Hi James,

Thanks for coming out to dinner yesterday. Hope you're having a good trip to PDX. This is a link to the first (okay, second) video in the Asha Logos "Our Subverted History" series I was telling you about. To be honest I haven't actually WATCHED most of these-–I listen to them while working (reading echocardiograms, mostly).

-Han Silo

An Open Soliloquy

My friend of five years, who took me to dinner my last night in San Jose, had an intense monologue for me as two cute, late 20s, California girls discussed relationships with the friends and men who define their entire lives. In a previous meeting, he told me of his family history, of Han Chinese stock, grandson of the banker of a Chinese warlord of the 1920s, who escaped to America. His father, son of the political refugee, became an engineer for a car manufacturer in Anne Arbor Michigan.

“I have a number of friends who are white nationalists—but, being American, their racism is weak, they are not up to it. Admittedly, you are a scary barbarian—look at your bone density, wrist to wrist. You are human, I’ll give you that! Your chattel, in Baltimore, maybe not so much.

“So, I’m on the plane with a Chinese man and really don’t want conversation, especially if he’s a medical slave—after what the medical establishment has done over this past half decade, I don’t want to be numbered among them any more than necessary.

“The conversation starts—he can see I’m Han. Then he finds out I’m full American and he is distrustfully curious. He happens to be another cardiologist; a slave, working for pennies in the east. This costs money, for the city we work in its 40k a year just for an apartment so he can get American certification. These H1B Visa people are spending a lot of money to live here, and for tuition. Of course, he is supposed to support his government. We are flying through Chicago, when the news comes that Orange Man is Bad. He looks at me and says, ‘As you know, back home, I can do and say anything I want; can do stupid things, as long as I don’t make a lot of money. Once I start making money, I have to agree with the ruler.’

“I say, ‘It is not so different here, making money makes one a slave.’

“ ‘There is one difference,’ he opines. ‘At home, one may not say anything bad about the Ruler. Here, one may say anything bad about the ruler, true or not. BUT! One may not criticize THE BLACKS!’

“We have a laugh, and he asks me about my practice. Now, I graduated from Harvard. That is a big deal—except its not. In the end its bullshit. But it is regarded as a huge deal—it gets you in. He finds out that I am not practicing, not billings millions, or tens of millions a year. Doctors don’t make real money. Most of that goes to large corporations, staff; at the end of the year you make mid to high six figures. Here I am making low six figures, and it makes no sense to him. It cannot be explained to him. I have squandered a great boon, in his eyes.”

“You may understand. In my residency, I saw three cases, participated in three case studies of medical incarceration and torture:

“One man is a Latino with no insurance and a large family. There is no differentiation in the brain, it is soup, he’s done. We can keep the body alive, after a fashion. This man is kept on for weeks, at $10k a day, so his family can come visit the body. What kind of afterlife transition is he having? Is his soul stuck in that whirling mass of fluid? Does he know? Is he prey to evil spirits come to seduce him from the way. One is reminded of Robinson’s Jeffers’ poem on the wounded hawk. Largely that was a waste, depending on your metaphysics, his… That is maybe a quarter of a million that could have went to a person with a chance, rather than to host an ICU wake.

“There is one Jеwish fellow who had remarried a non-Jew. The family disowned him, had an actual ceremony of excommunication. [1] I was working at a hospital that was associated with the VA. He was a veteran. He had cancer. Realizing he had little time left, and that the one thing he had, his house, that he wanted to leave to his wife, would be taken for his medical care—he divorced his wife. Then, he has a stroke. He had not yet signed the DNR. His wife knew his wishes, that he did not want to be an intubated, and probably a suffering, vegetable. We simply do not know much about what the person suffers in these “extended” medical states.

“She could not sign the DNR, as he had divorced her. His daughter is brought in and she asks me, ‘Is it possible that he is suffering?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, some of the procedures we do are very invasive. Then there is the property of morphine, that it can cause hallucinogenic states, and, among certain faiths, that state is regarded as an open door for evil forces to afflict the soul.’ She responds, ‘As long as he can possibly suffer, keep the fucker alive.’

“Whoa! Now, it takes months for this to go through the courts, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Finally a judge signs the DNR. Mind you, the spirit that guided this terrible situation, remains the overriding spirit that governs hundreds of millions today. The spirit of that daughter runs policy for some of the most powerful entities on earth. I don’t like being too near that. As bad as that was, I sense that the more money I make, the nearer I am to her spiritual masters.

“Then, there was Mister Springer, who had a DNR. He also had a daughter who was a high-ranking doctor. There had been a rift between them, which she wanted to put to bed before he passed. So, she pulled all necessary strings to keep him alive! Many times, colleagues would tell me that he needed an intervention—all of this in his daughter’s well-meaning, but ultimately selfish, hopes that they could heal their rift before he died. Once, he goes into cardiac arrest. The intern doing CPR on him breaks some ribs, as one does when restarting the heart by hand. Before he can be sedated, he wakes, apparently from the death of coma, looks into my friend’s eyes, and says, ‘This is torture—I have a DNR! I have papers!’

“Mister Springer was a famous case. I think he lived for almost two years in various stages of torment, mostly in a coma or under sedation, except for those terrible intervals of death-raising agony, all for a good purpose. Of sixty ICU doctors, over that extended period of perhaps eighteen months, I was the only person not to get my hands dirty keeping Mister Springer in torment. Now James, how can I, in good conscience, apply my mind, body and soul to MAKING MONEY in such a trade? At best, I would be the odd nail that gets hammered down. This way, I do my clinicals, get paid, travel, have a nice dinner with you.”

…

On the way back to my room Han Silo recited Tolkien and Jeffers in different measures, and opined, “I think that Tolkien, with his creation of the Rohan, was putting Anglo-Saxons on horseback in an attempt to formulate a national myth for the Anglo-Saxon people. He succeeded.”

…

Notes

-1. I recall that Catholics were satisfied with not letting you marry a protestant or something worse in the Church.