Paul Offit and RFK JR: The Truth v The Big Lie

 

Reading Mein Kampf is not easy reading. It is repetitious, self absorbed, petty and something of a slog, but along the way you realize a few things about Hitler: he is a man who has thought about his life and his experiences and how they shaped him, and he has some genuine insights buried among all the obvious pathology. 

One insight is that it is easier to sell The Big Lie than little ones. 

He notes that all of us tell little lies every day, from idle comments like, "You look lovely today," to other innocent white lies. But most people faced with a big lie, like we lost the war because the Jews stabbed us in the back, is believable because most people think you would not dare to lie so infamously, so it must be true. And it is often hard to marshal counter arguments to big things.

So it is when Dr. Paul Offit exposes the Big Lies Robert Kennedy tells--that polio vaccine has killed more people than it has saved by causing soft tissue tumors or the Big Lie that germ theory saying specific bacteria or viruses cause specific diseases is wrong. 

Where do you even begin with that?

In his op ed in the New York Times,  Offit patiently marches through the specific things RFK JR has said which are simply put, dead wrong: the COVID vaccine is the "deadliest vaccine ever made"; that pasteurization of foods, milk is harmful rather than life saving, “The ubiquity of pasteurization and vaccination are only two of the many indicators of the domineering ascendancy of germ theory as the cornerstone of contemporary public policy;" that AIDS was not caused by HIV but by drug use  "was most likely caused by recreational drugs like poppers and the antiviral drug AZT." that the drug used to treat HIV, AZT was "mass murder."

A cynic knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing, Oscar Wilde observed, and RFK taps into the large and deep well of cynicism in the American public. RFK JR knows that by going after the strongest part of the "elite establishment," doctors and medical science, he has the best chance of defeating the establishment. 

Trump knows that, too.

If you allow any segment of American society to be trusted, respected by the general public that segment, should it turn on you, criticize you or correct you, poses the only threat to your power.

That is why when Tony Fauci heard Trump say you can cure COVID with intravenous bleach and Fauci hit his own forehead, and shook his head in silent disavowal, that was more damaging to Trump than a hundred CNN and MSNBC journalists singing in unison. Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, even Bernie Sanders were never a threat to Trump, but Dr. Fauci was. 

And that's why he and his family got death threats. 

People trusted Fauci, and they ultimately trusted him more than they trusted Trump, or at least Fauci gave them pause. 

Which is why he had to be attacked as the man who gave China the money to develop the SARS-COVID19 virus in that lab in Wuhan with all the talk of "furin cleavage sites" and "gain of function" stuff came from. 

But those were the little lies and could be easily debunked. The Big Lie is that China developed the virus to attack the West and bring Western economies to their knees. That particular lie was a little hard to sell when it was revealed that China suffered as much or more from the pandemic, although that could be dismissed as China bungling. There are still Congressmen who vow to get to the bottom of the origins of COVID 19. 

As Offit, and many others have said, "Good luck with that."

Not that it really matters if China did develop the virus as a weapon and it simply got out of hand. What would we do with that information?

In medicine there's an old adage: don't do a diagnostic test if there is no therapeutic implication. Even if China was the nefarious villain in COVID, what is the therapeutic implication? That we stop studying virus? That we stop trying to monitor viruses in the real world, that we stop trying to see where viruses are leaking from bats to pangolins and hogs? That we stop making vaccines? Or, if we believe in the Chinese lab, you can say it was US NIH money that funded it. 

Nonsense. 

The Chinese don't need our money. The piddling grant from the NIH did not support the Wuhan lab which is enormous and gets enormous support from the Chinese government. 

And, in fact, the Chinese scientist, Zhang Yongzhen, who released the genome of the COVID 19 virus early on, was the man with the best chance of allowing test kits to be made nearly instantaneously, and gave labs around the world a jump on developing a vaccine. 

True, in the finest bureaucratic version that scientist got his wrist slapped by the bureaucrats in the Chinese government, but he was a scientist first, and he behaved like one--and he's still working. And he collaborates with scientists around the world, including Dr. Barney Graham at the NIH who was part of the team which got the COVID vaccine done.

