It was a dark and steamy night at Andrews Air Force Base, where the tarmac lights backlit an ominous tableau for Donald Trump, who glistened in the darkness like an eel. He denounced an American publication that reported he had referred to Americans injured and killed in combat as “losers” and “suckers.” “It is a disgraceful situation by a magazine that’s a terrible magazine,” he bellowed. “I don’t read it.”
On a sunny spring day in 1857, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and others gathered at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. Their purpose: to offer the young United States of America a national publication that could give voice to what many refer to as the American Idea. The bonds that held the northern and southern states together were being stretched to the breaking point and the Literary Founding Fathers searched for a way to articulate the national voice. They decided to create a magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, the publication derided by Donald Trump as “a terrible magazine.”
Mark Twain, whose early writing appeared in The Atlantic, reportedly said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” It did so on September 3, 2020 on the tarmac at Andrews when the most divisive president in American history denounced a publication born out of political division. The Atlantic was founded by men who deplored slavery and feared that the great compromise of the Constitution would prove to be an irreconcilable difference. Their fear was well-founded; the nation convulsed with the Civil War less than a decade later.
Sixteen decades and three years after The Atlantic was born, an American president, rather than working to bind the nation’s wounds, seeks to reopen them. He embraces right-wing fringe groups like QAnon, the Proud Boys, and the Boogalo Boys, while denouncing diversity training as “un-American.” He conflates peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters and looters who are always drawn to large street protests, hoping to fracture the nation along racial lines because he believes that is the key to his re-election. There is no “we” in Donald Trump’s socio-political lexicon: only “us” and “them.” In Trump’s mind, politics is black and white. Literally.
“I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness,” said Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden on August 20th. Two weeks later, Donald Trump showed us what the darkness looks like. His face was cloaked in shadow, backlit by distant beacons and the glaring red tail lights of “The Beast,” the presidential limousine waiting for its oleaginous passenger. Trying to look presidential, he was a creature of the night. Although he had just returned from a political rally in Pennsylvania, there was nothing joyous about the setting. All the scene lacked was excerpts from James Bernard’s score for “The Horror of Dracula.” The President rode The Beast slowly back to the White House. In a movie, he would have returned to a crypt.
Trump’s defense to an allegation that he said hurtful things is to say hurtful things. He is who he is. His dark words come back to haunt him like a “surrender Dorothy” contrail painted onto the political sky, especially when validated by other news sources. All his words, his insults, his lies, his madness, have gathered into a cloud he cannot rise above. Trump lives in perpetual darkness, not just on the Andrews tarmac but everywhere he goes.
“So when it is reported—first in The Atlantic, then by The Washington Post, the AP, CNN, and Fox News—that multiple sources have heard Trump sneer and jibe at America’s fallen,” writes David Frum in The Atlantic, “the reporting rings true because it is consistent with the public record. The denials ring false because they defy that public record.”
The Atlantic also has a well-established record, as recounted by Cullen Murphy in 1994: “The Atlantic Monthly is where war-reporting in the American press was made into an art, with dispatches from Civil War battlefields by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is where, in the 1870s, Anna Leonowens published the remarkable chronicle of her life as tutor to the son of the King of Siam. It is where John Muir published “The American Forest,” which led to passage of the Yosemite National Park Bill, and where Jacob Riis published his first searching portrayals of the American slum. It is where Vannevar Bush and I. I. Rabi and Albert Einstein wrote prophetically about atomic technology in the postwar era; where George F. Kennan serialized his memoirs, and, more recently, his diaries; where Frances FitzGerald probed the agony of Vietnam in an important series of articles beginning in 1966; where Tracy Kidder unraveled the electronic mind of a computer in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Soul of a New Machine.”
It is also the magazine that plunged Donald Trump into the darkness of his deceit and laid bare what an empty husk of a man he is.
“The things reported fit in the mouth you know,” writes Frum. “Everybody knows it’s true, and most especially those who have been tasked to deny it.”
In the autumn of 2020, we are not called upon to deny what Donald Trump has said. We are, however, called upon to remove him from office because of what he said. The task of good journalism, like that found in The Atlantic, is to cast light on the President. Our task is to cast him into the darkness, the unlit repose of history’s worst mistakes, to simmer in the infamy he gleefully wished upon others.
© 2020 by Mike Tully
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Vaccines, Vanity, and Victims
While most Americans hope for a Covid-19 vaccine, its effectiveness will be undermined by ignorance, fear, and scientific reality. President Trump declares a vaccine is imminent. He told “Fox and Friends” today that “We’re going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks, it could be four weeks, it could be eight weeks … we have a lot of great companies.”
