The Corpuscle

You guys have probably already figured this one out. I'm sometimes a little slow on the uptake. My mind wanders a twilight landscape.

Like most of you, I've been concerned and upset by all this talk of "taking care of the judges", and Ann Coulter's stuff about liberals, and Santorum's and the new Pope's stuff about gay people, and the religious right's stuff about atheists and feminists, and all that kind of stuff. And what with all the news about protest marches (riots?) going on in China over the Japanese textbook thing... Somehow it all put in my mind of the infamous Unit 731.

Unit 731 was one of the outfits responsible for much of the human medical experimentation that was done by the Japanese military in the late 1930s through the end of the war. Most of the, um, "work" was performed on Korean and Chinese prisoners, but there were some downed American airmen who died from the ministrations of Japanese military surgeons and "researchers" as well.

Here's the funny thing about human experimentation. Whenever I meet someone who tells me, "Oh, I'm a human vivisectionist", I always ask them, "Gosh, how can you bring yourself to do that kind of work?" The answer is always the same, of course: "Oh, well, it's not as if we look on a patient as being one of us."

... [M]ilitary medical personnel no longer concerned themselves with the well-being of their patients, especially those who were of foreign nationality. The humane treatment meted out to Russian prisoners during the Russo-Japanese War as well as German prisoners captured in World War I was no longer a benchmark for Japanese medics.[fn] This approach was abandoned in the third decade of the 20th century. Instead, when engaging knowingly in unethical practices, military medical personnel believed they were performing these experiments on inferiors. They felt free to try any test of stamina, for instance, to determine the minimum quantity of food necessary to sustain life for these "creatures,"[fn] or to undertake any form of surgery on these "test animals"[fn] that their imagination provided.

(Military Medical Ethics, Vol 2, Chapter 16, "Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the World-War-II Era", by Sheldon H. Harris, PhD., p.10.)

So at first I was freaking out about all this de-Americanization the Republicans were doing to me and all my compatriots. I mean, this sort of behavior is what eventually gets you into the vivisection trade. And, you know, doing other stuff like seeing if you can transfuse horse blood into people. By the way, it doesn't work. Don't try it.

Oh, and you can also get yourself to the point of deliberately infecting them with anthrax which, I will admit, would be pretty handy for various Patriot Act purposes.

Oh! Handy! Pardon the pun!

But then it hit me.

One of the reasons health care costs are so high in this country is because the drug companies have to spend so much on Research and Development, and because there are so many government safety regulations, and because of frivolous law suits, and because of dead-beats who crap out on their $50,000 medical bills just because that amount of money wipes them out financially. I mean really!

It's brilliant! This de-Americanization of judges, liberals, gays, atheists, feminists, and so on. You guys already saw this coming, right? Like I said, I'm slow sometimes.

It's the Republicans finally getting their long-awaited Health Care plan off the ground! Think of the money we'll save! No more R & D costs -- just round up a few faggoty liberals, run your drug tests, or try out your new and nifty Republicans-only surgical procedures, and hey, if things don't go just the way you'd planned them, who cares? Just tweak the drugs or the surgical techniques a bit and try them out on a fresh batch of atheistical judge-types.

Boy, I really have to hand (hand!) it to those Republicans. I never would have thought of it. Lots of good test results. Never any government regulations. No unpaid medical bills to further burden our shiny new bankruptcy system, and best of all... No frivolous lawsuits!!

And at long last I finally understand the old saw: "Hate the sin; love the sinner." They love us on account of when we croak, we render up such good experimental results.

And, yes, it's true... I'll likely be one of the human experimentation subjects. But I'm a liberal. I'm a progressive. I don't mind doing my part to help others. It takes a village to hold you down while they remove your stomach.