A Date with Destiny

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Our president has a date with destiny. It’s not one he could brag about, like his dates with porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy playmate Karen McDougal. He can’t grab his date by the pussy, because it has none. His date is a spiky little virus that can take over human cells and make copies of itself.

Already Trump’s date has killed over 214,000 people in our country and over a million worldwide. It’s infected 7.6 million people here and 35.2 million around the globe. Take either figure—deaths at 21.4% or cases at 21.5%—and you can see how far out of proportion is our nation’s suffering to our less than 5% of the world’s population.

The fateful irony only grows from there. There is no known cure for Covid-19. There are only palliatives. The remdesivir that Trump reportedly has been given only shortens hospital stays, and then only for certain patients. There is no vaccine.

But there are preventatives. Masks work. They dramatically slow contagion. Compared to the costs of modern medical care, they’re dirt cheap. They’re easy and simple to use. Social distancing is even easier and cheaper: it costs nothing but situational awareness and a bit of self-restraint.

Yet Trump has made both masks and distancing objects of derision. To do that, he’s deployed his boundless ego, his cheap machismo, and his so-called “populist” political revolution.

So Trump’s date with destiny was voluntary and foreordained.

Unfortunately, his date is also our date. Now the infection is spreading through the White House, our Senate and other high levels of our government. Among its chief causes are Trump’s disregard for science, inconsistent leadership, and reported pressure on all within his personal orbit not to wear masks or to stop normal socializing. So our government is going along on Trump’s date with destiny, and we are all in for a bumpy ride.

We don’t now know how the date will end, for him or for us. Trump could die, leaving the nation and the upcoming election in a state of chaos. He could survive but be permanently impaired, giving our top leadership the benefit of judgment and maturity even more dismal than what we’ve suffered so far. He could recover just in time to win a second term, borne on a wind of sympathy and an enhanced myth of omnipotence.

Trump could, as a then asymptomatic spreader, have infected Joe Biden during that abysmal debate, leading to both candidates becoming hospitalized at the climax of the campaign. Worse yet, both men could die, leaving deceased at the top of both major-party tickets. There are multiple ways in which Trump’s disease could provoke a medical, legal, political or constitutional crisis.

The chances that we, the people, would be forewarned enough to avoid the worst are slim. There is ample precedent for confidants of a sick president concealing the truth, even in normal times. But these are not normal times, and this is not a normal presidency.

Ironies abound. We are the nation that built our wealth and power on science and technology. We were not first in space, but we were first to the Moon. We invented the Internet and gave it to the world for free. In the depths of the most terrible war, we developed nuclear weapons, based on esoteric and untested theories of physics, in the largest secret crash project in human history, the Manhattan Project.

Yet today we have forsaken science in order to preserve the wealth and power of a few. We have given up our nation’s battle against global warming so Big Fossil can continue to profit until it has drawn the last drop of oil and last cubic meter of gas from our Earth’s crust. We have abandoned the masks, distancing, testing, contact tracing and quarantining with which nations much poorer, weaker and less “advanced” than ours have gotten Covid-19 under control.

We do all this in the name of “freedom” and “liberty.” But the kind of “freedom” they portend is freedom for the rich and powerful—especially entrenched and inherited wealth—to dominate the rest of us.

Truly we have lost our way.

Over twelve years ago, I argued on this blog that no one “won” the Cold War. Both sides lost. Both sides had drowned themselves in disastrous fictional ideologies. The Russians fell for Communism and the fiction of a “new Soviet man,” and we for the notions that greed is good and that freedom will never become license.

The Russians gave up their fictions in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved. We, apparently, still retain ours. We have yet to re-learn that greed is a vice, not a virtue, and that absolute freedom will only favor the rich and powerful, as it always does. We need smart regulation and fair taxation, the lifeblood of modern democracies.

Instead, we’ve lost the practicality, self-discipline, and skepticism for snake oil that built this nation. We’ve succeeded only in building a suffocating oligarchy of wealth and privilege upon the failing infrastructure of our democracy, and we’ve done so in record time. We’ve even built a new oligarchy of out-of-control digital behemoths to replace our fossil-fuel, gas-guzzler, private-insurance, and tobacco industries as they succumb to their inevitable fates.

Can we still recover? Can Trump? Can Biden if he catches the disease or already has it growing in his cells? As Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan sung, the answers are blowin’ in the wind.

Only one thing is certain. Without a widespread national epiphany, our chances for national renewal are dim, even if Biden survives and wins this election. We’ve got to restore our old ways of respect, and we’ve got to do so in record time.

We’ve got to respect each other, our democratic processes, and practical thinking based not on ideology, but on real expertise, cause and effect. Most of all, we’ve got to rediscover science, lest the torch of Galileo’s four-century-old scientific revolution, which built our modern world, pass to China and Xi Jinping, and all the hope and promise of Anglo-American democracy fade into history.

Maybe Joe Biden, with his innate decency and respect, can help us claw our way back. But Trump’s date with destiny, on which he’s dragged the rest of us, gives us no clarity. We are standing on shifting sands, with dust clouds obscuring every direction, and a harsh wind is rising.

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