This could be his most dangerous lie, which is saying something for a President whose lies fill the media firmament like stars in the sky. He celebrates quackery, insisting people take hydroxychloroquine and musing aloud whether those suffering from Covid-19 should inject disinfectants or receive 100-watt colonoscopies. But that’s political slapstick; his vaccine claim is more dangerous. It has a whiff of credibility and could get people killed if they rely on it and let their guard down.
Vaccine is not the goal; herd immunity is.
If someone breaks an ankle, their goal is not to wear a cast, but to heal. The cast facilitates healing, but is not an end unto itself. A vaccine is a means toward an end: herd immunity. That is why medical researchers don’t see vaccine distribution as their ultimate goal. The purpose is to accelerate the ultimate goal of herd immunity.
Covid-19 dines on lungs. Like any organism, its survival depends on available nourishment. The virus will not attack lungs that are immune because they are inedible. When enough lungs are inedible the virus basically starves and the threat dissipates. There are two ways to become immune: contracting and recovering from the virus, and taking an effective vaccine. The first scenario would likely kill millions of Americans before herd immunity is achieved, if ever. A vaccine confers herd immunity at a much lower cost.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, “Typically, herd immunity is achieved when 70% to 90% of the population is immune through natural infection or vaccination.” “Herd immunity depends on the contagiousness of the disease,” notes the Association of Professionals in Infection Control and Immunity. “Diseases that spread easily … require a higher number of immune individuals in a community to reach herd immunity.” Covid-19 is a highly contagious disease.
Vaccines are not 100% effective.
Not every person who receives a vaccine will benefit. The World Health Organization states, “no vaccine is 100% effective.” According to a recent article by Mark Terry in BioSpace, “the seasonal flu vaccines’ efficacy has ranged from 19% to 60%.” How effective must a potential Covid-19 vaccine be for the Food and Drug Administration to approve it? “First off, the agency indicated that it will require the vaccine be at least 50% more effective than a placebo in preventing COVID-19,” writes Terry. “That’s not likely to dazzle people, putting it about equivalent to a flu shot’s effectiveness in a good year.”
If a Covid-19 vaccine is 50% effective, the entire uninfected population would have to take it to even approach herd immunity. That won’t happen for the following reasons:
Skeptical public
Why should the public believe a President who said, as recently as yesterday, “I don’t think science knows?” “Anxieties over the process that could lead to the approval of a coronavirus vaccine are escalating,” writes Gregory Krieg on CNN, “as President Donald Trump, desperate to stamp an end date on the deadly pandemic nightmare, ratchets up pressure on top regulatory officials to deliver him a medical and political panacea ahead of the November election.” “The Trump administration’s meddling,” he adds, “overt and by insinuation, also threatens to set off a vicious circle that could undermine public confidence in a vaccine.”
Anti-vaxxers
Before Trump, there were the “anti-vaxxers,” who oppose vaccination for philosophical, political, or spiritual reasons. “(O)pposition to vaccination has existed as long as vaccination itself,” notes a study in historyofvaccines.org. A California State Senator, also a physician, experienced anti-vaxxer sentiment last year. “In 2019, I authored Senate Bill 276 to provide public health oversight over medical exemptions to vaccines,” wrote Dr. Richard Pan. “The attacks became even more personal. Anti-vaccine extremists held signs and wore T-shirts with images of my bloodied face.” He was physically assaulted twice. Then anti-vaxxers were joined by allies. “White supremacists joined anti-vaccine extremists demonstrating outside the governor’s office, and my spouse and children received threats requiring additional security measures.”
The King and His Cult
Many have observed that Trump would rather be king than president, including Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post and a reader of The Fresno Bee, who wrote, “I no longer have any doubt – this man running for president would prefer to be crowned king.”
Trump’s cult regards him as a monarch. He told journalist Bob Woodward in April that Covid-19 “is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance.” He added, “It is the plague.” Nonetheless, the President held dangerous indoor rallies in Henderson, Nevada and Phoenix, Arizona. He risked his followers’ lives to bask in their adoration, and they placed themselves in danger to honor the man who lied about the danger in the first place. That’s it how goes with kings and subjects; their lives are not equal. The last Hawaiian monarch, Queen Liliuokalani, wrote in her autobiography, Hawaii’s Story, that her ancestor, Kamehameha IV, shot and killed his secretary. “No legal notice of the event was in any way taken;” wrote the Queen, “no person would have been foolhardy enough to propose it.” A king can shoot anybody and get away with it, in a Hawaiian palace or on Fifth Avenue.
Any hope a Covid-19 vaccine will return the nation to normalcy is false. The vaccine is unlikely to be more than 50% effective. The anti-vaxxers and skeptical public will suppress the number of vaccines administered. And the disease will spread like a prairie fire because Trump campaign events resemble re-enactments of Jonestown. You can’t drink Kool-Aid while wearing a mask.
Too bad there’s no vaccine for stupid.
© 2020 by Mike Tully
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