Dr. Zhang Yongzhen

One thing which happened in New Hampshire during the height of the pandemic is the National Guard, those twenty something kids in their camo uniforms, lined up at parking lots, and long streams of people in their cars drove by and got vaccinated. 

Government in action to protect you. 

That was the best argument against the Big Lie. You could pound back your beers in your basement and growl about the elites and the establishment and cleaning out the swamps, but were you really going to sit home and not get vaccinated? 

Some did, but the vast majority voted with their feet and their bare arms, saying, no, well, actually I'll take the vaccine.

When push came to shove most of those cynics who take such glee in giving the finger to those elites who want to control the little guy still know that you don't want a deadly virus, intubation on a respirator, withered limbs, dead children and they embrace germ theory.

Lauren Boebert and the Politics of Humility

 "The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent toward them: That's the essence of inhumanity."

--George Bernard Shaw

"What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. And if you can humble yourself before them, they will do anything you ask."

--Frank Underwood, "House of Cards"

Reading the article by Peter Hessler in this week's New Yorker (Jan 13,2025) about the resurrection and triumph of Lauren Boebert, who touted her personal history--a high school drop out, pregnant at 17, arrested, down and out, "I'm straight out of Rifle, running a restaurant with my four little boys and with my G.E.D," she told her constituents.

All this put me in mind, somehow, of doing rounds at the New York Hospital, in the early 1970's, as a a medical student, the lowest of the low in hospital hierarchy, a part of what one patient called, "the thundering herd," a group of men in white uniforms, nurses, and a phalanx of professors of medicine, entering a patient's room with the chief of service, in his spotless, long white lab coat, his pinstriped vest, Brooks Brother's tie, and everything but angels hovering above blowing horns, heralding the arrival of the great man at the bedside. 

And, what really stopped me in my tracks was seeing the patient, who might be a Bowery Bum, now scrubbed by the nurses for the arrival of the great man, sit up and look around him, suddenly the center of attention, rapt attention, I might add, everyone hanging on his every word, as the great man in white asked him, with utter politeness, about his symptoms. Had he become short of breath walking up a hill, or was he short of breath all the time? Had he noticed the swelling in his ankles was gone in the morning only to return later in the afternoon?

And what was really striking, when the great man was really a good clinician, is that he conveyed to the patient and to every member of the ward party, that this man in the bed was among the most important people  on earth, because he was a patient. Didn't matter what he was outside the hospital, once in that bed he was not Dirty Joe, or whatever his friends called him on the outside, he was Mr. Smith and he was treated with the utmost respect.

And the great man was truly interested in his answers, listening carefully, asking questions to clarify the information. Did he find he could tolerate some foods, but not, for example fatty foods? 

After the thundering herd moved on, as the medical student, I often had to visit the patient later, to draw his blood or to do some other task, and the patient often asked who the great man was, even though he'd been told before. "Well," the patient would often say. "I hope I did okay."

"What do you mean?" I would ask.

"Well, you know, I hope I gave the right answers. He seemed pretty concerned."

After all the build up, the patient had been told by the nurses about the coming of the great man, prepared by the interns, rehearsed by the residents, and after all that unaccustomed attention, he didn't want to disappoint anyone. 

Sometimes I found myself saying, "You know you are just as important as he is." 

Don't know why I said that.

But it seemed like the lesson I had learned.

This was a medical school where we were constantly told that we had been selected out of the multitudes, and we had to prove we were worthy of our spot in the class constantly, and even if we were lucky enough to be selected to be interns, there was a merit pyramid, so there were half of each class eliminated each year with only 10 senior residents left from a class of 30 interns. But, no matter how select we were, it was basic gospel truth, the patient in the bed was the most important person in the room.

And that's maybe where Lauren Boebert's appeal, and maybe Trump's appeal, is. 

Doesn't matter if people call you white trash or disrespect you or ignore you, you are important, and just as important as all those folks with Harvard degrees. 

As we say in New Hampshire, "Just saying."

Remarks at the Deliberative Session

There is a technique of public speaking which holds you should tell the folks what you are going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you've told them.

That can get tedious, but I'll at least engage the first two, if for no other reason than it will help you know when I'm about done, and you won't have to keep looking at your watch, wondering when I'm going to finish.

