Archives:Boomer Reactionaries in Subprime Suburb of Victorville,Calif.Rage Against Giving Healthcare

[Jefferson23]

Class War For Idiots / February 7, 2012

From the Archives: Boomer Reactionaries in Subprime Suburb of Victorville, Calif., Rage Against Giving Healthcare To Their Kids And GrandKids…

By Yasha Levine

In the spirit of the Millennial vs. Boomer debate raging in the comment section of Connor Kilpatrick’s great piece, “Thirty More Years of Hell,” I’d like to republish my account of an anti-healthcare town hall meeting I attended way back in 2009 in the subprime Southern California suburb of Victorville, in which I attempted to capture the fear and horror I felt watching old white boomer hicks froth at the mouth and tremble with rage at the slightest hint of extending to their kids and grandkids the same sort of government-run healthcare “entitlements” that they’ve been sucking on all their lives.

Thirty More Years of Hell
http://exiledonline.com/thirty-more-years-of-hell/


It’s from September 10, 2009. Enjoy:
TOWN HALL MEETING IN THE HIGH DESERT: A CIVIL DEBATE AMONG MURDEROUS RETARDS
By Yasha Levine

It was a hot day, still 98 degrees at 6 PM, as I zoomed through gridlock on my freshly fixed 1979 Kawasaki KZ-400, squeezing between the monster trucks and lifted SUVs clogging one of Victorville’s main drags, pouring sweat into my helmet and leather jacket on my way to an anti-Obamacare “town hall” meeting at the local community college.

I thought I knew what to expect when I got there. Like everyone else in this country, I had been watching the packs of deranged tea bagger types and their astroturfing overlords dominate the healthcare reform debate like a pack of retarded howler monkeys in heat. But TV hadn’t quite prepared me for the reality of it. You can’t really appreciate how fucked this country really is until you see, as I did, hundreds of blue collar Americans sync up their primitive brains in a paranoid racist-hick seance, channeling White Power ideals through Reagan’s damned soul.

This Obama-bashing meeting was brought to the people of the High Desert courtesy of the Representative from California’s 41st District, Mr. Jerry Lewis. No, not the “Great Balls of Fire” guy. This one was a different type of performer: a great wads of cronyism political scam artist. In the two decades Lewis has served as this district’s rep, he’s made quite a name for himself as one of the most corrupt members of Congress, using his position as a ranking Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee (one of the most powerful committees out there) to “steer hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks to family and friends in direct exchange for contributions to his campaign committee and political action committee.” But as I was about to find out, Lewis’ constituency was so crazed they made him look less like an uber-successful used car salesmen and more like Mr. Mackey.

in full: http://exiledonline.com/from-the-archives-boomer-reactionaries-in-subprime-suburb-of-victorville-calif-rage-against-giving-healthcare-to-their-kids-and-grandkids/

[JDPriestly]

1. What government run health care entitlements does Levine

think that older people have "sucked on" all their lives. I support the healthcare reform bill, but it is factually wrong to accuse older people of having received government health care that younger people do not received. When I was a child, the poor pretty much had to rely on the generosity of the medical profession for health care. I am unaware that there were any Medicaid programs or the like. Besides, very few people qualified for Medicaid of any sort in the good old days. This story is premised on a lie.

And this ageism is disgusting:

You can be sure that when the Baby Boomers are done with it, Medicare will be sucked dry with nothing left for us youngin’s. And they know it. They want to maximize socialism for themselves while they can, and leave none for the next generation.

The Baby Boomers contributed huge amounts to the Medicare fund. They are now totally dependent on the system. If younger people want to have Medicare when they retire, they need to protect the system now -- from payroll tax cuts and joblessness and imports of millions of foreign-made I-Phones. If you want Medicare, you have to pay into the fund now and insure that America is economically self-sufficient enough to be able to afford Medicare 40 years from now.

If we keep importing cheap stuff made overseas and spending great portions of our wealth on foreign oil and wasteful energy sources, then your generation will suffer terribly.

The fools in Victorville are annoying, but insulting them in pieces like this article will not enlighten them or win them over.

