Corporate villains are usually just regular guys…
Americans want their corporate villains to be like Jordan Belfort — the character played by Leonardo di Caprio in The Wolf of Wall Street — hard-drinking, drug-snorting, womanizers. Or even like Elon Musk — who behaves in pretty loony ways while earning billions.
Instead, most corporate “villains” are just regular guys who take their kids to Little League or to choir practice and remember their wives’ birthdays. Regular guys who have friends and colleagues who like and admire them. Men like Brian Thompson.
I know it’s a huge, enormous stretch to compare Brian Thompson to Rudolf Hoss, the character in Zone of Interest, a NAZI commander who supervised the operation of Auschwitz. Yet, it was clear in the movie that Hoss was just an ordinary guy leading an ordinary life while tens of thousands of men, women and children were being murdered a short distance from his back door. That was the director’s intention — — to show the banality of evil (an expression coined by Hannah Arendt) to express the sheer ordinariness of most villains who perpetrated the Holocaust.
It’s another gigantic stretch, of course, to compare health care in America to the Holocaust. Yet stories of pain and suffering pour out when the subject is breached. The stories come from people who were desperate to receive treatment for their illnesses or disabilities, from old folks needing transportation to another facility or requiring a certain medication that’s not available or who are suffering for lack of adequate care but who keep getting turned down by insurers who meanwhile are earning millions.
The number of disputed or denied claims has risen 31% in the past two years. The implication, I suppose, is that those seeking care are the villains — we’re lying or cheating the insurance companies — why else would our claims be disputed or denied? Why else would it be so difficult to get the care we presumably paid for?
Years ago, I wrote a newspaper editorial when the local non-profit hospital was being purchased by a for-profit corporation and I stated: No one should profit from the misery of others. I still stand by that premise. And it applies to Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) or the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In both cases, you have individuals — usually not the people employed at hospitals or prisons — but the corporate shareholders who earn big dividends and the corporate CEO’s who earn giant salaries plus bonuses when they cut services and increase profits.
Colleagues claim Thompson was genuinely concerned with making health care more affordable and more available. And that may very well be true. But that’s not how he was perceived. He represented someone participating in the wretched scenario of greed that’s overtaken this country. He was not assassinated as an individual (any more than the execution of Rudolf Hoss or Adolf Eichmann could possibly account for the millions of deaths during the Holocaust) but as an ikon of a corporate system that seems to have lost its humanity, that appears to be less aimed at serving people than on reaping profits.
In my opinion, Thompson’s death is sad but not tragic. He didn’t lose his life in the world-wide, everlasting struggle to benefit humanity. He lost his life because he was a competitor in the race for corporate supremacy. His loss will, undoubtedly, be felt by family and friends and colleagues. For many of us, however, we view his death as an aperture through which a tiny bit of good may squeeze — that is, if attention to the murder has the effect of awakening corporate America to the necessity to serve the good of the people rather than to fill their own pockets. ###
