Trump is desperate to improve his ratings as can be seen by him using the Lincoln Memorial as the setting for fielding softball questions from friendly Fox News personalities. But does he not realize that by reminding people of Lincoln, he just emphasizes how awful he is by comparison?
I wrote recently about an interview with food writer Michael Pollan about his latest book on how coffee works on the body and produces the addiction that so many of us have that makes need to have a cup first thing in the morning and for some of us to drink it throughout the day. In the April 27, 2020 issue of The New Yorker Adam Gopnik reviews several books that paint a somewhat darker picture of coffee as a tool of global capitalism.
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It is one thing to know in a general way that slavery was cruel and that even after its formal ending following the end of the Civil War, black people continued to be oppressed, with the former slave states creating laws that systematically deprived their black citizens of the rights that they thought they now had. Historian Eric Foner has documented that process masterfully in his book Reconstruction. But it is still shocking to read about individual instances where there was such a flagrant disregard for basic constitutional processes in the effort of whites to shut blacks out of civil life altogether and drive them away.
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The Trump administration has done a remarkable about face in its attitude towards China during the current pandemic. After initially praising that nation and its president fulsomely for the way they handled the crisis, it is now harshly criticizing them, starting with insisting on calling covid-19 the ‘Chinese virus’ and accusing them of covering up the emergence of the virus. The motivation for this shift is quite transparent. As it became increasingly clear how badly Trump has bungled this issue, he very likely seeks to distract people from the administration’s woefully incompetent response .
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You may have noticed that Trump is no longer touting the virtues of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for Covid-19. While not in the same class of insanity as suggesting the injecting of disinfectants, this was still dangerous and has resulted in there being a run for this unproven treatment, resulting in those patients who need it to treat their lupus and rheumatoid arthritis not getting it. In a preliminary study conducted by the Veterans Administration with 368 patients that has not been peer-reviewed, no benefits were observed and there seemed to be extra deaths.
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I wrote earlier that the heads of some evangelical churches are urging their worshippers to attend church services even at the risk of spreading the virus among their parishioners, giving the spurious argument that their god would stop the disease from affecting the faithful. I said that I suspected that part of the reason may be that they are feeling the loss of revenue that is collected by passing the plate during the services.
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As talk increases of states relaxing the restrictions on physical distancing, on a recent episode of the radio show Fresh Air, Donald G. McNeil Jr., science and health reporter for the New York Times, says that the US is nowhere near ready to do that. He says that the remarkable success of the Chinese government in shutting down the spread of the virus was due to its willingness to put in place highly restrictive measures for as long as was necessary and only after the number of new cases were tiny enough to ensure that contact tracing could be done effectively did they begin to loosen the restrictions.
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