So the three points I'm going to make with respect to this warrant article which grants public, taxpayer money to the Sacred Heart School of the Church of the Miraculous Medal are these:

1. Nullification

2. Money

3. Separation of church and state: Is it good for Catholics or bad?

1. With respect to nullification:  

I visit New York City, Manhattan, now and then and I come to a crosswalk and see that sign flashing in red letters: DON'T WALK. I look down the grid in both directions and I see no car approaching, and I cross the street. Often, I'm accompanied by a policeman or a dozen other citizens. What we have done, of course, is against the law, but if we do not obey the law and if there is no enforcement, we have nullified that law. 

There are other examples: The governor of Alabama, George Wallace, stood in a schoolhouse door and said no Negro child would ever cross that threshold into a public, all White school. He did not care what the Constitution or the Supreme Court said. Nullification.  

And then there is judicial nullification, in which judges nullify a law. The state of Maine refused to use public funds to pay tuition for students to a religious school and Justices Thomas and Alito ruled the state had to pay. They said to discriminate against a religious school simply because it was religious was discrimination.  Justice Sotomayor noted that this ruling at its heart said that separation of church and state is unconstitutional.

This is a peculiar finding, of course, to say that the First Amendment, a part of the Constitution, is itself unconstitutional. 

Some say separation of church and state is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. The First Amendment clearly says government shall not establish a state religion. And the Constitution was not written for lawyers; it was written for the common man, and when it was written every common man knew what state establishment of a church meant, because they already had an established church: The Church of England. And they knew there were only two ways to establish a religion:  if you state this is the state church, or if you used taxpayer money to support a church, that was state establishment of a church. Apparently, Justices Alito and Thomas have forgotten all that. 

But they won't serve forever.

The question we have before us today is whether the nullification of the United States Constitution, the First Amendment, as we do it every year through this warrant article is more like crossing against the light, or more like the more pernicious forms of nullification of the Governor of Alabama or the US Supreme Court.

2.Then there is the money argument: 

For years it was argued that it was simply cheaper to pay for Hampton kids to go to Sacred Heart, which was less expensive than the oh so expensive public schools. That may have been true once, but now there have been empty seats in Hampton schools for years; we have already paid for those Sacred Heart students once and now we pay again.

The corollary to this is "I am a Hampton taxpayer, and my taxes should go to pay for my kid's education and I want my kid going to Sacred Heart." But the fact is only 25% of the kids at Sacred Heart live in Hampton. 75% of the student body is from out of town, so what we are really paying for this a Catholic school education for anyone who wants one, no matter where they live. 

There is simply no money argument for spending Hampton taxpayer money on Sacred Heart--for paying for computers for Sacred Heart, especially when it has always been promised that the funds were spent for only "non religious" things like computers, but when pressed  on the subject, officials admitted they have no idea whether those computers are used to stream religious services.

3. Separation of Church and State: Good for Catholics or an Insult?

You will say to me, "You have no right to tell Catholics what is good for them as Catholics. You are not even Catholic."

This is true: I am not a Catholic.

But I am old.

And I remember, before most of the people in this room were even born, a man named John F. Kennedy, who said, "Because I am not a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected President, it is apparently necessary for me to state that I believe in the absolute separation of church and state, that no public funds should ever be granted to any church, or to any church school." 

Then he went on to explain why he felt he had to discuss this, but even at age 13, when I heard him, I already knew why: My neighbors said, "Oh, you can't vote for Kennedy, he is a Catholic. That would be like putting the Pope into the White House. He would be a puppet on a string."

Of course, Kennedy did keep that promise, and it was not always easy, but because he kept that promise that finger of suspicion was never pointed at a Catholic candidate again and Catholics have been elected at every level of government, including the Presidency, since Kennedy.

So separation of church and state is good for Catholics, I would submit.

I'll close with my favorite story about separation of church and state, and it involves a past governor of Texas, Ann Richards. 

One day, Governor Richards looked up from her desk and found herself confronted by four very morose looking staffers who told her they had some bad news.

"What is it?" she asked

"Well, you see that nativity scene out there on the lawn outside your office, just a few feet from the entrance to the Capitol? The Supreme Court has ruled we have to take that down, because it violates separation of church and state!"

