Merry Christmas! I am home alone in order to spare my loved ones the sound of me hacking and wheezing and making like a fog horn while using up boxes of Kleenex. But it's not as sorry a holiday as you probably think. Someone else can help the kids set up their techie gifts while in peace and quiet I watch tales of murder on Dateline Extra, refilling my coffee cup during the commercials. If it works out that Theraflu turns to poison when mixed with caffeine in the alimentary canal, my last day will at least have been a pleasant one.
[Later]
I've moved on to new Christmas diversions: reading Twitter while blaring the Ramones. If it's true about heaven, and Lutherans can go there, generations of my ancestors are looking down with disapproval as I listen to Joey.
We're a happy family....
Sitting here in Queens
Eating refried beans
We're in all the magazines
Gulping down Thorazines
We ain't got no friends
Our troubles never end
No Christmas cards to send
Daddy likes men.
I learn from Twitter that, while the distances from New York City to Chicago and Shanghai to Beijing are similar, the former is served by one Amtrak train per day with a travel time of 19 hours, the latter by 35 "bullet trains" per day with a travel time of 4.5 hours. It's common to hear one of our earnest public officials complain blandly about "America's crumbling infrastructure," and I share the sentiment, but a bigger problem is the infrastructure that's not crumbling on account of never having existed here. Could claims of "American exceptionalism" be just a lazy boast sparing us the trouble of keeping up with the competition? Rail service in our country is embarrassingly poor, as is our transportation system in general--but then, our infant mortality rate is, or should be, a source of national shame. Here, according to the CIA's World Factbook, is a partial list of countries with a lower infant mortality rate than the USA:
Japan
Iceland
Singapore
Norway
Finland
Sweden
Hong Kong
South Korea
France
Spain
Italy
Austria
Belgium
Germany
Israel
Switzerland
Netherlands
Belarus
Ireland
Lithuania
Slovenia
Estonia
Denmark
Portugal
Taiwan
United Kingdom
Australia
New Zealand
Poland
Cuba
Canada
Greece
Hungary
Slovakia
Latvia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Serbia
You're edging toward countries we patronize with the term "third world" before "USA" appears on this list, below Serbia but ahead of Chile and Lebanon. I don't think repealing the ACA is going to move us up, unless there were to arise from the resulting wreckage a system of guaranteed national insurance administered by the federal government such as exists in virtually all the big industrialized democracies that outperform us in benchmark measures of public health. A modest proposal might be to postpone our debate over abortion rights until a child born in America has a better chance to celebrate a birthday than a child born in Cuba--modest, because we could do better than Cuba without breaking into the top 25 worldwide. If we were really ambitious, we could extend the truce until our infant mortality rate is only twice, instead of three times, Japan's.
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