Bill Clinton returns to Arkansas today to deliver what no doubt will be an exceptional speech. With profound logic and perspective, he will outline the essential wisdom of looming health-care reform.
Expect his best oration since the Democratic National Convention last year.
In that one, Our Boy Bill, typically offering policy command with pedestrian accessibility, laid out President Barack Obama’s responsible stewardship of the economy.
Someone in the national media asked if our favorite son’s bravura nominating speech would enhance Obama’s spectacularly abysmal standing in Arkansas. I replied that Arkansas people were perfectly capable of taking pride in a fine speech by their home-grown talent while continuing to despise the fellow he was extolling.
Two months later, Obama got 36.9 percent of the vote in Arkansas. Whether he would have received 35 or 34 percent without Clinton’s speech — we can never know.
So it will be with health care.
This is all about our state’s cussed independence and rural isolation, the latter of which makes Arkansas an ever-more-conspicuous anachronism.
American culture is becoming more concentrated, more metropolitan, more dynamic, more diverse, more interdependent and more reliant on government services for the densely congregated masses.
As more people live more closely, more rules are required.
But in static rural Arkansas, “they just want a good lettin’ alone,” as one-time Clinton vanquisher Frank White put it perfectly in the early 1980s.
It hasn’t changed much since, which is the point.
If you live in the countryside, remote from your nearest neighbor, then you believe that what you do is your business and your business alone. You see your actions as unlikely to have an effect — a direct and immediately detectable one, anyway — on anybody else.
Your septic tank is your septic tank. Your creek is your creek. Your hogs are your hogs. Your chicken house is your chicken house.
And, for heaven’s sake, your health care is your business.
You go to the doctor if you’re sick and you pay for it yourself, either from a health-insurance policy or from your pocket. Or maybe the bill never quite gets paid in full.
You don’t go to the doctor when you aren’t sick. You know that nobody lives forever and that the cemeteries are filled with people who went to the doctor a lot.
You face certain risks. Cancer and heart disease and stroke could bankrupt you or make you a ward of the state. But you take a risk every time you take your pickup around that blind curve on the state highway.
There are no guarantees. There is no living forever.
People in New York City can depend on each other — and ban their super-sized drinks — as much as they want. You’ll take care of yourself, thank you — and of the wife and the kids and the cows and the hogs and the hounds.
To take your taxes and subsidize somebody else’s doctor bills — no thank you. To take somebody else’s taxes and subsidize your doctor bills — no thank you.
In your world, all men should be islands.
Bill Clinton? He turned out all right, you think. You’d take him back as president.
But that’s only because he came from here and understands you. He found out what’s what in 1980 when he raised your car-tag fees and let Jimmy Carter run rampaging Cuban outlaws in next to you.
But he lives in New York now. He’s gone fancy.
He can explain until he’s blue in the face that Obamacare needs to mess with you on your health care in order the facilitate the general good.
You’re not buying it. You want what Frank White said — a good lettin’ alone.
So today Our Boy Bill will explain brilliantly, indeed compellingly, that it will be infinitely better for the American collective if all folks have health insurance. He will make it all seem positively delightful.
But you didn’t get an invitation to the speech. And you’ll be working anyway. They say you can stream the speech on your computer, but you don’t know how. Anyway, there’s grass to cut and hogs to slop.
And you wouldn’t much listen, even if you had the chance.
You like Clinton. But he’s not the boss of you. And Obama surely isn’t.
One final note: You’re outnumbered more every day. That’s sad for you. But it’s good for the folks living on top of each other in the cities, where a good lettin’ alone is quite out of the question — and quite alien to the contemporary dynamic.
John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.