Governor Richards turned and stared wistfully out her window at the manger scene, and said, "Oh! I do so hate to do that. It's a such damn shame! This is the one and only time, every year, when we are ever able to gather three wise men together in one place at the Capitol!"

A Shot To Save the World

 

As Mad Dog has gotten older, he finds he needs to return to books and articles to really appreciate them. The first time through, no matter how carefully he reads them, it just doesn't stick, but upon the return things come into focus.

Penn Ad in the New Yorker: Stealing the Glory

Re-reading Gregory Zuckerman's "A Shot to Save the World," about the scores of scientists who over a thirty year slog coalesced around the science that produced a remarkably effective vaccine against COVID 19 in just a year, Mad Dog is once again smitten by the story.

Some of this is simply delicious because of the story of one of the central figures who played a key role in providing the essential platform for the vaccine, mRNA, Katalin Kariko, and how she was ostracized at the University of Pennsylvania, ultimately given the choice of being fired or taking a demotion to a new university rank devised just for her as a "senior researcher" not even a faculty member, how when she finally managed to convince another faculty member of the potential value of mRNA, and once the two of them started a company to pursue it, Penn refused to invest in it, but ultimately made $1.2 billion from the patent it provided which was used to make the vaccine.

And then, in the ultimate in chutzpah, in an act which must win the grand prize for hypocrisy, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for her work, Penn took out a full page ad in the New Yorker claiming credit for nurturing her great work.

Penn outdid Cinderella's wicked step mother, claiming it didn't just nurture the princess, but delivered her glass slipper and the prince to go with it.

You just can't make this stuff up.

Luckily, in the 21st century there is Google, and it takes precious little time on Google to see how nasty Penn was to Kariko--not an unusual story in medical research--but it's the claim that we knew all along how she was destined for greatness that sets off the rockets.

There will be, likely already are many other books about the way in which the COVID 19 mRNA vaccines were developed, but a good place to start is with Zuckerman's tale. He is a Wall Street Journal reporter, and his interests are unavoidably connected to the financial aspects of vaccine development, but he's clearly talked to enough scientists-- and the right scientists--who schooled him on how to ask the right questions, and once you get past the inevitable grab-you-by-the-lapel style, the determination to describe the personalities of the scientists for "human interest," the story is a page turner.

Banting & Best Discoverers of Insulin

So many people were involved, so many people taking risks, so many falling flat on their faces, so many people in positions of power who simply were too dim witted to pull the right levers, but enough smart, determined people simply dodged around the nincompoops, the deed got done.

Most vaccines take 10 years to bring successfully to market, the shortest big one before the COVID vaccine took 4 years, and they did COVID in one year.

Dr. Offit

When Paul Offit gave credit to President Trump for getting the vaccine done, he laughed. He said bringing that vaccine to fruition was the greatest scientific achievement of his lifetime and that was on Trump's watch. The reason he laughed is evident in Zuckerman's tale. The way science and the way this vaccine happens cannot ever be one man's credit--a decades long, tedious, ants on the march scenario is required. The guys at the top of political and academic institutions just hold the news conferences and take the credit.

Any fan of "The Wire" knows what I'm talking about: It's the "drugs on the table" charade. 

We see people working on HIV, like Henry Masur and later Tony Fauci, and we see people working on using genes to fight cancer, and we see people working on stem cell technologies and all these people weaving a thick mat upon which the next line of performers can jump and then the next.

It's an inspiring story, and an instructive one.

It also suggests that while government must occasionally play an essential role, government alone cannot do this kind of thing.  The Manhattan Project was a children's tea party compared to this one.

It reveals the centrality of universities, but it also shows how obtuse and arrogant faculties in academia can be and often are.

Child with Type 1 Diabetes

But mostly, it suggests that the Napoleon's, the Stalin's, the Ghengis Khan's of history are not much more than people who hit other people over the head with bigger and bigger clubs, while the folks like Jonas Salk and Katalin Kariko are the people who change life on earth for every little guy just trying to survive.

