Monthly Archives: August 2016

Accidental Death and Dismemberment

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Just looking at the dismemberment breakdown in my Accidental Death and Dismemberment policy. It’s not the kind of thing I read everyday, but still, it’s kind of entertaining in a grisly way. Losing an arm, say, or a leg is good money. Losing both is better money. Even better if the arm and leg are on different sides of the body. I remember reading in a book about the Civil War that  General John Bell Hood lost an arm on one side, a leg on the other. They had to strap him to his horse. That always seemed kind of pathetic for a big, tough Texan like John Bell Hood. I also read somewhere that he died after the war in one of those yellow fever epidemics New Orleans was notorious for. That would have been worth less money, dying from yellow fever, than losing that arm and that leg. But of course he lost that arm and that leg in a battle, well, two battles. Hood always liked to be in the thick of things. But his Accidental Death and Dismemberment policy would not have covered either amputation. Gotta read the fine print…no wars.* He should have thought about that before galloping like a fool headlong into the fray. He had to rely on veterans benefits, if they had those back then. Well they did, or would have, except he was on the losing side. No veterans benefits for them. They lost their country, their peculiar institution, and their veterans benefits. All they had left was Dixie, and you can whistle that till the cows come home and you ain’t gonna get a penny. Look before you leap, I say.

Those Accidental Death and Dismember plans–AD&D in the trade–really get into the details. You make a few bucks losing a finger or two. A thumb is a bit better, losing a hand better still. Same goes for toes and a foot. But those are still chicken feed compared to having the whole arm or leg lopped off. Losing both really does cost the insurance company an arm and a leg. They must hate that. The rep would be in the operating room, if he could, trying to sew the things back on.

The policy gets a little weird above the neck. Loss of speech, hearing, vision and maybe even smell are covered. You lose just one eye or one ear you earn some pocket change. If you lose one ear and one eye–one of those how the hell did I do that things–you get a better deal. They list all these in the policy, and all the other body parts, with the pay out for each. They run down the page in declining value. Dying is winning the Super Lotto, of course, the big wazoo of AD&D. That first D is what you aim for if considering your prospects in an accident from a strictly financial point of view. The arm/leg thing comes next, then an arm or a leg all the way down to a measly finger. You look at your finger and realize how little it’s worth. It wiggles back, showing you what it can do.

OK, this essay is getting under my skin. And that skin isn’t worth anything, insurance wise. So I’ll stop right here and leave you, dear reader, free to go watch Dexter. Personally I can’t watch Dexter. I find it disturbing and disgusting and wonder what is wrong with all you people. Then again, Dexter the serial killer is giving his victims the big wazoo, insurance wise. I doubt they’d appreciate that, however. Besides, they’re all bad guys and bad guys never have life insurance, so never mind.

 

* Actually John Bell Hood would have known all this too well, since he was the president of a life insurance company after the war. Imagine that. The company was ruined by the yellow fever epidemic that killed him. Killed him, his wife, a kid or two, and left a mess of orphans. Ironic now, tragic then.

 

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Gavrilo Princip

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[2014]

(I’m not so sure about this one…Held onto it a few months. Then figured what the hell. So here it is….)

I’ve just been reading one sad article after another about Israel and Gaza and Palestine and murders and retaliation and things blowing up.  And I’m thinking again how none of this would be happening if it hadn’t been for Gavrilo Princip and his little gun. It was a warm summer day in Sarajevo a century ago. He came out of nowhere, fired twice, killed the heir to the Hapsburg Empire and his loving wife died too. They died in each others arms.

Gavrilo Princip

Gavrilo Princip

The police grabbed Princip. He was tried, found guilty and sentenced to the maximum sentence of twenty years. There was no death penalty in Austria-Hungary for those under twenty one. Not even for regicide. He died of tuberculosis in his cell within a couple years. No matter, he was no longer any importance, none whatsoever. He never did get to see how his war came out. He just rotted his life away (literally, his tubercular bones were disintegrating) completely forgotten as the world came down all around him. He had some regrets. There are interview transcripts. He said if he’d known all this would happen he never would have shot the Archduke. Never at all. He would have stayed home deep in books–he was quite the reader–and just let the royal procession pass by. He had always wanted to be a poet anyway. A great Serbian poet.

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Winston Churchill on funding the arts

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Perhaps you’ve seen this quote lately:

When Winston Churchill was asked to cuts arts funding in favor of the war effort, he simply replied “Then what are we fighting for?”

Alas, Winston Churchill never said that. I’ve heard various accounts of how it was he never said it–one blamed Kevin Bacon because he knows everybody–but Winston never said it. He so never said it I laughed the first time I read it because it seemed so ludicrous. For one thing Churchill would have starved his own grandmother to defeat Hitler. For another almost everyone artistic was drafted into the service or being used for the war effort in one way or the other (many of the young male leads you see in British war-era films had been wounded and discharged already.) Thirdly, England was in hock so deep to the United States even before we entered the war that it eventually had to sell off its empire to pay us back, so arts funding would have meant nothing compared to, say, India. And finally I wonder if most of Britain’s arts funding already came from the aristocracy. There were enough of them. Still are.

In a country that didn’t even have enough bomb shelters for its working class population, detouring scarce funds instead into the arts would have been a travesty. Those were different times, desperate times. We can’t even conceive how desperate. We should be thankful that we can have debates about arts funding. That’s an option of civilizations not facing annihilation.

However, Winston Churchill did once say that a man who blew the trumpet for his living would be glad to play the violin for his amusement. And I have never been able to figure out what the hell that means. But he was a painter, and you how they are.