ... Once der Führer shows up, it's pie-fight time."

All of which distracts from this point: The rest of the developed world — including Germany, which has had some form of national health care dating back to Otto von-freaking-Bismarck — has already adopted this most civilized idea, one that a very agonizingly vocal minority of this country feels (or pretends to feel out of party loyalty) portends doom. Hell, it distracts from the fact that our own country has a successful and popular scaled-down version of government-run health care. It's called Medicare.

As CP's Jeffrey Billman explains in his new column, "Soapboxer," the only thing perfect about the health-care bill is that it's a perfect mess — and that it should absolutely be passed. Jeff, who's this close to defending his master's thesis in political science, explains that what's more important than what's in the bill is that it gets passed. It moves the "Overton Window," which he can tell you all about on p. 10. Essentially, once we have something resembling universal health care, it can be tweaked, and it'd be political suicide to try to take it away.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)