Paul Offit Offers Up Some Truth: Vaccines

 

What got me through the COVID scourge in 2020-2022 was a clarion beam of enlightenment on something called Microbe TV, with its podcast TWiV, which I listened to, religiously.  For 4 hours a week, I learned stuff about viruses, immunology, vaccines, epidemiology I never learned in medical school--I don't think they even knew when I was in medical school.

Dr. Offit

One of the star guests they had on often was Dr. Paul Offit, from Penn, who is on the FDA committee which approves or rejects vaccines and he was always a voice of careful reason, unswayed by trends or bombast, just a show-me-the-numbers kind of guy.  

This link to an interview with "Dr. Mike," who is someone I've never heard of, but who is one of the best interviewers of medical people I've ever run across-- is 90 minutes long and it is worth every minute.  I listened to it in 30 minute segments and Offit is so disarming and so open, and obviously knows what he's talking about. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A27ameSqcQs

I keep imaging the interlocutor who sometimes comments on this blog, who is informed by every FOX and QANON conspiracy theory, listening to this, and gradually smiling and saying, "Hmm, maybe this guy is a good source of real information," and the world being transformed.

Never will happen, I know. But Paul Offit is so reasonable, it almost seems possible, he could break through to the other side.

One thing he says is that given the widespread level of COVID vaccination, and especially for people who have had some form of native COVID, plus the vaccine, especially in people who are not high risk (over 75, immune suppressed, pregnant) another vaccine at this time may not be worth it. There is always a small risk and he talks about the clotting with the J&J vaccine and the myocarditis in young male athletes after Pfizer, but he is always trying to figure the risk vs. the benefit ratio.

He also talks about T cells, the unheralded hero of immune protection, which more people ought to know about. Everyone knows about antibodies, but T cells are  the infantry who are going to come out of the trenches and get the invaders when the next wave hits, after the antibody calvary are long gone. T cells are in it for the long run. 

What is especially engaging is his answers to the questions about who can you believe, and how can you know what is the truth?  They talk about the doctors who are well known and well adorned with prizes and big university names who have testified before Congress and on CNN and FOX and elsewhere, who say vaccines cause autism, or introduce DNA contaminants into your cells, and how tough it is to know who to believe. We're not talking about Dr. Oz here, but guys who are doing really fine work in other areas, who, for some reason have felt the need to go on TV and talk about stuff they really don't know about.

But the overall effect is, at least for me, profoundly reassuring. You figure, if the committee has guys like Paul Offit reading the 400 pages before the meeting on every next vaccine, you've got a fighting chance the government is actually going to make the right call.

Belief in the Superior Man

 

Re reading "The Guarded Gate," by Daniel Okrent is a reawakening and an illumination.

Okrent traces the wellspring of American thinking about defining a superior man, who, in the 19th and 20 centuries was thought to be the vehicle for national redemption and advancement.

There were a group of men, who are today relative unknowns, who developed and fostered the idea of a natural aristocracy, and then there is the group of willing buyers of the concept among the famous, who were invariably rich and "well bred."

Of course, the idea of a naturally gifted man who possessed superior powers endowed by God, who was meant to rule over other men, much as man is meant to have dominion over animals, dates back to the sword and the stone and the Arthurian legends. But that was embellished and developed by the Englishman, who heads the list of "unknowns," Francis Galton.

Galton

Galton focused on the idea that you could measure intelligence, as if it were a single trait, like height or weight and then rank people by the number, the IQ. Like the rest of those on this list, he grew up wealthy and believed he was wealthy because he was more intelligent, talented and ambitious than the common man and thus deserved his wealth, as a God given thing. Reading Darwin, he found the concept of heredity, and the idea that IQ could be passed on, as could the lack of it. "Let us do what we can to encourage the multiplication of the races best suited to invent and and conform to a high and generous civilization." Thus emerged the idea of genetics, selective breeding extended from the farm to the home. He came up with the word, "eugenics."

Then there was Charles Davenport, an American.

Davenport, also rich, chased after the huge money offered by Carnegie to set up a "laboratory" at Cold Spring Harbor, just down the road from Theodore Roosevelt's place, and he used it to launch the Eugenics Records Office, and "Better Baby Breeding" programs, long before the idea of meritocracy based on IQ testing, it was Davenport's hope to get merit through meticulous breeding of human beings. Qualities like "morality" and high character were breedable.