This article is a waste of time.

[Jefferson23]

3. You may not appreciate his irreverent style, but he is not premising the story on a lie.

I am astounded you think anyone at this rally would read anything outside of Fox News, if that..you
think Levine's target audience at The exiled will one day include these people is ridiculous. There was no lie, what he said was,

...I felt watching old white boomer hicks froth at the mouth and tremble with rage at the slightest hint of extending to their kids and grandkids the same sort of government-run healthcare “entitlements” that they’ve been sucking on all their lives. (end)

"the same sort of", which is not to be denied, he goes further here:

But the evil corporate shills didn’t bother me as much as the old people with their old-person smells. There they were, barely moving and ignorant as all hell. They are part of “sun revolves around the moon” demographic, but they are not stupid, survival instinct-wise. The joke of this is that they’re all living on government healthcare plans—the very thing they had been mobilized to this auditorium to fight! But they were not ignorant or hypocritical. They were fighting to protect a limited resource.

Consider these fun Baby Boomer facts: Right now, there are about 75 million of them. By 2020, there will be one baby boomer for every five Americans, yet they’ll account for half of all visits to physicians. As they age, they’ll siphon off more and more money from Medicare, spending more to keep themselves alive than they ever put into the system. The amount of healthcare that these offspring of the “greatest generation” will need is astounding. Right now, just as many Baby Boomers are beginning to retire, there are about 80,000 hip fractures a year. Ten years from now, that number will grow to 500,000.

You can be sure that when the Baby Boomers are done with it, Medicare will be sucked dry with nothing left for us youngin’s. And they know it. They want to maximize socialism for themselves while they can, and leave none for the next generation. (end)

His link if you had read it: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=14528


Yasha was featured on the front page back then, of the Daily Press, here is a snip..it is linked within the OP I posted:

Observing Victorville: Gonzo journalism from the “Key City”

September 08, 2009 5:26 PM

In coming weeks, Levine said, “I’ll be taking a closer look at a few of the extremely costly and downright shady development projects thought up by the city in the past few years. Projects that were almost designed to fail at taxpayers’ expense.”

He has much to say, for example, about the absurdity of federal tax dollars bailing out Goldman Sachs as a corporation, while local tax dollars are still on the line for a contract with the company to finance the struggling Victorville 2 powerplant.

“But in the warped, ‘pro-growth, pro-business’ logic of a city on the frontier of Southern California’s urban sprawl,” Levine writes of these projects, “the plan made perfect economic sense.” (end)
http://exiledonline.com/yasha-levine-is-front-page-news-in-victorville-3/


Levine's lack of compassion for the ignorance and bigotry of this group is understandable to me...it is not about ageism, in and
of itself..sheesh.

[madrchsod]

2. reminds me of our local long term republican house critter

for a republican he`s done a pretty good job getting the pork back to our district. now he has to court the crazies in the party that has dismissed for the last 25 yrs.

i know it pains him to actually agree with crazed republicans knowing full well he`ll spend every dam dime he can get his hands on. i guess he is hoping they don`t notice.p;

[bemildred]

4. This guy sounds like an asshole.

Insults and stereotypes start to finish.

I'm a leading edge boomer (1945), I have seen EXACTLY this same argument made against the "Greatest generation" vis-a-vis the Boomers; it's a divide and rule ploy to get us to fight with each other rather than demand our rights in a unified way.

PS: it does have some truth to it, but it's not something the Boomers did, and it's still happening, the message to the post-Boomer generations is "you're next!".

[Jefferson23]

5. I don't believe his blanket of condemnation is meant to cover an entire generation, not at all.

He is speaking to this group at this rally who represent not only ignorance and bigotry
within the Republican party but greed. I had mine, so screw you.

[bemildred]

6. OK, I read more of it, not all, but more.

The basic thrust of his argument is fine, his analysis of the problem in terms of "generational analysis" is twaddle, as he admits and then proceeds with anyway. But most of all he is wrong about how we got here, and from what he says elsewhere he ought to know better, since he does discuss it as a class issue, which is what it is and always has been.