On “New York Times decries ‘squandering’ of Medicare funds”
Thanks for writing this article. I am 67 and live in a community with other older people. Many of them are in their 90s and a few over a hundred. Most of them lead active and fulfilling lives. We are all dependent on Medicare.
The arrogance of those who think we should be left to die is astounding. The only justice is that most likely they will grow old also.
JDB
New Jersey, USA
7 June 2011
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Clearly, the elderly, with their selfish health problems are just greedily using up too many resources. I propose that each community have elderly treatment plants, like they have water treatment plants. The “treatment” would be euthanasia; the corpses could be used for fuel to heat McMansions or private jets. Think of the boost to the economy for private industry, with lucrative franchises available!
Vivian P
North Carolina, USA
7 June 2011
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Excellent response to this inhumane campaign. I find the argument that such life-saving medical procedures as a $50,000 cardiac defibrillator implantation are too expensive absolutely despicable. A Wall Street speculator or Hollywood bottom-feeder throws more down on a car, a luggage collection, a yacht party. Our libraries and schools and medical clinics, on the other hand, are prohibitively expensive. God forbid we take care of our grandparents.
What does a drone missile strike cost? According to the New York Times, a single Predator drone costs $4.5 million. Such weapons are killing not only Afghan and Pakistani civilians, but also the ordinary Americans whose health care costs might get in the way of the Obama administration’s million-dollar murder and mayhem.
EG
Michigan, USA
7 June 2011
On “Wes Craven’s Scream 4: How badly did we need another one?”
An interesting review noting both the potential complexity within Craven as well as contemporary cultural forces that have hindered his development in the past as well as the present. The concluding paragraph reminded me of what Richard Brooks mentioned in Patrick McGilligan’s Backstory 2, part of a book series of interviews with Hollywood screenwriters. Brooks mentioned that films of the 1930s and those who contributed to them formed part of a humanist tradition that related to real people and problems. World War II affected that tradition and the blacklist virtually destroyed it.
Concerning Krohn’s reference to that perverse documentary tradition of filmmaking, I would like to emphasize that the much maligned Diary of the Dead (2009) by George A. Romero makes a pointed criticism of that narcissistic form of cinema and how it contaminates the personalities of those who participate in it, making them little better than the inhuman zombies that attack them.
Yes, The People Under the Stairs is quite an interesting film and there is also a radical tradition within horror films of the 1970s that a recent anthology, The American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millenium (2010), has attacked in many essays, reflecting a neo-conservative and postmodernist slant in recent film scholarship. It is very important to emphasize how alternative traditions can combat this tendency but, perhaps, not in contemporary Hollywood.
Tony W
6 June 2011