Henry Adams

Then there was another of the Boston Brahmin class, Henry Adams, who mingled in this crowd. His influence was less direct, but a passage from his book, "The Education" is so ripe, it is important to include, to describe the thinking in which all these men were marinated. Adams describes walking across Boston Common and seeing a man  in a long black frock coat of cheap gabardine, untamed beard down to his chest, flakes of dandruff and crumbs intermingled, pockmarked face, framed by side curls to his collar, unbathed, a walking stench, Adams wrote, "A Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow...a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish."  

What is so striking is this same revulsion to "the Jew" described by Adams appears, nearly word for word in Hitler's "Mein Kampf," written 18 years later. Same sentiment, same effect, different continent.

Then there was Prescott Hall. Another rich guy.

Prescott Hall

Hall said that immigration was a racial issue at its core, and that immigrants were "toiler, beggar, thief and scum." He wrote to the Boston Herald in 1894, "Shall we permit these inferior races to dilute the thrifty, capable Yankee blood?" He enlisted esteemed folks into his Immigration Restriction League, like Francis Walker who wrote of "the vast masses of filth [who come from] every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe."  An antecedent to "shithole countries." Like Mr. Trump, who wonders why more Norwegians don't want to immigrate to America, the IRL argued for a large entry fee which would keep out the scum but not prevent "thrifty Swedes, Norwegians, Germans." Keep out those who live like swine, in "systematic beggary at the doors of the rich...picking over the garbage barrels in our alleys...beaten men from beaten races."

This idea about immigration from the Harvard set was  really just an extension of how things operated in their own cloistered world--you don't want anyone allowed in your world who does not have enough money and culture to buy in.

Then there was Madison Grant, who was, in his time semi famous.

Madison Grant wrote the basic textbook of this Harvard/Brahmin attitude for race mixing which formed the fundamental resistance immigration, "The Passing of the Great Race."  Grant called Eastern Europeans "half-Asiatic mongrels" and he said "the Catholic Church under Jewish leadership," was directing the end to the great WASP civilization. 

Then there was H. Fairfield Osborn.

Osborne

Osborne, who headed the American Museum of Natural Hhistory, which gave a scientific patina to the idea of survival of the fittest and evolution from subhumans (Eastern and Southern Europeans) to the superior Nordic and Anglo Saxon human specimens. He is, in a way, the perfect example of someone who is widely remembered for the good things associated with his works--the Museum of Natural History in New York has delighted and informed generations of wondering children and adults, but the seamy underside, the role it played in "scientifically" arguing for a hierarchy of racial worthiness is not talked about today.

Then there was Albert Johnson, of the House Immigration Committee. He decried the "approaching extinction of the Mayflower Descendants" and crafted legislation in the House Committee on Immigration to stop all immigration for two years, to meet the "Emergency!" He did bend to the Brahmin set, by allowing them their house servants, who were allowed to immigrate to work in the vast homes of the rich, as an exception to immigration barriers. And he ran into problems excluding all non white immigrants over the definition of who is White. In 1922 Supreme Court case settled the matter, by saying that for non native born people, citizenship was open only to Whites or to African Americans born here (acknowledging the 14th amendment). Thus the Indian plaintiff, who was neither Black nor White, was excluded. America was for the Whites, and, grudgingly, for the Black Americans brought in as slaves and grandfathered in.

Then there was Eugen Fischer. 

Fischer: going where his creed led him

Perhaps my favorite among the non famous mopes is Eugen Fischer who said, "What Darwin was not able to do, genetics has achieved. It has destroyed the equality of Man." He was much loved by the Nazis.

So through launching a think tank, The Cold Spring Harbor enterprise, the publication of a widely read book, "The Passing of a Great Race,"  and by conversations over dinner and in clubs and at camp outs and all those means by which this group of Gilded Age men communicated, these men and their disciplines were able to gain access to men with power, men who were positions to place ideas into action.

It is the famous men who came under the spell of these obscurities who pushed their ideas into the public space and eventually, public policy.

Most of these  folks are remembered today for the positive things they did, but they each went to the dark side and that side has been neglected, or some would say concealed from the history books.

