Do You Smell Something Trustworthy Burning?

'The Burning of Rome, E. T. Paull sheet music 1903'
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Do You Smell Something Trustworthy Burning?

by John Kendall Hawkins

I felt like a spry pre-fire Bambi when I opened my mail today and there was my Social Security Administration Medicare Health Insurance (Part A): Hospital Benefits Only card. I may even have given myself a squeeze or made a little bunny-roo hop. The card won't do me much good here in Australia, where hospitalization is already free; and the accompanying invitation to sign up for (Part A): Medical Benefits Too, will have to be ignored, as that's free here as well, and I won't be returning to Los Estados Unidos anytime soon. So why sign on and let them charge me $150 per month for (Part B?) Part D, which includes, vision, hearing, and dental, the stuff oldies need regularly would cost even more per month. I don't know if I'd have to pay for separate psychiatric coverage that so many add-on Parts would seem to require. So, I'll have to settle for (Part A) as a milestone, and thank the vanquished or abdicated God (depending on who you read) that I would not be returning home to a millstone instead.

Yes, a milestone. I'm officially an old geezer. I made it this far. I beat the odds. Actuaries are angry, bookies aren't far behind. I don't have an RV to go on the prowl with, looking for adventures among the outback Aussies, in a country that is essentially an America-sized desert encircled by trees from coast to coast. Kinda like one of those Dunkin Donuts with Christmas sprinkles. An unhealthily delicious place. I will be looking for an African child to write to, an Mbuti who can be ear and will tell me about life among the vanishing pygmies that took up so much of my time as a lad studying cultural anthropology. O The Forest People! And almost gone now my urge to rage on against the White Monster Moby, and uncertain that Medicare will pick up the fee for my prosthetic leg -- once whalebone, then wood, and now they're telling me some aluminum doo-hickey will have to do, and soon I won't have a leg to stand on. Mbuti, stay free!

I would love to report a warm American apple pie feeling in my heart as I begin my last journey of delight into the inner folds of stretch marks towards my late destination, now with the confidence that Medicare (Part A) brings. But that warm feeling I have may betoken a need for adult diapers in the soon time. I can affirm the need to feel sentimental as I grow older. I yawl back to my black and white days of watching J-E-L-L-O ads on TV (purportedly, my first human word, to introduce some self-anthro-po) and, later, trying to figure out why Hank Williams would sing about someone jumpin' in a "doggone river," if the doggone river was dry. Ouch. I dunno, I'm a logic hound. Back then, in the 50s and 60s, we had Trust, and genuine naivete.

Medicare (Part A and B) makes me think of FDR and the New Deal and the rise of the Social Security Administration with its promise to ensure that ordinary folks in the future would be insured against lost wages due to retirement or disability, with survivor benefits should the worker die prematurely. Such benefits were entitlements, not needs-based payments. Workers saw deductions for this insurance taken directly as a separate "tax" on their payroll, which went into a Trust Fund that could not be molested by alleged legislators in Congress. This tax was not, in principle, meant to be drawn into the budget politics of succeeding partisan governments. It would always be there, whether an administration was Republican or Democrat. But even back in FDR's days, before my time, there were barons and tycoons and monsters of possession who were looking to take down the last three-term president's largesse. Social Security. The program name states its own purpose.

I worked as a claims representative for the Social Security Administration from 1989 to 2003. First in Boston. Then in Rockville, Maryland. I hated the job. And the job hated me. Just the general mess of bureaucracy, rules so spun out you lost your mind trying to grasp a thread of interpretation. We administered both the social security entitlement program (payroll tax-based) and SSI, the needs based program. Neither was a grand program, when you thought about what folks got. But even so, there was an Upstairs/Downstairs quality between the entitlement and needs-based services. You could zip an entitled person through in an hour, and in pay, if their paperwork was in order. An SSI applicant almost always would have more paperwork they needed to bring back in. Bank accounts they closed 10 years ago: Prove it, you'd be forced to say to the Old Girl. That kind of thing.

In Boston, I became aware of what Totalization meant one day when a German Jewish woman applied for benefits and I noticed her arm was tattooed with a long number that almost made me cry. I was studying German at the time, but I wished I hadn't been. When I found out about a special category of benefit called Black Lung was for, I almost cried. People live like that? My secretary was, I thought at the time, a catatonic schizophrenic (wouldn't you be?), and it made me want to cry. I would get my spuckies from a place across the road where the proprietors seemed to hop around like the Mario Brothers. I knew this couldn't be a healthy perception. I once tied a colleague to his seat with masking tape, and when I realized how much extra time I'd made his applicants wait, I almost cried.

In Rockville, I lived among the Deep Staters. I took retirement apps from crazy-eyed CIA agents with paperwork in suspiciously "perfect" order. I dated a woman I picked up in the bar across from the gym I worked out at who worked for the State Department and dazzled me with tittering tales of asset seizures and bank account freezing of suspected overseas hostiles, and who had me meet her parents (like the movie), the dad an old CIA wart with barbed wire eyes that sought to penetrate me and who I always suspected of running a background check when his probes were returned with Moby Dick mirth. I didn't marry her (as far as I know). I soon got relegated to the downtrodden pile -- SSI. sometimes, I only heard SS, I. I shook hands with AIDS victims, Haitians who picked their nostrils, locals who carried roses (you know, hoo-hoo), and twangy people from West Virginia. I got in a car accident, simply by sitting at a red light, and had to be cut out my subcompact with the jaws of life, the CCR tape still going. Then I quit SSA and the USA and went overseas and everything. And here I am now on the Net, a former govo. So, don't tell me....

