Thursday, April 23, 2020
Reciprocity
“What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
— A Proverb
Here is this week’s question. What do they call us in Guatemala? Hint: It has something to do with China. Here is something else that has to do with China.
On April 18, 2020, during the trump’s daily maunderings through the forest of his ignorance, he indulged his ambivalence towards the country presided over by his good friend, President Xi Jinping, going down the self-congratulatory path which is the only path he follows during these outings. Addressing Covid-19, and its entry into the United States, he reminded those in attendance that he “cut off China very early. And if I didn’t we would have a chart that you wouldn’t believe. . . .How would I know to do that? . . .People knew that some bad things were going on, and they got off to a late start. . . . but we cut off China. If we didn’t cut off China, we would have been in some big trouble . And we cut it off.”
That was, of course, not the trump’s first self-admiring description of his actions. It was one of his daily dozens. On March 25 he proudly proclaimed that: “We’re the ones that gave the great response, and we’re the ones that kept China out of here. And if I didn’t do it, you’d have thousands and thousands of people who’ve died-that are now living and happy.” That was the trump version. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on January 21 it announced the first travel related case of the virus in the United States. It took the trump 10 days to impose limits on travel from China into the United States.
Enhancing the blame-game of which the trump is clearly the all-time champion, in his self-promotional appearance on April 18th he gave vent to the idea that perhaps China intentionally caused the outbreak of the virus saying: “Let’s see what happens with their investigation. But we’re doing investigations also. If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, then there should be consequences.” Continuing his rambling he said: “Our relationship with China was good until they did this. The question was asked, ‘would you be angry at China?’ Well the answer might very well be a very resounding yes, but it depends: was it a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately? There’s a big difference between those two.” The trump got that right. Ask Alejandro Giammattei. He is the president of Guatemala. Guatemala has been the beneficiary of the trump policies.
According to a report in the New York Times on April 19, 2020, the trumpsters have been engaged in aggressive immigration enforcement, deporting thousands to their home countries. Among those being deported were many infected with Covid-19. On April 20 it was reported that among the illegal immigrants being deported who were infected with Covid-19, were a number who had been sent back to Guatemala.
On April 13, 44 migrants on a flight from Brownsville Texas to Guatemala tested positive for the virus. On another trumpload of migrants flown into Guatemala from Trumpville, 12 individuals were affected with the virus. On another flight 75% of the passengers were infected.
The United States imposes restrictions on people entering the United States to insure that they are not infected with Covid-19. It does not impose the same restrictions on those it is deporting from the United States into other countries. In the trumpeyed view of the world, it’s OK for the United States to send people infected with Covid-19 into other countries, but it’s not OK for people from foreign countries to enter the United States with that same infection.
Before the trumpian sponsored influx of infected people into that country, Guatemala was already struggling with the effects of Covid-19. As of April 17 there were 235 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the country, and 35 deaths were related to the virus. Ten per cent of the confirmed cases were persons seeking refuge in the United States who had been sent back to Guatemala by the trump.
In a speech on April 17th, President Giammattei adopted the approach taken by the trump with respect to planes arriving in the United States from China. He said no more deportation flights would be allowed to enter Guatemala until the United States could offer assurances that the passengers on the flights were free of the coronavirus.
Herewith the answer to the question posed at the beginning of this column. The question was: “What do they call us in Guatemala?” Here is the answer: Guatemala’s Health Minister refers to the United States as the “Wuhan of the Americas.” He got that right. Christopher Brauchli can be emailed at
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
The Snake Oil Salesman
— Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s DreamYou spotted snakes with double tongue.
It is an old and honorable profession. But not even its most successful practitioners could have ever imagined that one of theirs would attain one of the highest offices in the world from which he could continue to give their profession the exposure they all knew it deserved.
As members of the profession, they had grown accustomed to the fact that, from time to time, there were those who belittled their efforts. Some critics even went so far as to call them “quacks,” a clearly derogatory description, and not one to which those following their high calling should have been subject.
The profession to which I refer is, as many readers will have already guessed, the profession of the Snake Oil Salesman. It is an old and honorable profession, and a description of its qualities takes up countless pages in sources as notable and reputable as Wikipedia and National Public Radio, to name just two.
Since many of my readers are almost certainly unaware of the history of this profession (of which the trump is now its most prominent spokesman,) herewith a short lesson for which I am indebted to NPR which many years ago devoted an entire program to the Snake Oil Salesmen. Since that program aired in 2013 it does not, of course, make reference to the trump since there was no way the reporter could have anticipated the success a member of that profession would soon enjoy.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “snake oil” as being a quack remedy or panacea. Among the many things we learn from the NPR story is that snake oil is made from “the oil of the Chinese water snake, which is rich in the omega-3 acids that help reduce inflammation.” The trump fixation on China and how it has contributed to the world pandemic is probably attributable to his knowledge, as a snake oil salesman, that snake oil was first brought into the United States by Chinese laborers who helped build the railroads in the 19th Century. According to the report, the snake oil was highly effective in its original form to reduce inflammation. It was especially helpful when used to treat arthritis and bursitis.
Notwithstanding its beneficial effects as used when first brought to this country, “snake oil” soon became popular during the second half of the 19th Century when people were referring not only to snake oil but to patent medicines that were widely advertised in all sorts of media, but were of no proven medicinal value. Among other things, those medicines promised to cure chronic pain, headaches, “female complaints” and countless other ailments afflicting those seeking relief. The words have now become synonymous with “quackery” or “health fraud.”