Maxwell Perkins.

Perkins is remembered as the brilliant editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and literary prizes for editing are named after him, but he was at the same time publishing "The Passing of the Great Race" and other tracts vilifying all that is not WASP, and extolling the virtues of what Hitler called the "Aryans." He was in that polite, deeply antisemitic, racist caste. He presented the attractive, clean face to the world which obscured the frothing, snarling and hideous thoughts behind it.

Margaret Sanger.

Sanger is remembered and celebrated as an early feminist, who fought for contraception and abortion as a right women ought to enjoy, but she was happy to sell abortion as a means of controlling the reproduction of Blacks, mentally impaired and other impure elements in America. She was not coy about selling abortion as a way to control the population of Blacks and the underclass.

And, of course, Henry Ford.

Ford, wrote "The International Jew" and was obsessed with Jews as forming a world wide conspiracy, and was informed by the previously mentioned mob. His greatest fan was Hitler, who showered awards upon him, had his framed portrait on his wall and Hitler noted, with great satisfaction, the denial of entry of the ship St. Louis loaded with Jews fleeing the Gestapo and their subsequent return to the concentration camps. Hitler said, "Well, the United States won't have them. Why should we? We'll dispose of them as we see fit."

Theodore Roosevelt

Roosevelt was well embedded with the entire mob. He called unfettered immigration to America, "Racial suicide." He invited a black man to have dinner at the White House, which almost cost him the whole former Confederacy in the next election, but he was of that rich class of folks who did not see themselves as racist, antisemitic or anything other than simply the elect.

And then there was Adolph Hitler, who was the ultimate expression of the thinking these men promulgated.

So, the "Crisis on the Border," the interminable clips on FOXNEWS of dark skinned South Americans headed up the Panama isthmus, and Central American gang members, and Mexican rapists headed toward Texas and the talk of American blood being poisoned, and of vermin streaming across the border is nothing new. 

It makes all those suckered White guys in the sports bars, who never wanted to get into Harvard, feel like they are members of an elite, the White American elite. And they can sing along with Lee Greenwood,

And I'm proud to be an American
Where at least I know I'm free
And I won't forget the men who died
Who gave that right to me
And I'd gladly stand up next to you
And defend Her still today
'Cause there ain't no doubt
I love this land
God Bless the U.S.A.

And listening to them, Mr. Trump will recall John McCain, the sucker who got captured, and he'll know what Trump chumps do not, that he is in the long line of rich guys who have convinced the little guy he loves them.

Zaretsky and the Cynics

 

Cynicism is the operating mode in my office. Every day people visit with their problems and their hopelessness, asking for help from a system they fully expect will disappoint them.

When I tell them there's a drug prescription I can write which would likely help a lot, but the computer software tells me their insurance won't cover it, they smile bitterly and say, "Yeah, what a surprise."

Zaretsky

Not long ago a man who had type 1 diabetes from age 6 visited. He had over the prior three years achieved not just excellent blood sugar control using a new version of an insulin pump. His HbA1c, the measure of his average blood sugar had not just got to an excellent range, but to a normal range. Of course, we were both delighted. He was healthier than he'd been in years. 

Then his insurance company notified him it would no longer pay for his insulin pump supplies, effectively cutting off this therapy. Why? Well, his HbA1c's had been normal for 3 years so they were not going to pay for normal. As far as the 20 year old clerk in front of his computer in Minnetonka, MN was concerned, this patient was normal, and no amount of appeal helped. We spent 3 hours that day in the office, with my medical assistant progressing on her computer and by phone up the ladders of appeal to no effect. 

"So, my blood cholesterol and my blood thyroid levels and my blood pressure are now normal owing to my cholesterol and thyroid medication and my blood pressure medication. Are they going to stop those medications, too?" he asked me.

"What a surprise that would be," I said.

But that is not that sort of cynicism I worry about.

That sort of cynicism is what Robert Zaretsky describes in the Boston Globe Sunday Ideas section of December 15.  Zaretsky begins with the arresting observation that cynicism afflicts us all, "like an odorless toxic gas."

He then launches into a visit to the original Cynics of ancient Greece.

