The health crisis in America, being highlighted in real time by Mr. Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko” and Kevin Trueadeu’s books of defection from the ivory towers of the intellectual bourgeoisie - “Natural Cures and More Natural ’ Cures‘,.’ expresses a very real crisis in America that goes beyond the bourgeois shape of production or the bourgeois shape of what constitutes health and crisis. There is no need to be stuck in old forms of class strife and modes of thinking characteristic of the middle and last phase of industrial development. The health crisis as the crisis of obesity in America opens the door to a different kind of dialogue. The health care crisis is far to often defined in ways that rivet on the ability of the individual to access the medical super/infra/structure or the modern money economy. Roughly 45 - 50 million people in America have no form of health insurance - money, to access the system. To his credit, Mr. Trueadeu puts forth a more sophisticated concept of the health crisis as a combination of wrong eating, overeating, a drug culture and a wrong science of the human body perpetrated by an economic and political system driven by big pharma, the food industry, the national food outlet (chains), the professional medical establishment and its various associations; and government in the form of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and all the representatives in Congress funded by these economic and political groups. A system of national health care allowing individuals access to the medical industry, even if they have no money, is desirable, but cannot solve the health care crisis because it is rooted in the drug culture, wrong and over-consumption. If wrong consumption (eating) and over-consumption, eating to much, are the alpha and omega of the health crisis in America, and it is, then the fundamental solution to this crisis is self evident and obvious. The sheer obviousness of this proposition is the reason it has escaped critical examination by thousands of generations. There is no rational explanation for the rampant use of prescription and over the counter drug use in our society other than profit motive. There is no rational explanation for the production and sell of most food-stuff (eatable material) in our society other than profit motive. Trudeau’s books present a devastating indictment of the food, medical and pharmaceutical business and corporations and how big pharma controls media outlets. And then presents evidence of the payoffs - bribery, used by these industries to create and pass laws to protect their profits. Moore‘s movie “sicko“ does a reasonably good job is putting on the big screen the cash sums American politicians receive from the “medical and sickness“ industries. To criticize the health industry is to challenge a complex of profit making industries that rival - if not exceed, the energy sector. The health industry is not just hospitals and criticism of the industry is not a knee jerk reaction to modern medical technology and pharmaceuticals. Much of modern medical technology and drugs can play a legitimate role in society in saving the individual facing an immediate catastrophic life ending crisis. However, the health crisis in America does not arise from a series of catastrophic events where 300 million people face immediate death and require extreme measures. The health care crisis in America is a crisis of wrong and over consumption, today expressed as a crisis of obesity, and a historically wrong view of the human body itself.
IN THE BEGINNING: Genesis 1:28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." 29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. Genesis 2:8 Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground--trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. _http://bible1.crosswalk.com/OnlineStudyBible/bible.cgi?word=Genesis+2§ion =0&version=niv&new=1&oq=&NavBook=ge&NavGoto=Go+To%3A&NavGo=1&NavCurrentChapter =2_ (http://bible1.crosswalk.com/OnlineStudyBible/bible.cgi?word=Genesis+2§ion=0&version=niv&new=1&oq=&NavBook=ge&NavGoto=Go+To:&NavGo=1&NavCurrentChapt er=2) Rev.22 [1] And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. [2] In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree (herbs, I.e., green leaves) were for the healing of the nations. _http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=5444797_ (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/k/kjv/kjv-idx?type=DIV2&byte=5444797) Although, a more than less self taught student of the materialist conception of history, including Biblical interpretation, as a child I grew up in the Christian church and specifically what was then called “the Negro Church.” To this very day I enjoy much of the material in “the Books of Moses,” as well as various ancient writings like the Books of Enoch and Macabees 4 . Wrong eating and over-consumption contains some of the oldest stories of history in most cultures. The most vicious disputes one will encounter in America is over food and even questioning what our society puts into its collective body is to draw the fire of the minion of the bourgeois order. Discussions of peak oil, energy sustainability or global warming pale in comparison. The concept “wrong food” and “wrong eating” as a scientific and theoretically sound framework of history inquiry is worth pursuing. The ideological and theoretical reflection, stating that human history begins with the hunter-gatherer, rather than the gathering society, is increasingly unsustainable and devoid of science. Most so-called scientific facts governing eating and health is a combination of historical ignorance, outright lies and today clever propaganda by corporations in pursuit of profits. Healthy life expectancy in America has been falling and recorded for the past 30 years. On this issue of our species history beginning as meat eaters, religious theology is light years ahead of many of the philosophies and theories of the materialists, because it suggests and admits in scripture that our species existence begins in the garden metaphor, or as a species of gatherers, then wheat and cereals. Hunting flesh and domestication of animals comes later in our history. Religious theology world wide, and various ancient concepts of human existence, also admits that something called “purified flesh” is to be striven for as the highest state of bodily and spiritual enlightenment. Religious theology however suffers from its own bodily corruption and degeneration. Something as simple as “purified flesh,” which to a child should mean “purifying the flesh - body” is converted into a philosophic concept and belief in redemption on the basis of mental contemplation. This is not to say that meat is the worst thing one can eat, because it is not. It is to say that 99% of what we consume as food today, is not the meaning of food at all, but substances and products that serve as vehicles for profit making. In the language of Marxism, these products become so much “ bourgeois need” and simultaneously serve as its condition and precondition for reproduction. Real food can of course be sold and is sold for profit but that is not the point at all. The point is that access to real food is controlled and the masses are offered eatable stuff - products, which not only makes them sick and unhealthy, but ensures they are trapped in the logic of what appears as addiction. This addiction arises and sustains itself on the basis of wrong eating and over eating. Mr. Trudeau’s books explain, on the basis of insight of medical practitioners and healers, in laypersons terms, how to break this specific cycle of addiction and obsession. What the various voices of these medical practitioners and healers do not explain is why and how the body works and why it has the ability to consume virtually any “food stuff” . . . and then rid itself of toxic build up. A more than less detailed explanation of the body’s tube like elastic system, based on concepts of the late Professor Arnold Ehert, will be presented later. The inescapable drive of human history at all stages is the struggle for food and subsistence, against a real and perceived scarcity, and its resultant expression as the collision of ideas and the struggle of classes. This is going to get complicated because the most radical amongst us find it difficult to escape the inherited and reshaped ideology of our historical bourgeoisie. In America and indeed the world market, the modern bourgeoisie inherited wrong and insane thinking, rooted in thousands of years of wrong consumption. This struggle for nutrition creates all the seemingly metaphysical passions driving human history in the world in which we live. The struggle for food and sustenance is a historically evolved form of the struggle for nutrition. This is not to say that the metaphysical does not build upon itself and then mediate itself. Why do we do what we do and behave as we behave and eat what we eat? You are what you eat my friend and this basic static proposition is not going to go away or be explained away by intellectual gibberish. Why? ************************************** Get a sneak peak of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
