Now if you’re ready, oysters dear …

Based on a character depicted in "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (Hieronymus Bosch, 1504), this figurine strikes me as a fair representation of our healthcare system at work.
Based on a character depicted in “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (Hieronymus Bosch, 1504), this figurine strikes me as a fair representation of our healthcare system at work.

I guess the headline here is that I’ll be among those in attendance when Kiss plays Greenville tonight at the Bi-Lo Center. My first exposure to Kiss was in 1978 during their “Kiss Alive II” tour. That was at Carolina Coliseum in Columbia where, some 20 years later, I saw them again.

The first concert was a revelation and the second was a nostalgic exercise. But tonight? I’m not sure why I’m going. Curiosity, I guess. Or maybe defiance. A bunch of 60-year-old men in monster makeup, one bleeding from the mouth and spitting fire. They’ll sing “Love Gun” and “God of Thunder.” Sirens, explosions. Confetti. They’ll be a hot mess.

But this morning I forgot all about Kiss as I streamed Bill Moyers’ latest condemnation of the healthcare lobby and then his discussion of Wall Street’s congressional clout with Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur and Simon Johnson of M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. Here were three mainstream eggheads echoing, in the polite diction of their kind, the angry rhetoric of so-called “conspiracy nuts” like Alex Jones and Jeff Rense. American government bought and paid for by powerful interests. Healthcare to the highest bidder, and Devil take the hindmost. Corporate predators, shielded from consequence by pet legislators. An orgy of graft. An Orwellian nightmare. Horrible, horrible, horrible.

How high on propaganda must we be that we’re willing, even yet, to believe a single thing we’re told by the mainstream media? Why do so many of us refuse to even consider the possibility that 911 was a Shock Doctrine event staged by the military-industrial (-healthcare-banking) complex? Why do we engage in “affordable healthcare” discussions when every other industrialized country in the world has figured out that “pay to play” healthcare is an abomination? How much more proof do we need that voting is an act of denial?

So I’m having trouble right now gearing up for the Kiss concert. I’m disinclined to rock and roll all night, and as for partying every day … not likely. I live in a plutocratic police state where up is down and black is white and those of us who question consensus reality are regarded with nervous suspicion.