Diogenes

Now, I have to admit up front, anytime I hear someone jump back to ancient Greece my antennae sizzle and start to combust: Oh, here we go, trying to act all scholarly by referring to Socrates or someone who lived so long ago, surely we have no real idea of what he said, thought or lived, but every Oxford don loves to go there, because it makes them sound, well, you know, scholarly. Hey, this guy can read Greek on tablets--he must know something I don't.

But in Zaretsky's case, he actually makes this all relevant, alive and engaging. 

Diogenes, the original Cynic it turns out, is a guy I recognize. "In their eyes, civility equaled hypocrisy and conventions corrupted our nature."

Oh, that I know from way back. 

My father was like that. 

We lived in Washington, D.C., the ultimate place for parsed speech, for hypocrisy hiding behind every euphemism. Washington, D.C. was then a distinctly un-cosmopolitan, Southern town, where people always began with a "Bless your heart," and lots of Southern blather. "Why, Bless your heart, I understand why you might be upset about my insistence that no Negroes be able to use a Whites Only bathroom, but you know it's only about hygiene and it's best for everyone, the Negroes as much as us."

My father got to the point where he hated the mindless rituals, like saying, "Nice to meet you," or "Thanks for coming by." He just launched into people.

Polite Company

I saw the same thing in European immigrants who flooded suburban Washington after the second world war--they had no time for civility. The former fighter pilot up the street was like that. He had heard the colonel sending him out on another mission say stuff like, "We are all so proud of you," once to often. I can only imagine how he would react to that "Thank you for your service," thing.

But modern cynics, who orbit Mr. Trump do not insist on shoving aside the hypocritical to speak the truth.

"Unlike the modern cynic, the ancient Cynic insisted upon truth-telling. Not to be cruel for the sake of cruelty but to be blunt for the sake of our common humanity," Zaretsky notes. 

My father was a huge embarrassment to my brother and me because whenever we had to go somewhere social with him, he stood out, much as Diogenes, as uncultured, hostile and unsophisticated.

In a social world where people from South Carolina and Georgia, where lynching happened daily and the Whites just smiled politely, there were plenty of hot button issues everyone stayed away from, the third rails prevailed, even at a cocktail party of my mother's friends who taught at the high school where she taught. My curmudgeonly father could start a fight if we weren't minding him, and bottles and furniture might start flying.

Modern Day Cynic at his Lynching Trial

But now, that's what Trumplings want to happen. As if the fight, the provocation were all that mattered. Truth is irrelevant. The 2020 election was stolen; vaccines cause autism; COVID was a Chinese plot; climate change is a Chinese plot; wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers; separation of church and state is not constitutional--the First Amendment is unconstitutional. Doesn't matter. Truth to power is no longer a thing--it's now the middle finger to power. Truth is irrelevant.

The story of Diogenes sunbathing and Alexander the Great walks up to talk to him and commands, "Make a request!" And Diogenes says, "Move out of my sun," is a splendid parable. "In effect, he reminded the hegemon-to-be that he was nothing more than a man."

I really don't care if this parable reports a real event any more than it matters whether Biblical parables are true. The point is, it is a relevant story for today.  This is why Musk is so topical: He's telling everyone to move out of his sun. He may be a weird reactionary but he's not wrong about everything. As Musk has pointed to a multibillion dollar fighter plane saying that sending up a man in an airplane, when a drone could serve the purpose better, has more to do with getting the pilot laid when he goes to the Tail Hook party later, than with national defense. 

Truth there, even coming from a nasty self serving source.

Zaretsky's article is worth a read. I was a science major in college but I did get to take the occasional non science course, even one in philosophy, but as soon as the professor started talking about how some word or concept actually goes back to the ancients, and all the other dons started smiling because they wanted to believe their mastery of ancient Greek mattered, my mind shut down. Zaretsky makes this stuff modern, makes it live.

My cynical patients,  care nothing for the truth; they just want to burn everything down, and they are as happy to embrace untruth as truth. 

Discovering truth is often a lot of work. 

Vaccines? Oh, horrible, more harm than good, better to have polio and measles abound than to risk a vaccine. 

Yikes. 

I presume Diogenes would not be amused.