Roger Cohen has an amazing column today. In the first part, he offers a familiar lament about the deracinated hyper-individualism plaguing modern society. In fairness, just because the argument is so familiar and he’s cribbing it from some French book doesn’t make it wrong. Still, it’s a pretty plodding treatment of the subject. Cohen even reverts to the old trope about his recent jury-duty service introducing him to so many different kinds of Americans and how that was one of the rare moments when he got to interact with them:

In a way, it was — a relief from being alone on a phone or in front of a screen. We got to know each other’s tics and, having dealt with killing and rape and assault and insurance fraud, we all embraced at the end. Oh unthinkable act, we’d done something selfless for the commonweal, learned to listen to each other, accepted differences and argued our way to decisions.
America could use more of that kind of experience. As it is, everyone’s shrieking their lonesome anger, burrowing deeper into stress, gazing at their own images — and generating paralysis.

Maybe it’s just me, but this strikes me as near-parody, the ridiculous, self-serving moral preening set against the backdrop of strawman b.s. How many people really mock others for the “unthinkable act” of sitting on a jury? But hold that thought. In the very next paragraph we get this:

Which brings me to health care: Crunch time has come on a question central to the nation’s future, where an acknowledgment is needed that, when it comes to health, we’re all in this together. Pooling the risk among everybody is the most efficient way to forge a healthier society. That’s what other developed societies do. And they don’t have 30 million plus uninsured.

Cohen then runs through some tendentious pleading for health-care reform and concludes with this:

The public option, not dead, would amount to recognition of shared interest in each other’s health and of the need to use America’s energies and resources better. It would involve 300 million people linking arms.
Or we can turn away from each other and, like Narcissus, perish in the contemplation of our own reflections.

So, we need health-care reform because it will make going to the doctor more like sitting around waiting to be picked for jury duty! Cohen doesn’t even realize how terrible this analogy is. Never mind that jury-duty service is mandatory and people who try to duck it can go to jail (that doesn’t quite jibe with the feel-good spin liberals try to put on health-care reform). Jury duty is also boring, tedious, and supremely inconvenient. Only refugees from Hands Across America get a thrill from contemplating “linking arms” with 300 fellow Americans just for the sake of doing it. Moreover, no one — and I mean no one — will feel the thrill of social solidarity when they pay higher premiums, wait on longer lines, or find out that their doctor will no longer treat them.

There’s a shocking amount of condescension involved in Cohen’s sense that everyone would enjoy and benefit from “slumming it” with the commoners as much as Cohen apparently did. I have no problem with the folks who show up at jury-duty waiting rooms, just like I have no problem with the folks waiting on lines at the DMV (the folks behind the counter are often a different story). But this “for your own good” case for health-care reform (it will make you less narcissistic!) is just idiotic. Does anyone really believe this coffee house blather about how if we don’t want to make our health-care system an analogue to jury duty we’re choosing to “like Narcissus, perish in the contemplation of our own reflections.”

If that’s really how Cohen feels about the issue, the answer is a lot simpler than a total overhaul of the health-care system: Get out more.