King of the World Ma!

by Roxanne Tellier

As the Church Lady used to say on Saturday Night Live – “Well! Isn’t that special! “

“This evening I am happy to report that in addition to the President meeting the CDC criteria for the safe discontinuation of isolation, this morning’s COVID PCR sample demonstrates, by currently recognized standards, he is no longer considered a transmission risk to others,” physician Sean Conley wrote in a memo released by the White House.” (The Hill, Oct 11) 

‘Dr’ Conley, an osteopath, and a character straight out of a casting director’s idea of what a doctor should look like, is apparently now America’s foremost virologist and epidemiologist, whose opinion on contagion and viral transmission is the only one we are to trust.

Heaven forfend the nation’s SuperSpreader be stopped from infecting more citizens. His tally now includes 34 inside White House workers, all but one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pretty much all the biggies who attended that ill=fated Rose Garden party –  Chris Christie;  Kellyanne Conway, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah; Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.; Notre Dame President Rev. John Jenkins; pastor and evangelist Greg Laurie; and freelance photographer Al Drago. And of course, his lovely, but currently invisible, wife, Melanoma. Will there ever be enough lives on the line to fill his quota?

USA Today is trying to figure out who all else might have tested positive on that fateful day. However, some may have purposely failed to announce their condition, lest it make the papers, and prevent them from – oh, I don’t know – voting for a new Supreme Court Justice, say. So the journal has made this handy seating chart, so that everyone can play Pin the Tail on the Infected!

Even if he does, as he claims, ‘feel great!’ – we have only his word for it. He and his admin and doctors have told us that this is so, and that we must accept that this is what we are to believe. The world has been told, in no uncertain terms, that the president’s health is not their business. Unless, of course, he’s sick in hospital, in which case the nation must be on alert and filled with empathy and respect for his suffering, 24/7.

COVID 19 is a horrible, deadly virus. Its effects are debilitating, and, once having had the virus, every organ in the body may be affected. Even a mild case can leave sufferers with a ‘brain fog’ and fatigue that can last months. In fact, it may even last longer than that; we simply don’t know at this time.

If trump decides to fire up his rallies again, his travelling will mean possibly infecting the pilot, the staff on the plane, the Secret Service, ground staff, and anyone who travels with him. He seems uncaring that he’s infected his own wife, but people around him are getting pretty tired of being ignored as he puts them in harm’s way without a thought for their health. Ask the White House staff. Or his Secret Service protectors.

But ‘pshaw!’ says he, to the needs of the little people. It’s all water under the bridge for the Man of COVID. He hasn’t given a thought to anyone but himself for most of his life, and he’s not going to let a tiny thing like a global pandemic change that.

He hasn’t since he first came on the political scene. Over and over, trump’s main line of conversation has been about how great he is, how smart and savvy. When he’s not bigging himself up, he’s bringing somebody else down, no matter how brilliant that other person may be, or what accomplishments they’ve chalked up. The man has spent the last four years trying desperately to completely annihilate Obama’s successes, and he intends to do that, even if it means killing every man, woman and child, burning America to the ground, and then salting the earth.

He is the very definition of depraved indifference. It began when he started his campaign in 2015, and it hasn’t let up for a single second since. Every day we must hear the tramp tramp tramp of trump trump trump. We cannot hide from him; he is everywhere. He is on the television, on social media, on the front pages of newspapers and magazines. He tweets as though there’s a minimum. And now that he’s running to try and win another four years, he’s ramped up his presence. He is inescapable. Omnipresent. There’s nowhere to hide from his face, his words, his demands, his whining, his bullying.

Meanwhile, our lives are no longer our own. COVID’s restrictions have meant that our personal touchstones and milestones are just stumbling blocks that recede into the past in hours or days, as the pace of history forces important moments into history. It never freakin’ ends. It’s all trump, all the time, and there’s no room for anyone else’s truth, ego, or life.  

We crave – we absolutely need – those moments, the times we come together as family, as friends, as people who care about each other. These moments are what makes us strong. Weddings, funerals, important birthdays – these are not meant to be immaterial. If we deem these gatherings to be merely here today, and forgotten tomorrow, we lose the very desires for unity, solidarity, and strength in numbers that has made nations unified and whole. Greater together, than as people apart. This is what makes humans – human.

And while, in some ways, thanks to our Confabulator in Chief, we may never have been so gullible and misinformed, we have also never been so selfish

The divisiveness of 2020, the viciousness, the quarantining, the fights over toilet paper and who should, and how to, wear masks – these are not character-building moments. Living in a world that seems to echo the ugliness of 1984s slogans of  “Freedom is Slavery,” “War is Peace,” is to drift into a madness too dark to contemplate.

And yet still there are those who look at the utter chaos in the United States and can’t decide on whom they should choose to lead them into the next four years. It seems that no matter how horrific conditions may become, whether those conditions include forest fires, floods, droughts, and hurricanes, coupled with most of the military and White House being ill and/or quarantined, fifty million citizens being unemployed, and another 30 million using food banks and fearing homelessness, and a president whose latest  antics would be considered madness in any other sitting president, except that for this guy, it’s only turning the crazy dial up from ten to eleven – they’re concerned that Joe Biden might not quite have what it takes to steer the Ship of State.

A stuffed animal would be more capable than the current Captain of the USS Titanic.

We fumble with the efforts to wrestle this plague into submission. We await Schrodinger’s Election, which feels simultaneously too soon, and yet so far away. And we want it to be over, but we’re terrified of what ‘over’ will look like.

If we are entering the Autumn of America, will it be followed by the Winter of the World?