Splitsville TO BE, OR TO STOP BEING?

The Venerated, Wizened Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Normally, our description of the US as Splitsville (a deal where you have two distinct “nations” living cheek-by-jowl in a single geo-political entity) involves at least one of the two cohorts under discussion knowing who and what they are. So, for example, in the intelligent/stupid dichotomy, the stupids may not know they’re stupid (and, really, how could they? They’re stupid!), but the intelligents are at least smart enough to know how much they don’t know. It’s the same for the sane/crazy pairing. Often, as in the we-know-Trump-is-working-for-Russia-and-we’re-outraged-by-it vs. the we-think-Trump-may-be-working-for-Russia-but-we-don’t-care dyad, both groups know to which side they belong.

But this week we confront the existence of two really, really distinct groups living, laughing, and loving in the US of A, and no one—not even we!—knows, or even can know, to which they belong.

Cool, no? Yes! And terrifying. To that end, let’s see what Paul Krugman has to say about what he calls “the quack-industrial complex.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a crank who tried to block the rollout of Covid vaccines that saved millions of lives, is now the secretary of Health and Human Services. That agency’s top vaccine regulator quit late last month, declaring that

it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.

We don’t know how many Americans will die prematurely because public health is now being run by a man who rejects medical science, but it’s likely that the number will eventually run into the millions…America had substantially lower life expectancy than other advanced countries even before Covid, and the gap widened when Republican hostility to vaccines led many Americans to refuse Covid shots.

And there you have it: One group of Americans will die prematurely (or unnecessarily), and the other group of Americans will not die prematurely. To which group do you belong?

Not so fast! Sure, you can say, “Hey, fuck you guys. If (or when) there’s another COVID-like pandemic, you can bet your bippie I’ll get vaccinated against it, no matter what Bobby ‘Gargle Voice’ Kennedy Junior has to say, or rasp, about it.” (Younger readers may be unfamiliar with the term “to bet one’s bippie,” and, indeed, may even be under the impression that they don’t have a bippie to bet. Suffice it to say, they do.)

We grant you the point. We’ll be getting vaccinated, too—assuming there will be a vaccine applicable to the next new, hot, happening virus. But that assumption may not be warranted.

Krugman:

Furthermore, savage funding cuts and layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes for Health are already having a catastrophic effect on medical research. We may never know how many lives could have been saved, but won’t be, because of this wholesale assault on science. But the number won’t be small.

Efforts to kill scientific research seem frantic. Last week, with no warning, CDC labs studying sexually transmitted disease were closed and all their scientists fired. Make gonorrhea great again? The layoffs were so sudden that there are freezers full of samples with no custodians.

(Krugman has a good sense of humor, but he missed an easy layup in this graf. We’d replace “Make gonorrhea great again?” with “Make America Gonorrheal Again.” MAGA!)

We’ve come a long way from Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” to those “freezers full of samples.” Is it too late to make Mitt prez? It is, isn’t it. We can’t believe we’re thinking this.

All of this is to say that, even if there is a vaccination available for the next big disease, or even if the next big disease doesn’t appear in our lifetime, there will still be ample opportunity for us—or you—to die prematurely due to the Trump/Musk rampage against medical research. Cuts to and layoffs at the FDA will almost certainly result in increased risks of our encountering food-borne pathogens, which will dovetail nicely with a crippling of the agency’s ability to evaluate and give its blessing to new drugs.

There’s more, but first: Here is where we remind you that all of this—the sabotage of science, the trashing of research, the replacement of sound medical and scientific policies with lies, ignorance, and bullshit—is supposedly to trim the Federal budget in order to accommodate tax cuts for billionaires and corporations. Although it won’t even do that. The amounts “saved” by these measures won’t remotely be enough to pay for those tax cuts, let alone when they’re accompanied (as is the plan) by an increase in defense spending. And don’t forget to add in the substantial costs involved in quarantining and caring for (or burying) millions of people laid low by Bobby Jr.’s “policies.”

So, yes, the Trump/Musk/Republican scheme is dangerous, evil, and morally squalid—but is that so very bad? After all, we (and you) won’t die of measles, because we all made the good decision to be born in an age when narcissistic, nihilistic, rich assholes didn’t run public health policy, and people knew that vaccines worked. No harm, no foul, right?

Sadly, no. We’re not off the unnecessary-death hook, because Trump is determined to revive the use of what he (somewhat obscenely) calls “beautiful, clean coal.”

This is bad news for people who breathe air. And it will probably go hand-in-glove with bad news for people who drink water, since Trump’s Destroy Civilization Plan presumably includes a relaxation—if not a complete elimination—of environmental regulations.

How Republicans and their constituents are able to believe that they’ll be exempt from these dangers is a matter for another day. It’s delusional, but what else is new? We’ve known this for a while and it’s succinctly summed up in the now-familiar “When I joined the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, I never dreamed that the leopards would eat my face.”

Would it be ungracious, when confronted with this lamentation, to reply, “Tough shit”? Arguably. But we have our own sad trombone of injustice to play. We look at RFK, Jr.’s lunacy and we want to say, Fine. You want to drag 21^st century America back to the 18^th century? Go ahead. Just so long as the only people who suffer unnecessary disease, injury, and death are you, your family, all Republicans, and the people who vote for them.

If only! But it doesn’t work that way. Pandemics spread. Even the best vaccines aren’t a hundred percent effective. Some of us have underlying conditions we may not even be aware of. And so we all live in Splitsville, not knowing whether we, our loved ones, or even, for that matter, our hated ones, will die prematurely or…you know…continue to hang around.

Then again, maybe Trump’s policies have nothing to do with the budget, taxes, or any theory of governance. Maybe he just wants to exact revenge on the rest of the world. Why? Because Trump is obsessed with being liked. In the 2016 campaign he said, “Anybody that likes me, I like them.” His “Sir stories” aren’t about imaginary people obeying him; they’re about imaginary people weeping with adoration of him. It’s why he loved those rallies. He basks in being liked.

And now, true to self-sabotaging form, rather than use the presidency to do great things for others and earn their admiration, he’s made himself the most despised person, not only in America, but on Earth—which means in the entire solar system. In the words of one nice lady we know, “Everybody is openly asking ‘is he dead yet?’” (And no one needs to ask, “To whom does ‘he’ refer?”) Of course he wants to kill us.