Sick jokes

In the dictionary between shit and syphilis

Screenshot.

You probably heard that Brian Thompson, the CEO of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, was shot dead — apparently in a premeditated hit — outside the UHC investor conference in Manhattan today.

Did it make you feel sorry for him? Or did it make you feel something else?

Most news coverage of the event has been straightforward, with the expected expressions of grief and concern, presumably genuine but apparently managed by communications professionals. KARE-11, in Thompson’s home state of Minnesota, quotes UnitedHealthcare’s parent company UnitedHeath Group (“We are deeply saddened and shocked at the passing of our dear friend and colleague”), his grieving widow and children (“Our hearts are broken and we are completely devastated by this news”), and even Minnesota governor Tim Walz (“Minnesota is sending our prayers to Brian’s family and the UnitedHealthcare team”).

But much of what I’ve been seeing on social media about it has been less solemn. Thompson was the chief executive of a company that makes enormous profits out of titrating and, whenever they can get away with it, denying medical treatment to sick and — it is important to note — dying people. In fact in that regard they’re worse than most.

We see comments now like “It’s really weird that people don’t seem to be showing the appropriate sorrow for a guy who, through denials of coverage, probably kills a few people a minute.” And even if our ethics are biblical, even if we read “every man’s death diminishes me” and share the sentiment, we may be tempted to make an exception and lean less toward John Donne and more toward Clarence Darrow.

I mentioned a similar phenomenon when Death finally nabbed Henry Kissinger out of the claw machine:

Kids these days know how bad they’re getting screwed, and are in consequence a lot saltier about who and what they perceive is keeping them down, and less likely to observe certain proprieties in reference to them.

In this case their approach seems absolutely correct. Kissinger was genuinely white-hot, gooey-center, triple-decker evil, a war criminal and a mass murderer. Why go easy on him now that he’s dead?

But Kissinger was, like Hitler, a special case, or at least seemed so. If his grieving family confronted me and asked how I dared talk that way about Henry Kissinger’s death, I don’t think I’d be much bothered, though I like to think I’d have the strength of will not to laugh in their faces.

With Thompson, well, if you pinned me, I’d have to admit — I do admit — that, if his responsibility for the suffering of his company’s “beneficiaries” is different from my own responsibility for the sufferings of indigents and unfortunates that I see every day and do not exert myself to aid, it is mainly a matter of degree; that we are all sinners, and it is for God, not me, to judge.

I would admit it. But I’d resent it.

I would resent it not because I’m a monster or insensible of my own moral failings. It’s because all the big voices in our society tell me the sufferings that made him rich were justified by his wealth.

Because this society rewards, in ever-increasing amounts, the spread of misery far, far beyond what I could accomplish even at my most cruel in a hundred lifetimes, and says the real crime is failing to show respect for it.

And, to complete the insult, we are continually asked to count our own lives cheaper than theirs — as my wife puts it, to use our bodies as buffers between these people and any responsibility for their own actions.

I really think that’s why people made jokes about his murder. We don’t know anything about Thompson that would make us, in Darrow’s words, read his obituary with pleasure. But we know UnitedHealthcare. We know there’s no way UnitedHealthcare, a rich and exalted corporate citizen, will ever get what’s coming to it. And so we take our bitter comfort where we can.