"So you start off in charge, you're an independent operator,
you don't work inside the system, but then you figure out the system
thinks it includes you, some moron must have slipped in that clause
while you weren't looking, so you go talk to him, and it's a pretty
congenial meeting, although he does come across like a company man, and
then later on you get an engraved invitation to come to a party. The
food is very good and the people seem reasonable in a sort of washed-out
way, but the upshot is, you can come in out of the cold if you want to.
They'll take you in. You can sit in an office and make twice as much as
you were making on your own. That's what they tell you. The only thing
is, you have to sign a piece of paper that says you were never born and
you're actually a desk ornament. They assure you it's just a formality
and they've signed the same paper, and look, it hasn't hurt them..." -- The Magician Awakes
When I was running for a Congressional seat in 1994, I was also in the
middle of a fight to preserve access to alternative health care, against
FDA attack-and during that process, I was enlightened through meeting
various members of the Pod People species, who had their own ideas about
what health freedom meant.
These were high-IQ idiots who had some sort of access to politicians and
academics. They were expert compromisers and sell-out artists, who saw
their mission in life as something on the order of "integrating"
everything they could get their hands on.
In coming years, they would become hangers-on at Center for Alternative
Medicine (CAM) (later renamed to Center for Complementary and
Integrative Health), the new office of alternative health established at
the National Institutes of Health. Think "seedy tout at the racetrack."
CAM was, for many people, the realization of a wet dream. Finally, the
federal government, gripped in a new cloud of Love, was going to admit
that alternative medicine existed and could be "integrated" into "real
medicine."
Yes, yes. A new day was dawning. A day of recognition. A big gold star
would be pinned to chests of chiropractors and naturopaths and
acupuncturists. O joy.
"You like me! You really like me!"
In these meetings with the Pods, I observed their loafers, their pressed
jeans, their safari jackets, their carefully arranged thinning hair,
their casual smiles. Holy shit, these were recent incarnations of the
frat boys I had gone to college with:
"Everything's good. All we have to do is craft language the politicians
and bureaucrats can understand and accept, and they will reach their
hands across the divide, because, in the final analysis, all that
separates people is a diversity of background and experience. We can
integrate that."
The sub-text was:
In the coming years, alt. medicine will be recognized. Professorships
and bureaucratic jobs and positions at hospitals will spring up out of
tax money, and we can dig into that stash and find cushy work, if we
play our cards right. But don't rock the boat. Don't attack the feds.
Don't go after the FDA. Don't be "negative." Love may not conquer all,
but it can worm its way into government budgets.
And that was right and true. These days, the professions of chiropractic
and naturopathy and acupuncture have, at the highest levels, sold their
souls to allopathic medicine and federal regulators. Therefore, for
them, the fight for health freedom is over. They think they've actually
won.
In the 1960s, this whole process was called co-opting. Government or big
business would find ways to absorb ("integrate") its opposition.
Whereas, once upon a time, the naturopaths were tough seasoned fighters
who were holding government at bay and plowing ahead with the work of
healing, now they have their own bureaucrats cashing checks and
enlightening the young dewy-eyed generation of practitioners on how the
game is played:
"Hey, it's all legal now, baby. Don't sweat it. (cough, cough) I mean,
we are in conference with major players at NIH, and a task force has
been created to elucidate the work of two prior study groups, and in
this regard we have secured ex-officio membership on a sub-committee to
examine the psychological effect, on medical doctors, of reading
published studies on minimal supplementation with extremely low-dose
Vitamin C during the first five hours of head colds which were preceded
by a tingling sensation at the back of the throat and a genital
twitching in rabbits...in fact, and you'll really like this, at the new
complementary-medicine wing of a hospital in Northern Alaska, some of
our fourth-year students here at the naturopathic college will be able
to apply for positions as interns applying a citrus concentrate to
toilets in the men's rooms on the third floor, to assess the results,
vis-a-vis germ eradication, against the old toxic cleaning solutions..."
And that about sums up what will happen to the chiropractors and the
naturopaths and the acupuncturists up the road. Chiros will adjust the
spines of hard cases in homeless shelters who refuse Thorazine and then
publish their findings on government-issued toilet paper.
Gradually, the great golden promise of integration will come true, only
not in the way this new brand of alt. practitioner expects.
I have news for the New Age Pod alt. bureaucrats. Once you're in with
the government, you're all the way in. You take the scraps they leave on
the table. You learn how to love the scraps. You primp and pump up your
pretended achievements and cash your checks. That's your role. When
you're called on to sell out further, you do it with a smile. You kiss
the ring. And you come to realize your profession of natural healing has
become a cartoon of itself. You live in that cartoon and you make your
little speeches and mount your plaques on the office wall. When you want
more money, you stand in line at the federal trough and wait. Bullshit
is thy name.
What the Pods never learned is that, when you negotiate with your your
opponents, you are you and they are they. Since that is the case,
especially when you are coming from a position of relative weakness,
your "victories" are wholly a function of who your opponents are and
what they really want and what they are willing to do to get it, in the
long, long run. Can I make it any simpler?
In this context, integration means you will eventually find yourself in
quicksand holding a long stick, and the person on the other end of the
stick will be your enemy. Then, he can re-negotiate everything.
Immediately.
Yes, Virginia, there are enemies. They exist. They aren't just an
illusion fostered by "old discredited modes of thought." You don't make
them vanish through some puerile trick. For starters, you don't put any
stock in their promises.
