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Saturday 23 May 2020

Tort Reform

"Maria Guadalupe, you had best stop telling the fibs!"  Mama Maria only ever spoke the language of the land she'd adopted during her daughter's infancy when she'd become cross with her.

Maga hated it. Not because she wasn't fond of being reprimanded, but for the accent she imagined was the foundation on which all those television characters were based. She'd once dared to try and lure the exchange back to her mother's nativity; it only made the situation worse.

"Speak in the English! We are living in San Jose of the USA!"



Maga didn't understand herself to be fibbing, in any case. Certainly not this one. But because she understood that her mother imagined the fantastical claims of her little girl would be the foundation of her rightful ridicule as a failed parent, she began back then to aspire to grow up to become somebody who could finally prove the reality of her adolescent observation. Maybe it would turn out that what the church regarded as an apparition, something her mother had not called into question until it had personal ramifications, had instead been the result of the daylong casting of the shadow of the ascension. With that settled, not only would her truth be confirmed, but the scholarly acclaim would make her rich, which would get her mother the treatment she so desperately needed.

Mama Maria believed much of what was said to be great about her chosen people and, with her back to that window, those draperies setting the scenery, she would go on about an additional ad nauseated aspect she'd bought into, which had to do with those who take that greatness for granted. When they weren't cut from the industrious cloth of their origin, they were lazy and litigious.

What Mama Maria had not considered was that these were two sides of the trust encrusted medallion, complementing the proverbial daydream bestowed upon its citizenry by birthright. Though it did occur to Maga, in those so many words, that only being of California and not from it, which never limited her mother's sense of responsibility, put a cap on her benefits, nonetheless.

And thus would Maria Guadalupe grow to know the irony of the things she'd been made to memorize in elementary school. The dates and the names and the things that the names had said. After twenty years of education and an additional twenty divided between public service and private practice, "The buck stops here" revealed to Maga that the deal never changed hands, which also meant that the minted faith in God was for gullible people like her mother who toiled at the pyramid's base, while the all-seeing eye represented the kind of control that those at the top would continue to strive for.

With that always in mind, she saw nothing exceptional about the rule of law, of this, the only land she would come to know — except for its being increasingly about the rights of the ruler, rather than some mythological set of adaptive understanding toward who's to be ruled upon. And given her witness to the tricks of mass manipulation, primarily prone to cruel entertainments, it was hardly a surprise that a common view among the commonest of this folk should be that their employer not be held liable for entrapping them to death, especially where this would afford an industrial continuance of the practice into perpetuity. A majority of respondents to one or another poll had thought the term was "gameful employment". Jobs.

Among saviors that've ascensions ago sailed, Maga's thinking was that if your primary carer had been made immune from their initial promise by an insurer that provides more coverage for the doctor than the patient, then the insurer should be held to account. For her part, Mama Maria had preferred dying to having anyone else pay for her illness, even if her illness had been the result of the wilful misdiagnosis of another ailment, the result of treatment by elimination, which, stated more accurately, entails beginning with the cheapest approach first and climbing that ladder up to and not including where the cost exceeds the benefits.

The definition is a matter of perception, of course, which perception had been coursing through the veins of Mama Maria, which immunized her of the capacity to accept the sort of assistance offered to her, by her daughter no less, whose professional capacity was limited well enough anyway by the law of the land. Jesus on a goddamn taco, Mama Maria probably saved her the pretty penny!