Perhaps you saw an article from the Sunday Times of London, which made the rounds here in the U.S. the other day. The headline: “Daughter saves mother, 80, left by doctors to starve.” It is a horrifying story (find it here). The daughter “says she had to fight hospital staff for weeks” before her mother was given artificial feeding. “My mother was going to be left to starve and dehydrate to death.” Hospital practices are “a subterfuge for legalised euthanasia of the elderly on the NHS.”

That would be the National Health Service in Britain, of course. Some weeks ago, Sarah Palin made reference to “death panels,” which struck many people as absurd, hysterical, and irresponsible. Maybe. But Americans ought to think long and hard before going the way of Britain, Canada, and other such places, when it comes to health care. There are awful questions to be faced. Even Barack Obama faced them, back when he could afford, as he apparently sees it, the luxury of candor.

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Do you remember when the governor of Colorado, many years ago, talked about “a duty to die” and autumn leaves and all that? That may not have been the most ingratiating politics, but that was candor! Socialized medicine is more than “making sure everyone is covered.” It has an unseemly, even a ghastly, side. “Look before you leap” is an expression that comes to mind.

I guess that “socialized medicine” is a verboten term now. Shouldn’t be. And why in the world should socializers be touchy about it?

I believe my favorite name of any group is the name of an anti-euthanasia group. It’s called Not Dead Yet.

A few days before the election last year, I made an observation on the Corner that kicked up a little fuss. (The Corner, as you know, is this site’s group blog.) I had just been to Vermont, and reported what I heard — and what rang true to me: Wealthy people who had moved to Vermont for the skiing and so on were going to vote for Obama and Biden; ordinary Vermonters — native people of modest means — tended toward McCain and Palin. I also mentioned what I had sensed in New York — in Manhattan, that is: The rich were all for the Democrats, and the Republicans I could find tended to be people who worked for the rich: doormen, drivers, and so on. This seemed to me so true as to be almost too obvious to state.

When I was young, I was taught that the Republicans were the party of the rich, and the Democrats the party of the poor, plain and simple. And then when I grew up: It wasn’t so plain and simple. I remember working at golf courses, making minimum wage. And wealthy liberals would come through harrumphing and clucking that the Republicans were the party of the rich. That was a little rich.

Anyway, when I did this Corner note, some people dumped on me, including on our blog itself: How could I be so naïve and sloppy? How sad that I lived outside “the reality-based community”! People like me simply had “different ways of knowing.”

After Election Day, there were reports of a significant shift of the rich to the Democratic party. And, this week, there was a news item that said, “Democratic members of the House of Representatives now represent most of the nation’s wealthiest people, a sharp turnaround from the long-standing dominance that Republicans have held over affluent districts.”

Just kind of interesting, is all. Maybe we can settle for accepting that there are rich people, poor people, and medium people in both parties? And, just FYI: If you run into ski-chalet owners in Vermont, or well-heeled denizens of Manhattan, don’t bet the ranch they’re Republican, if you value your ranch at all.

I know a conservative journalist who works for a mainstream — let’s say establishment — newspaper. (Her presence reflects what I might call a righteous tokenism.) I asked whether there were any other conservatives around. She said only the janitors and the printing-press guys. That rang very true, to me.

May I mention that I don’t have anything against the rich? And wouldn’t mind joining their ranks my own bad self?

You might have seen a story highlighted by the Drudge Report earlier this week: “Apartment residents told to take down U.S. flags.” Find it here. This occurred in Albany, Ore. And it is the kind of story that may make your blood boil, if you have a certain kind of blood. I am not talking about race or ancestry; I’m talking about thought. The Drudge-circulated story informed us, “Residents we talked to who had been approached to take down their flags all told us the same thing: that management told them the flags could be offensive because they live in a diverse community.”

You might wonder what a loss of civilizational confidence looks like: It looks, in part, like this.

May I get back to the rich-man, poor-man thing? I love something I once heard Phil Gramm, the former senator, say. He said there came a time when “I got sick of being told by people who had never been poor what it was like to be poor.” Gramm knew better than they. And that was one of the things that made him such an effective candidate. He could not be cowed or bullied, on class grounds. Really nice.

I should preempt a little mail (or a lot): People will tell me that Gramm was a lousy candidate, because he failed in his presidential bid. Okay — but he got elected in Texas time after time after time. He was a fabulous candidate, who had a bad presidential outing when that bell rang. As he will tell you (and as he told me, in this piece here).

Let me return to the theme of civilizational confidence, and the loss of it. You may remember that, some months ago, the faculty at Brown University voted to change the name of Columbus Day to Fall Weekend — because Columbus is a villain, you know. I did some writing about this. And a reader reported the following, earlier this week:

Hi, Jay:

My wife and I went to the Brown-Holy Cross football game, along with a friend — this was the Saturday before Columbus Day. My wife and I wore “Italia” shirts, and our friend wore a “Ciao, Firenze!” shirt — plus, he equipped his kids with small Italian flags. All of us, respectfully, I think, went about wishing people a happy Columbus Day.

An especially interesting encounter took place as we were entering Brown Stadium. The ticket-taker, an elderly gentleman of Italian descent, commented on how he liked our shirts. I told him that we were wearing them because it was Columbus Day. Glancing quickly right and left, he whispered, “Not around here, it isn’t.”

I find it strange that a school in one of the most heavily Italian cities in the country would choose to ban a holiday that has become a celebration of Italian-American heritage.

Well, that’s almost the least of it, but it is true.

One more thing: Our reader reminds me that the Holy Cross teams are called . . . the Crusaders. Is that the most un-PC name in the country now, or what? Beats “Cherokees” or whatever by miles.