By the date of this entry, March 24, 2020, you may recall, depending on how far in the future you live, and depending on your interest in history, that we are in the midst of a global pandemic. Yesterday there were nearly one thousand new U.S. cases of Covid-19 and an ungrand total of 550 deaths.
The Orange Red-Hatted Booby is especially nervous, since an economic collapse would probably bring in its wake the drowning of Big Bird's reelection hopes. So he is considering curtailing the shelter-in-place directive for a back-to-work corrective. This is of course in vehement opposition to expert advice. Our tragedy and his is that he truly believes he's a genius and can buck those stuffy scientists for the benefit of all--especially for him and his corporate cronies. Dr. Fauci, the government infectious disease expert, has been lately absent from President Looney Tunes's press briefings--The former has been making the unpardonable mistake of doing his best to correct Trump's lies and errors. I think the President might soon try to jeffsession the man back to Brooklyn. The scientist's ability to speak truth to power reminds me of the last voice of reason, spoken by a man who was about to disappear, complaining of Nazi crimes in the German Reichstag, right before Hitler shut it down. Après Trump, le deluge?
Democracy might be a defective form of government, given the degree of greed, hate, and delusion among the people and their representatives, but it's the best system for protecting civilization's mountaintop settlements, our towns and cities, from going over the cliff. Trump, pushing us in that direction, is already talking about abrogating civil rights to help combat the emergency. This would make matters worse--and, besides, can we trust a man like Trump to decide when the emergency is over? I can already hear him protesting that the election in November--if Biden wins, that is--was rigged.
Democracy depends on an educated public. Our system of education has failed a large segment of the population, and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.
I repeat the obvious: one should get one's information from vetted, scientific sources. Usually a president informs the public with sound advice, delineating scientific directives to combat a medical emergency. What we get from the Mad Hatter is tinctures of sense washed down with a gallon of snake oil. He recently stated that he believed that chloroquine phosphate, used to treat malaria, would benefit those who are infected with Covid-19; he thought that the use of this drug would be, to use his words, "a game changer."
It proved to be a life changer for a couple in Arizona. The woman, totally convinced of what her president said, recalled she still had a solution of the drug which she used to treat ich, a fungus that affects fish. (When I was a kid, I had a collection of tropical fish. In those days, we treated the fungus with methyllene blue, a few drops of which, as per directions on the bottle, turned the water blue. The fungus was easily observable, consisting of white spots, especially apparent on black fish. I remember watching those little white stars swim by on a living patch of pitch black, underwater sky). The couple, panicked about the pandemic, and, even though they had no symptoms, took a dose of a drug meant for koi: the husband died quickly, the wife eventually recovered in a hospital. (By the way, my fish seemed to thrive despite the fungus--until I added methyllene blue to the water, which often caused them to sink to the bottom forever. Yes, "the cure was worse than the problem").
"We can't let the cure be worse than the disease" said a cadaverous-looking stiff on Fox News; the following day, Trump co-opted the phrase, albeit in a lesser version. We gotta get America back to work--after too-brief period of staying at home. I really think he's going to try to endanger the lives of us all, so he and his corporate buddies can prosper.
My heart dropped when I heard the governor of Texas on YouTube, advocating that seniors be willing to sacrifice themselves for what he has determined to be the public good. Let old people die so that he can fly high? This is disgraceful, this is obscene, evil, and sick.
Good can come of this crisis only if the American people stop being programmed consumers and simplify their lives. I have little hope that this will happen. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori? Shut the fuck up, Horace, and have a Coke.
How did our politics get to be so evil? I sometimes feel like one of those educated Romans who escaped to their villas in order to ignore the creeping destruction around them. I am, however, not giving up on the world yet.
Everyone agrees that a stimulus is needed. The one proposed by the Republicans, however, contains a 500 billion dollar slush fund that Trump can use at his discretion to enrich any corporation he chooses.
Trump has reduced his party, more or less, to a bunch of greedy sycophants, but there are exceptions. Romney is a die-hard capitalist, for instance, but he has standards. Trump doesn't.
In a recent press conference, Trump was asked if he were aware of several members of Congress who have recently tested positive for Covid-19. Trump, of course, was unaware of this occurrence; while the reporter was reciting the names of the infected politicians, our dear leader stopped him when he heard Romney's name. "Romney is in isolation? Too bad!" Can one imagine the White Man in the Spite House ever to be fair?
When I was a kid, I loved to visit the Museum of Natural History. I remember being saddened by the skeleton of a dodo:
Waiting for Trump to fly right is like, pace Beckett, Waiting for Dodo. Even if resurrected by genetic engineering, the bird would still be unable to fly.
Now, after many, many years, I look at a picture of all that remains of a glorious animal, which became extinct through human greed and folly. O My God!, I say to myself, that could be us.
Not necessarily. Vote!
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