Puritan Life Insurance Company: Fill & Download for Free

If you live in a nation like Canada, or any other social democracy, it is hard to fully understand what it is like living in the U.S. You can visit here, but you really can’t understand it unless you have spent a long time here—the kind of capitalism experience in Norway and the type experienced in the U.S. are totally unrelated. I spent some time in Canada one summer, and I have traveled in Europe. The feeling you get in America is that you are fundamentally alone, that you are at the mercy of this giant buying, selling, and producing system that is made of steel and glass, and humans are easily chewed up and spit out of it. You realize you don’t matter, and people don’t care about you. They don’t even pretend to try. Studies have shown that America is the loneliest nation in the world. It is a very atomized society. Most of our lives are spent going between our air conditioned homes into our hermetically sealed cars to travel to work. From there it is rinse, wash, repeat.Driving around you see the embodiment of American culture—the convenience store. Filled with beer, soda, candy, chips, cigarettes, coffee, and gum, this is what we use to make it through our day. The quick sugar buzz from some soda, maybe a hit of a cigarette, we use these things to strengthen our nerves to keep going.If you are white, living in a suburban setting, there is enormous pressure to maintain your lawn at an impeccable level. And if you don’t abide by this requirement, you never hear the end of it. Many whites like to create things called “homeowner’s associations” when they live in housing developments. These are organizations headed by the most uptight white members of the community. They ensure that any terrible violations of white Protestantism are not violated, which includes things like leaving your garbage can on the front porch, parking in a visitor parking spot, or taking your trash out a day early. There is zero room for nonconformity among these modern day Puritanical hell holes.Everything is incredibly homogenized. In the major cities the downtown is usually okay, but outside that it is a slum, because the factories and businesses have been sent overseas. Some of these areas are in such disrepair the city razes buildings all the time. There is constant work undoing what used to be a city. And as this happened people moved further and further out. You have to drive everywhere, and the stretches of miles you must pass to get to another housing area is amazing. A great deal of your life is spent driving on highways, cluttered with billboards, selling stuff you don’t need, and stuff you wouldn’t want—until the advertising worked on you.At night TV is absolutely mindless. Commercial after commercial. It feels like a giant wasteland, where you wish you could even find a touch of humanity. You get a distinct uncanny feeling—the feeling that you are in some strange parallel universe, devoid of any and all real people or things. Even when you go to the doctor the medical complexes are located in the middle of slums, but the medical buildings are extremely rich. They are like Southern plantations. The business of getting well is exactly that, a business, and you are reminded of it by the giant number of workers who process insurance forms and bill insurance. It is a Kafkaesque experience to see them greatly concerned about all the details involved in billing your insurance company. When you see the doctor it is also a dehumanizing experience, very clinical. I always remember the smell of hand sanitizer, and the cold metal of the doctor’s examination table, with a thin sheet of plastic and some roll over paper.Everything in America is monetized, even church. The only place you can go that isn’t trying to suck money out of your pocket is the library. It is one of the few places where you can just be, without the expectation of giving someone money. At restaurants people don’t look at each other, they just stare at their phones.The reason for all of this is America is fundamentally about money. That is the only binding force of American culture. But in this system you know your value is based on whether you can buy, sell, or get out of the way. In America, poor black men are sent to for profit prisons, their slave labor permitted there by the Constitution. Working class white boys are sent to the military, to become gun fodder for the Empire. In this system you can try to be intellectual, try to care about other things, but the implicit message you get from everywhere is that nothing really matters but making money.It is a system that is so antisocial, so disgusting, and so unnatural that you feel that anything would be better than this—anything. You just want to get away from it, out of fear that you will become like it—an automatan. Even if it meant having less money, less luxury, at least your life could be rooted in something real, something authentic.When people say that America is the greatest nation in the world, that it is exceptional, and that capitalism is the best system in the world, it actually makes me feel ill to hear it. If this is the pinnacle of humanity, then we best go back in time.It isn’t just me. I have lived outside this country for long periods. I have seen other ways. The best way to describe America is this:“Fuck you buddy, I’m eating.”And when this is all you have to live for, every day is the same as the next.

Montreal without doubt, fickle mistress that it is over Toronto, the heartless, unforgiving master. As anyone of a certain age witnessed, Toronto benefitted from hundreds of thousands of Montreal’s best and brightest with the flowering of a misbegotten political dream, in the mid-seventies, led by banks, insurance companies & others, demonstrating that money is, indeed, a coward. Prior to that event no Montrealer would think of going to that Puritan backwater other than to visit an ailing aunt in Dundas.yes, we say TGIF whereas they say TGIM, and there’s no question that if you measure your success in life by your salary alone, Toronto’s your spot, but without breaking down all the elements that give life joy, Montreal is far ahead. Now if we could only get rid of those Cones - just wait five years!

Are you kidding? Think of the many lives cut short by cigar smoking - George Burns and Milton Berle come immediately to mind, both cut off in the prime of life. Look at Fidel Castro. He was a healthy and vigorous man until his late eighties, when he was brought down by over sixty years of continuous cigar smoking, (or maybe it was diverticulitis). What about the athletic career of Michael Jordan? Maybe he could’ve been a great baseball player if only he didn’t smoke those Cuban cigars all the time? Then, I think of my first photography teacher. A great guy, generous, and with a real lust for life. Never saw him without a cigar clenched in his teeth, even in class. He was only 94 when he died, leaving behind a young widow. Of course, I’m not entirely sure brain aneurysms are caused by cigar smoking, but it seems reasonable to conclude he might’ve lived a longer life without cigars. Right?People who smoke only pipes or cigars (not cigarettes) actually have lower death and disease rates overall. Occasional cigar smokers are actually considered good risks to insurance companies because they have lower death rates overall in the population. Pipe smokers tend to live a little longer than non-smokers, too. People who chew tobacco have oral cancers at about the same rates as non-tobacco users, as long as they don’t smoke cigarettes. You can always trust an actuary to get to the statistical truth.The reasons for this ought to be obvious, but we’ve all been fed a line of bullshit for a long time. Just stay away from cigarettes, if health is your main concern, because inhaling smoke into your lungs is bad for you. You don’t inhale pipes and cigars. And, maybe don’t chomp on those cigars, (my own unscientific opinion), just smoke ‘em.If all that isn’t enough to persuade you to quit, then consider how much happier the nannies, the puritans, and the health-obsessed people in your life will be. It’s very annoying to see smokers enjoying tobacco, so have a little consideration for them! And, even if cigars were going to take a few years off of your life, what would give you the right to make that trade-off?