Last year, I watched the PBS documentary series, The Roosevelts. I expected to come away with a more finished animus toward Teddy than I did. He wasn't entirely the poophead I'd been led to believe he was. (Hopefully, someone will say the same about me long after I'm gone, if I'm remembered at all.) But that aside, I came to understand facets of American history I hadn't considered before after watching it. Teddy was a hero to many back then. Check out this comparison from The Marvelous Career of Theodore Roosevelt (1910) by Charles Morris:

This seems improbable from rumors and limited reads, but there's plenty of evidence to support the splash he made.

In 1906 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech he gratified many on the Left, and offered up an interesting contrast to Barack Obama's acceptance speech for the same prize in 2009, where he seemed to make the case for casus belli on behalf of his handlers. Instead, Teddy spoke of a League of Peace, in progressive anticipation of the eventual League of Nations that was established to prevent another "war to end all wars." Roosevelt said,

Today, this would be received as radical Left socialist thinking needing expunging from the minds of the hoi polloi. CNN would be all over him.

But perhaps merely leavening Teddy's stated enthusiasm for such a peace dividend and body with the fact that he was a fierce enforcer of the Monroe Doctrine, which promoted the idea that America had the right to intervene in the Caribbean, adding to it his Corollary that allowed that self-given mandate to include Latin America -- and, many observers point out, further expanded to a Global Monroe Doctrine, whose actions have been so contemporaneously contentious. If he is now regarded as an a**hole, it may be in the way Napoleon was scourged by disappointed revolutionaries in the end, for going too far and claiming too much. Word is, even Beethoven came to rue his sycophantic "Eroica" symphony.

Teddy was, we're told, FDR's hero. And if Teddy set the standard for the radical reinterpretation of the role of America in the world, then FDR was resolved to stabilize the domestic front. For the purposes of this piece, it's his New Deal masterwork the Social Security Administration that deserves most kudos. The Great Depression that ended the Roaring 20s left people penniless, their life savings in banks wiped clean. Without jobs or retirement funds, soup kitchens became popular dating sites. FDR created lots of ways around this quagmire, including the WPA, but the Social Security Administration guaranteed that folks would have funds in their retiring years, and that if they disabled during their working life they could collect on the social insurance they had paid into during their working life, and that, should they die, their underage dependants got their allotment. Anyway, this is pretty much the flavor and tone of the PBS series, The Roosevelts (2014), still online for streaming, and strongly recommended viewing.

However, I didn't come here to praise Caesar but to bury him, dressing and all. So back to invective. The Medicare (Part A) is, alone, a hoax, without (Part B), because I could land in the hospital and, without the medical (Part B), wonder how I'd pay for the doctors. So though (Part A) is free, you're immediately incentivized to sign up for (Part B) or face the risk of the Out of Pocket Twilight Zone episode, where you spend your hospital days hoping to die rather than face a Credit Report Enforcer who'll f*ck up what's left of your life so fast you'll go around wearing a Groucho Marx disguise. To get (Part B) is easy: They'll take out the $150 per month from your meager benefits. So now, for example, grandpa gets $850 instead of $1000. That's a lot of extra food pantry leftovers s/he'll be eating that month. And god help Grandma if she opens her mouth to meekly complain to the gendarme the world's become.

As mentioned earlier, SSA benefits don't come out of General Revenues but from a separate Trust Fund set aside to be apolitically distributed to seniors of all ilks. But there are members of Congress, egged on by Wall Street handlers, who want to (or have) placed some of these funds in high risk investments and/or who seek to privatize social security benefits altogether. As my boyhood hero Ralph Nader ("2008 Independent for for President; 2004 Reform nominee; 2000 Green nominee") put it decades ago,

That cut has gone up, Ralph. Now they want the whole inshallah-allah.

I was reading a Forbes magazine article the other day -- "Social Security's Trust Fund Will Now Run Out Of Money By 2034 Without Congressional Action." Actually, according to the 2021 SSA Summary Annual Report, that year is now 2033. A more telling Forbes piece came during the Obama administration, when it became clear that something was awry when a budget holdup suggested that Social Security payments might not be mailed that month due to Congressional disagreement over money. As the Forbes piece puts it:

You know what? F*ck these weasels in Congress, with their spit and polish images, narcissism reflected in a leather shoe growing more jackboot by the day. Nader admonished these clowns so long ago it brings me back to my First Love years (Mary Powers outside the Fallout Shelter door, first French kiss). "The idea that Social Security is going to run out of money is simply nonsense," Nader said during his controversial 2000 presidential run. And that was true -- the funds were safe if nobody messed with the Trust. But then along came Give Away Billy Clinton and his (and her) plan to end welfare as we know it and to free up "surplus" funds for investments, and while they were at it to take the "super-predators" off the street -- but apparently not off Wall Street.

Technically, there is no Social Security Trust Fund any more and there hasn't been one in a decade. The Democrats -- Clinton and Obama -- gave it away. When that money got "borrowed" by those deadbeats in Congress to help their investor buddies for kickbacks (how much did Nancy get?) that ended the program, by making it part of the heavily politicized general revenue debates. When Obama said back in 2011 that he "couldn't be sure" SSA checks could go out it was to get the oldies into a blind panic and put heat on the Republicans to get them to concede points in the budget debate. Something the trust Fund was explicitly established to avoid. Maybe you remember all the hand wringing by the MSM? No?

So, I am in possession of my Medicare (Part A) card now. But it is only a milestone, a slap happy toast to my having made it this far across the wilderness of my being in this world. By the time I move back to America, funds will have dried up for (Part A).

It makes you wonder about Trust. Our paper currency still crows In God We Trust, but it's a lie, like Social Security is a lie. God is Dead. And we put two bullets, gangland style, into the back of his head when we were rolling him.

Like Lawyer Bill said, it depends on what your definition of Is is. But the point is moot.