Instead, to begin with, you make public their bad deeds.
Come on. Wake up. This strategy goes back to the cave men. The first
time it was used, a guy stopped his girl friend from marrying some oaf
when he said, "Hey, Oaf Dude rolled four boulders we use for bonfires
into his own cave. I've got him in the act on video. Look."
This was my strategy when I was running for Congress. I went on the
offensive against the FDA. The material at my disposal then, as now, was
voluminous. It's in the public record.
The Pods castigated me for my approach. They saw this as a hindrance to,
yes, integration. They told me we were in a new age, and now the
preferred method was extensive negotiation. Conflict resolution.
One night in 1994, a few months before the passage of the so-called
Health Freedom Bill in Congress, which I was assured would protect us
against the FDA forever, I sat in a last-ditch meeting with a dozen
other people. We wanted to draft an amendment to the Bill that would
nail down the protections we really needed.
A towering hack from UCLA, whose specialty was apparently Brainstorming
and Conflict Resolution, a fat domehead who was as interested in health
freedom as a scuttle fish is interested in the orbit of the moon,
chaired this meeting. He had been invited in as an expert.
So he asked us all to introduce ourselves, one by one, and after that
little excruciating exercise, he said he would write, on the blackboard
behind him, each of our ideas about why this amendment was important.
Well, of course, we already knew why it was important. Otherwise, we
wouldn't have come to the room in the first place.
I saw he was going to take a couple of hours, moving us through his
hoops, to get to the heart of the matter, so I said, in my usual
gracious style, "This is stupid."
He looked at me. He tried to smile.
I said, "Let me summarize. We're here to draft an amendment to the Hatch
Bill that will give us more guarantees. We can write this sucker in
twenty minutes. I will write it. Does anyone in the room want to go off
and write his version? Then we can compare."
One hand was raised.
"Good," I said. "Do it. I'll go into this next room here and type out mine. Let's take a break and come back in twenty minutes."
So that's what happened, and we did hash out an amendment, and of course
nobody in Washington wanted to give it three seconds of time, because
all the elements of the Hatch Bill had already been agreed upon, behind
closed doors.
After our meeting, a man in the room who knew the UCLA hack came up to me and said, "You were pretty harsh there."
"Really?" I said. "If we'd followed his little Chinese torture
technique, it would have taken us six hours to come to the same place we
are now. Who did he think he was dealing with, second graders?"
The man frowned.
"That's not the point," he said. "Brainstorming has its own style, and we needed to follow that."
"Why?" I said. "We already knew what we needed. We're not building a rocket ship here."
"Okay," he said, "but this meeting was supposed to be about integrating
our ideas, so that, in Washington, the same spirit of integration might
prevail and get us what we wanted."
"By osmosis?" I said. "That's quite a leap of logic. Do you have a church?"
"What?"
"A church."
I looked him over. He was lean and bronzed. I imagined he did push-ups
under a tanning lamp in his home gym. He was crinkled around the eyes,
probably from forced smiling, a practice I don't normally advocate. His
combover seemed to be threaded with minor extensions. I couldn't be
sure. He was wearing one of those bush jackets with the many pockets.
His nails were done with transparent polish.
He wasn't smiling now.
"I sense a church here," I repeated. "With a doctrine derived from As So
Above, So Below. If we're nice here tonight, 'Washington' will
mystically pick up the vibe and be nice. Anyway, you don't remember me,
but I was with you at a meeting last month, and you were pushing for a
committee to study the amendment, which would have put us so far behind
schedule the Bill would have passed before we got our pencils correctly
sharpened."
The man blushed.
"Don't worry," I said. "You're winning. You're going to get a gig in
whatever structure comes out of this war we're waging. You'll always be
the good guy in the room. The folks in Washington like that."
And by God, he did get a gig. Within the swelling bureaucracy of alt.
medicine. A series of gigs. I was told he's a brainstorming expert, and
when he holds meetings of his minions, he bores them so greatly a few of
them want to push him out a window.
But he's simultaneously for health freedom and for "sensible government
regulations," and he's for cooperating with the FDA and he's for
integrating medical drugs and nutrients-judiciously, of course-and he's
for increased government inspections of organic farms and he's for
genetically modified food, with some (again, "sensible") restrictions,
and he's for 15 rather than 49 doses of vaccines for babies, and he's
for bringing naturopaths and chiropractors and acupuncturists into the
fold, and drafting new "standards of practice and external monitoring"
for them.
I believe he calls himself, on occasion, an ex-hippie who still applies
the lessons of his youth to the exigencies and realities of our time.
I'm thrilled. (Integral integration with integrity.)
With Pods like this working for us, our job is complete. We can take
heart and look forward to a new century of love, during which our
great-great grandchildren will be birthed in organic oak vats where,
synthetic genes imparted, they'll bathe in a solution that delivers 60
or 70 vaccines at the moment of emergence into the world.
A chiropractor with an advanced degree will clean out the vat and dump
the contents into a drain, mop the floor, and take out the garbage.
Outside the baby factory, a fully licensed government naturopath will be raking the leaves on the lawn.
A PhD acupuncturist who's done post-doc work at the Mayo Clinic will be
smoothing out the sand and picking up candy wrappers in the kiddies'
playpen.
They'll stop working and look up as the hospital dietitian, who researches processed-food injectables, rolls by in her Mercedes.
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