Health Reform, the Dog Days of Summer & T.S. Eliot, or: “I do not think they will sing to me”

Apollo and the Cumaean Sibyl, Giovanni Domenico Cerrini (1609-1681)

As summer wears on to an inauspicious health reform end, and we await pronouncements and more posturing from the gang of six (who, through the compromise which is our legislative system, represent less than 3% of the nation’s populace yet seem to have been left holding the relative financial and physical health of the other 97% as well), we are left with the vagaries of legislation inchoate to ponder. Many versions, nothing firm. The debate wandering to and fro and fueled by hyperbole, the desire for “victory” (whatever that may mean), and lobbyist dollars descending upon the corridors of Washington until they have become, in the words of T.S. Eliot,  ”Streets that follow like a tedious argument / of insidious intent.”

And at this juncture, as the debate seems increasingly beyond “the swell of a progress” and into the hands of the true powers within this country, Eliot somehow seems appropriate; if you haven’t read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in awhile, now might be a good time. If you’ve never read it–you have something to look forward to.

Or perhaps The Waste Land is more appropriate–more particularly, considering the demagoguery which has removed end of life counseling from consideration in the Senate’s bill, the poem’s Latin and Greek epigraph:

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.”

Which according to the folks from Norton is

A quotation from Petronius’s Satyricon (first century A.D.) about the Sibyl (prophetess) of Cumae, blessed with eternal life by Apollo but doomed to perpetual old age, who guided Aeneas through Hades in Virgil’s The Aeneid: “For once I myself saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a cage, and when the boys said to her ‘Sibyl, what do you want?’ she replied, ‘I want to die.’”