In Reply To Gary And Barry
I received email messages from two friends this morning. They registered a complaint to a statement which I made yesterday. I criticized Capitalism as practiced by Big Pharma as being predatory, pitiless. I am an insulin dependent diabetic. Not only is the cost of insulin very expensive, the pricing of many prescription medications has increased exponentially in the last year or so. I might add that having medicare insurance is little help.
My friends are resistant to any critique of Capitalism.
I offer this in reply. It is a stanza from a Wallace Stevens poem entitled Six Significant Landscapes.
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling,
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
2 thoughts on “In Reply To Gary And Barry”
Capitalism is viewed by many as the antithesis to Marxism, as if the two are intertwined codependents by being polar opposites. Some feel if you are against aspects of capitalism, you must, therefore, be a Marxist. This is, of course, nonsense, but people in general tend to believe that if you are not one thing, you must be the other. Rarely, if ever, is this the case, but we want to define others by fitting them into our notions of preconceived assumptive roles. Life is filled with grey areas and when we understand that, we can embrace and understand that good aspects of socialism and good aspects of capitalism are not mutually exclusive. This is where the old and somewhat forgotten arts of compromise, dialogue and mutual respect come into play. Some day I hope we can revive these characteristics, since without them we are doomed to be at each other’s throats for the foreseeable future.
Fish or fowl. Which are you?