Weekly Reader

A person without health insurance can still catch the coronavirus, infect others, and get dangerously or fatally sick, without knowing that they are supposed to be able to go to the doctor about that for free: The Department of Health and Human Services reported last week that it has paid out far fewer claims for Covid-19 testing and treatment for the uninsured than it expected. Everything about the health care system is complicated, hostile, and potentially ruinous for people without health insurance, so it’s not surprising if a lot of people couldn’t shake that experience off within a matter of weeks and months. It’s true that our health care system was not designed to handle a pandemic, but it would be more accurate to say that our system was not designed to provide health care to people en masse, whether that is regular checkups or chemotherapy.

But Debs directed his critique of Christian churches not at their faith in the Gospels, but their failure to follow them. We don’t have to wonder how Debs would reconcile his affection for Jesus’ message with the so-called prosperity Gospel embraced explicitly, and more often implicitly, by so many affluent Christians today. “(T)he dead Christ was metamorphosed from the master revolutionist who was ignominiously slain, a martyr to his class, into the pious abstraction, the harmless theological divinity who died that John Pierpont Morgan could ‘be washed in the blood of the lamb,’” Debs wrote.

LF: To me, this is a feature, not a bug. Bill Maher has been joking about “pedophile island” on television for 20 years; I spoke with someone recently who claimed that everyone on the Upper East Side in society circles referred to Jeffrey’s townhouse as “the veal farm” (a particularly gruesome nickname). However, I think that this is actually typical of these kinds of stories. Part of the fact that it was out in the open, at least partially, is what allowed it to go on for so long.

People get up in arms and say, “I can’t believe people didn’t say anything.” Who was going to say something? Donald Trump? Bill Clinton? Come on now. This is fundamentally not how power works. You cannot appeal to some unnamed, fantastical authority. This is the case with everything: you cannot appeal to an authority when the authority itself is implicated and indeed incentivized to keep this crime — whether it is this specifically or, as we talk about on the podcast, more generally — going. This is what power exerting power looks like.

Inside Out was considered little more than a side project for Zack de la Rocha (yes, of Rage against the Machine), and Rob Haworth, the two guitarists in the Orange County-based Hard Stance. When they opened a show consisting of local bands in the fall of 1988, Hard Stance drummer Alex Barreto was impressed with the way de la Rocha took naturally to being a frontman, after years of being strapped to a guitar. “There was something really sincere in his eyes when he was singing,” Barreto says. “I was really intrigued by that.” Barreto managed to steal the role of Inside Out’s drummer away from Half Off’s Vadim Rubin, and hounded de la Rocha to pursue the band further. But de la Rocha was afraid that giving more attention to Inside Out would cause rifts within Hard Stance. “Hard Stance was his baby, and everyone else in that band had been friends since middle school,” says Barreto. “I was just this outsider who replaced the original drummer. But it was clear to me that Inside Out should happen.”