How Trump & Fantasy Scr@wed Us

Powerful article on Politico's site, Inside America’s 2-Decade Failure to Prepare for Coronavirus, by Dan Diamond. In it, Mr. Diamond looks at how we were warned that something like Covid-19 was coming, but the prophets were often heeded only late in the game...or not all. When Mike Leavitt, Bush's secretary of health urged Americans to prepare for Bird Flu, everyone from Right Wing pundits to late show TV hosts --among them Jay Leno-- joined in a merry game of mocking him and his "alarmist" warnings.

However, until recently, Presidents did tend to pay at least some attention to their medical experts. Trump is another matter entirely. For him, science was entirely subordinate to the fantasy he wished to project upon the universe. (Not that the Left has any business being smug on that score. After all, postmodernism--which is widely believed on the Left-- has spent several decades assuring itself and others that "reality is socially created." Tell that to someone dying for lack of a ventilator.)

But, now, Trump and his fantasist enablers, and all those billionaires who were certain that everything would be fine if we just drowned government in the bathtub, have run into a situation in which no amount of fantasy can trump (sorry) reality, and in which a government small enough to drown in a bathtub is also one which cannot protect us from serious threat of death and economic depression.

So, for heaven's sake, let us vote Trump out of office, and let us make certain that nothing like him returns there, and let us (maybe most important of all) pay more attention in future to people like Mike Leavitt and less to people like Jay Leno.

After all, the lives we save may be our own.

Pay Attention

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About me: I’m a writer and former journalist who has published material on everything from computers to the Jazz Age. (Among my small claims to fame is that I interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)

Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.

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