For our purposes, and in examining the prominent snake oil salesman who now lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C., and remembering that snake oil salesmen were also referred to as “quacks,” it is useful to recall that one definition of a “quack” is a person “who pretends, professionally or publicly, to have skill, knowledge, qualification or credentials they do not possess; a charlatan or snake oil salesman.” It goes without saying that such a definition describes the trump more perfectly than any description I could conjure up. But my attention was drawn to the trump quackery not because of his pretense to have knowledge, qualification or credentials he does not actually possess. I was drawn to the definition because they were the first words I thought of when the trump began touting the virtues of drugs to combat the Coronavirus about which he knew no more than the hawkers of snake oil in the latter part of the 19th Century.
In the time-honored tradition of the snake oil salesman, the trump has begun touting the virtues of two antimalarial drugs, chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, neither of which, like snake oil of old, have been proven to have any benefit in treating the coronavirus that afflicts the world. When asked about the efficacy of the two drugs, since they are unproven, the trump adopted the classical snake oil salesman approach saying: “I want them to try it. And it may work, and it may not work. But if it doesn’t work, it’s nothing lost by doing it. Nothing.” You can hear long dead Snake Oil Salesmen applauding that brilliant response, reminiscent as it may have been of responses they might have given if challenged by skeptics.
The trump brought Clark Stanley to mind. Clark was known at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries as the Rattlesnake King because of his success in selling “Stanley’s Snake Oil” following a demonstration he put on at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In that demonstration he sliced open a rattle snake, put it in boiling water, skimmed off the fat that rose to the top and sold it to the eager on lookers. He continued to sell the product until, in 1917, the Food and Drug Administration charged him with “misbranding” his product by ‘falsely and fraudulently represent[ing] it as a remedy for all pain.” He was fined $20 and his empire collapsed.
The trump empire’s future may or may not depend on the effectiveness of his snake oil. With any luck, however, the ballot box, rather than the FDA, will be his undoing.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Trump and The Mask
One will rarely err if extreme actions be ascribed to vanity. . . .
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human All Too Human
It caused unwitting confusion. The trump had been focused on Easter for several weeks. Although not a religious man, he had a sense that for many of his followers, the Resurrection of Christ was one of the most important days of the year even though its celebration was subject to the vagaries of the calendar in terms of precise placement.
The trump has never suggested that he is as important as Christ although it is not hard, when listening to him wallow in words, to conclude that if he does not think himself as important, he believes he comes in a close second. It has not occurred to him to consider that the beauty of the language attributed to Christ, and the crudeness and incomprehensibility of his own utterances cause most people to reject any notion that he is a close second. That, of course, does not cause the trump to think less highly of himself.
Although not a believer in any god, the trump realized that for political reasons it made great good sense for him to proclaim the day of Christ’s Resurrection to be the day to give his devout followers relief from the confinement imposed on American citizens by those wishing to protect us from Corona Virus-19. As the trump proclaimed, when announcing our redemption from house arrest, it would happen on Easter Sunday to coincide with the resurrection of Christ.
As it turned out, those who were less wise than the trump, but better schooled in the ways of the virus, knew ending the quarantine as the trump proposed would jeopardize the lives of millions of people living in the United States. They persuaded the trump that that was a bad idea. That reduced the trump’s anticipation of Easter Sunday, the day he had thought was going to give his followers much better reason for celebrating than a resurrection that occurred long before the trump was even born.
With Easter off the table, the trump attention shifted to another festive time of year to which he always looked forward. That festive occasion comes in the fall and offers the pleasing symmetry to Easter in that it is almost exactly six months later-Halloween! And awareness of his new focus explains his aversion to the idea of wearing a mask. It has nothing to do with the Corona Virus-it has to do with Halloween.
Halloween is an event that has a special place in the trump heart. He knows that lessons learned as a child wandering New York City Streets on Halloween gave him the skills that made him the success he believes himself to be. It was those wanderings that gave him an understanding of the true meaning of “trick or treat.” As a child he understood it to mean that if an adult did not give him what he wanted when he went to the door and announced “trick or treat,” it was OK to dump garbage on the entrance or put soap on windows of the offending family’s house. As he grew older, tricking or treating became one of his most useful tools in business dealings with other people and institutions. If they did not accommodate his needs, he would use every trick in the book to exact revenge. Examples of that can be found in the myriad of people whose lives and livelihoods were destroyed by the trump’s frequent use of bankruptcy to eliminate obligations he had to those who had helped him out of situations in which he was in financial distress.
And that brings us to the mask. And it may all have been a misunderstanding. The people who were suggesting he wear a mask were thinking of the virus. The trump thought they were making suggestions for what he should wear at Halloween. And the trump has not yet decided what costume he will wear next Halloween. In fact he and Jared Kushner, who usually helps him decide about matters of great significance, have not even had discussions about Halloween. And thus, the trump finds it preposterous that people standing next to him at the podium, people who know less than he about almost anything he can think of, should be dictating his Halloween costume. For all anyone knows, it might be spoiled if it included a mask. And therein the reason for his decision to shun the mask. And, as noted, it was probably just a misunderstanding.
Like the trump, the rest of us will be waiting with bated breath for the next Halloween-not because we are eager to see whether the trump Halloween costume includes a mask, but because less than two weeks later, we may learn the name of a new president of the United States. Awaiting that news creates more suspense in most of us than waiting to behold a costumed trump.