Day 1214 – The Two Forbidden Cities
Saturday May 16, 2020
169 Days until the election on November 3rd
249 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
When I was in China in 1983 someone offered me a little guide to the Forbidden City. It was two yuan, about fifty cents. I bought it. It was pretty standard stuff when you quickly thumbed through the pages. There were pictures of all the regular places within the city, but without anyone standing in front of them.
The first paragraph was your standard historical introduction:
“The Forbidden City was built …”
It was the second paragraph that really got my attention:
“But our great chairman Mao …”
The third paragraph went back to the standard history:
“Built by the Emperor …”
And the fourth reverted to the political PR:
“… Throwing out the running lackies and their yellow dog …”
I love that pamphlet.
When I heard the stories about the CDC and how far it has fallen on the world stage I wondered if they needed to take a similar methodology to survive?
There really is no question about what Donald Trump is doing to our government and our way of life. The parallels to Hitler are honing closer and closer to the reality of what is happening in our country. Does the CDC have to adopt a way of reporting like that pamphlet? Do they have to write in one paragraph: “Our glorious president has declared we must get the economy going and all do our part…” and in the next say, “According to the rate of infection the following states have a rising percentage of …”?
I wonder how long they can hold out. Donald is trying to knock of the heads of the beast wherever it surfaces. Vaccine doctor says can’t approve an unproven drug – Swoosh. Gone. Report says you must follow these steps to be safe, but that won’t let the economy open by next week. Twack, Hidden.
And so it goes.
Commentators and pundits are no longer hiding their distain, calling him an idiot and the worst president of all time. For those who wanted Washington shook up, I’m wondering if this is what they wanted? Did they want to see someone come in and rip apart the very foundations of our democracy?
History is replete with examples of great confusion and chaos followed by a strong man. Usually, that strong man becomes obsessed with the power he wields and the country falls under an oppressive rule. Democracy is not the norm. Feasance and fidelity to the great one is more common.
For the first time in our history Doctors Without Borders has come to our country to help out. This is an organization that typically goes to third world countries.
Here we are months into this pandemic and we are still talking about testing and getting enough Personal Protective Equipment. There is talk about what is the normal way we have handled such things in the past. The president and his cronies have been begged and pleaded with to do what is the obvious, but they refuse.
The esteemed journal The Lancet, a British based international magazine has called for a change in leadership here. They are a public health and medical magazine. They are calling for it not as a political solution, but a public health solution.
The president has said that he doesn’t want to do more testing because that drives up the number of cases and he doesn’t want the number of cases to go up. This reveals, once again, his fundamental misunderstanding of reality. Not of truth – reality. It has been explained over and over again since he said that statement that no testing and getting a result does not drive up the number of cases. The cases are still out there. If you don’t test you don’t know where they are.
There are two ways to fight a virus: find everyone who is infected and separate them from everyone else and keep them separated until they get well or live with the virus in our midst and come up with treatments to help people who are infected survive and get better.
The first strategy is called “containment.” That is what we have always managed to do in the past. That is what the CDC and WHO are designed to do.
The second strategy is what a society does after containment doesn’t work. After the virus is so numerous and spread out that we can’t stop it. In that case, all one can do is muddle along, and hope for a vaccine. But vaccines take a long time to develop and in some cases like AIDS we still don’t have a vaccine. We have medicine that allows people to survive with the AIDS virus but they aren’t cured. They are coping.
Our president is neither following a strategy of containment or of coping.
I am reminded of a joke about a woman who has gone to bed with three different men. The third man is an ad man. (Okay, that’s very 1950s. It’s an old joke.) One of the women’s girlfriend asks what the adman was like in bed. She replied, “he sat at the end of the bed the whole night and told me how great it was going to be.”
That’s pretty much where we are. However, while Trump sits at the end of the bed he is also busy deploying his henchmen throughout the government decapitating the agencies and turning them against themselves and us.
I keep waiting for an adult to enter the room, turn on the light, and all the cockroaches scatter.
It’s up to us in November to make that happen.
169 Days until the election on November 3rd
249 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
PS Worry Dolls, Guatemala. Put all your worries into one of these dolls before you go to bed. Place it under your pillow. Go to sleep. In the morning all your worries will be gone.
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