It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad country

(In homage to the late, great film director Stanley Kubrick)

MIAMI – Recently, I wrote celebrating that a dose of sanity had finally broken out when it comes to this country’s dealings with Cuba and Iran. So this might seem like an odd title.

Indeed, looking back, as we get closer to the point of the U.S. political cycle when the media begin to use the term “lame duck” to refer to the occupant of the White House, I realize that Obama has injected an–admittedly modest–degree of reason and fairness into quite a few other crucial issues. Health care. Gay rights. Torture. Illegal wars of aggression.

In many more areas, he has tried to do the same but has been stymied by the fierce opposition of a combination of corporate cannibals, grotesquely powerful lobbies, and Congressional crazies. Gun control. Guantánamo. Global warming. In still other areas, I suspect Obama would have liked to enact more progressive policies but was either dissuaded by conservative advisers (smacking down Wall Street on the wake of the Great Recession) or realized that trying more radical solutions would only bring defeat at the policy and political levels (economic inequality; race).

Still, no president, especially one stymied at almost every turn by the powerful, the mean- spirited, and the crypto-racist, could hope to have reached down deep enough to begin healing, much less curing, the insanity afflicting the nation’s social marrow, its psychic core.

It comes down to one word: violence. By that I don’t mean just the crazy carnage inflicted weekly through the barrels of the ever-proliferating and increasingly deadly stock of guns in these United States, although that’s a major part of it. I don’t mean only the many recent outrageous examples of excessive use of force by police resulting in the deaths of many African Americans and, absurdly, one white graffiti artist in Miami. The fact that these things are still happening almost daily in 2015 is especially depressing, however.

I mean mainly something analogous to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil in reference to the bureaucrats who efficiently administered the Holocaust from their desks. In this case, I mean specifically the routine, taken-for-granted, deeply institutionalized violence that infects almost every cell of the social body.

Let me break it down with an example. Heart disease is the major cause of death in this country. Cholesterol is a major contributor to heart disease. Recently, scientists have discovered a new class of drugs that in many cases is much more effective in lowering cholesterol than the standard treatment.

It’s a game changer and cardiologists are elated. After all, their vocation is healing hearts and saving lives. (Cynics would say their vocation is making money. I am not a cynic, only a skeptic. I believe in the possibility if not the probability of human goodness. Cynics do not).

This breakthrough will help them do that. There is only one problem. Drug companies, which own the patents to these drugs, are charging prices only a Bill Gates or an Oprah Winfrey or the Pentagon could afford (the last out of their petty cash).

In other words, the drug companies have a monopoly on these potential life-savers, and they are using it to ration the drugs to a few patients with the highest net worth. How can a private corporation be allowed to appropriate the most precious products of hundreds of years of work by countless researchers and thinkers engaged in a collective and cumulative endeavor called science? Here the logic of profits and the power of money can determine life or death. This, too, is violence, and it is more pervasive and insidious even than the multitude of drive-by shootings, unjustified police killings, and other more visible types of violence.

I could give examples to the point that the editor and the translator of these reflections would want to kill me. Since I don’t want to inflict torture on them or invite retaliation I will just give a few more examples in the form of recent headlines, mostly paraphrased from memory:

Killings by police in Florida have tripled in the last fifteen years

            Fight over how little to offer homeless

            Every year the Miami-Dade Public Schools forced to educate with fewer teachers

            Florida near the top of nation in foreclosed homes

            Citibank reports record profits

            Judge orders government to turn over videotapes of force feedings at Guantánamo

            Shooting in Charleston: In wake of a tragedy, a eulogy stirs a nation

            Military leaders question rush to arm soldiers in U.S.

            Health Care: Data on price, quality elusive

            Police respond to robbery, find body

            Boom in Upscale Development: Now you can park your Ferrari inside your condo

            Louisiana: At least three are killed in movie theater shooting, officials say

            No charges in Taser death of graffiti artist

            Dreamers must return papers that protect them from deportation

As the late American novelist Kurt Vonnegut would say: “And so it goes.”