Hey LIND,

Please listen. I think you could make your article much better if you were to examine the way that productivity itself has changed since the beginning of the century.

Fomenting hatred for Sarah Palin shades all to easily into disdain for the white lower-middle class because these people no longer have an automatic iconographic association with productivity.

Right or wrong, the perspective NOW is that white middle-class Americans are no longer productive. Productivity has moved overseas. Now the Jacksonian

Democrats are percieved by their urban counterparts as lazy, overweight, falsely entitled, and yes, racist.

What's more, they foolishly vote against their own economic interests, time and time again, on racist and homophobic lines. Abortion too, is seen as a way of maintaining 1950's iconographic balance of power. Girl is at home having babies, not out with the sharks.

I AM NOT CLAIMING THESE VIEWS ARE CORRECT. Most likely the obesity problem stems from everything but laziness. What I am saying is that the ICONIC beauty of the working class in America is sullied. And nobody, not the rich Republicans, or the bourgey Democrats, feel like it's a story worth saving.

Cheerio.

-L

I need to agree with Ron Paul here. The man is a strange mixture of utterly sober reasoning and erratic wackadoodle ideas, but who isn't to some extent? So I don't hesitate to agree with him on this point:

What we had before the collapse was HARDLY a "free market"

PLEASE address this point before you totally discredit yourself. I usually like your pieces, Mr. Leonard!

As you read the following, you will think I'm making it up. Kate, Tracy-Clark, Joan?

I don't know if any of you read these comments ever, or if you are too busy doing your jobs to read what some of the loony-toons on here have to say. But it's true.

It will sound like science fiction (to borrow Monica Crowley's favorite phrase of late) it will sound like an Orwellian Nightmare.

I have a very good friend, whom I shall not name, who is currently in medical school at UPENN, a top-tier school. S/he is working in pediatrics at the university hospital currently, as part of his/her curriculum.

Hear this: NOW there is a fast-growing trend towards saving earlier and earlier premature births. Births that only ten years ago would have been miscarriages, we can salvage with existing technology. Sounds promising, right?

S/he watches in horror as medical colleagues brag and one-up each other, "I delivered one at 23 weeks," "Well, I delivered one at 22 weeks!" etc. etc. Why horror? Read on...

Now for the hard part: A "baby" born at 22 weeks doesn't have a GI tract. Doesn't have a fully formed brain. Much of the brain is just fluid. It has ill-formed poorly functioning organs.

You say, Surely no "human" can survive without a GI tract! But, no, nowadays we have a special formula that comes in IV bags. It circumvents the need for digestion by mainlining the afterproducts of digesting into the blood. I didn't ask how these "babies" poop. Maybe a synthetic colon.

So, these babies probably die after a few weeks, no? Nope. Some of my friend's "patients" are in their teens. They have lived their lives in a hospital. They can't eat or shit. They can't talk (or think). They can't do anything but lay and moan with dull soulless eyes. They SEEM to be in constant agony.

The thing about Terry Schiavo is that, at least you know she had a life before she died. These vegetable-humans have never lived. This, is "LIFE" in its most abstract form. It is not an abstraction. Humans CAN be reduced to whatever they are insofar as they merely live. Really.

And those IV bags I told you about. They cost $4000 dollars each. To feed one of these "people" takes about ten bags a day. And that's just the feeding. YOU do the math.

So, these "babies" are born to the super-wealthy, who for whatever reason can't let go of their loss, of their reproductive failure, right? So be it. Eat the rich. Screw them, right? Wrong again. These babies are most often born in emergency room situations, to poor uneducated mothers with no health care.

The one protection we do have in this country for the sick is emergency room care. So these mothers come in with early contractions, and the baby that should be a miscarriage is delivered, but because it is technically (in the most abstract sense) alive, it would be murder for the doctors to kill it. They could be sued, criminalized, jailed.

So they must keep it alive.

So who pays for the billions of dollars of care that goes towards vegetable humans in the USA? You guessed it. YOU do.

Hey Salon,

The typos in this one are kind of out of control.

White make?

Care vs. Case?

I mean, technically they are minor. But they are pretty content-heavy

How uncool is urban America going to be when it becomes as clean and orderly as Zuerich, CH?

You're not going to get decadent and belligerent rap lyrics out of a sleepy suburb either.

And how are young hipsters supposed to 'gentrify' communities when there aren't any ostensibly bad neighborhoods?

Geez. Obama needs to think this through.

American culture consists in the suspended tension between cities, train towns, and the suburbs where no one can GET to you.

Public transportation means gross seedy people are mobile. These divisions exist for reasons that run really deep.

And if it weren't for the geographic separation, the "ghetto" wouldn't be a "ghetto" (look it up in the dictionary. We're talking about putting America in a blender here, if we're going to increase wealth and mobility in urban centers.

That's scary, right people? ;)

-Lilian