“When I heard that United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot today, one of the things that came to mind was this movie, John Q.starring Denzel Washington,” thedivergentleftist wrote on Threads. He is not the only one to have thought of this film which was released in 2002. On social networks, many have compared the assassin of the boss of one of the largest private insurers in the United States to United with the character of Washington, who takes a hospital emergency room hostage to force the doctors to carry out the heart transplant that his son needs to survive and which he cannot afford.
“The Brian Thompson situation is what happens when John Q overrides negotiations. He just shows up, beats the crap out of the CEO of the insurance company, and moves on. The end! », Wrote Redd Legend on X.
Just as many denounce the jubilant or hateful reactions that greeted the assassination of Thompson, who was part of an industry accused of accumulating enormous profits by refusing to cover certain medical costs of their clients. But the fact is that the CEO’s killer is becoming a folk hero to some Americans.
This reaction is partly due to an “American-style cruelty” to which my colleague from The Press Yves Boisvert alludes this Saturday in a column. But it would be wrong to see it only as a reaction to this hated private health insurance industry. In an opinion piece where she herself alludes to the film John Q. the editorialist of New York Times Zeynep Tufecki writes that we must also see “something more fundamental”.
“We’ve been there before. And it was not a pretty sight,” she adds, referring to the Gilded Age, a period stretching from the 1870s to the end of the 1890s and marked by an extreme concentration of wealth in the United States. .
“This era takes its name from a Mark Twain novel: “golden”, rather than “golden”, to mean a thin layer of shiny surface. Beneath this layer lurked the corruption and greed that engulfed the country after the Civil War,” Tufecki writes. “The era survives in the public imagination through names that still resonate, such as those of JP Morgan, John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt; through their homes, which today welcome amazed tourists; and through television shows with extravagant interiors and sumptuous dresses. Less remembered is the brutality that underpinned this wealth – the tens of thousands of workers, by some calculations, who lost their lives in industrial accidents, or the bloody repercussions they suffered when they attempted to organize to obtain better working conditions.
“The intensity of the political violence that erupted is also less remembered. The vast inequalities of the era fueled political movements that targeted titans of industry, politicians, judges and others for violence. In 1892, an anarchist attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick following a long conflict between Pinkerton security guards and workers. In 1901, an anarchist sympathizer assassinated President William McKinley. And so on. »
The Gilded Age was followed by a period of reforms orchestrated by progressives. The United States must now prepare for reforms orchestrated by plutocrats.
(Photo NYPD)
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