Not until I had read "The Premonition" did I take down off my bookshelf a black jacketed volume I had received for Christmas from some relative whose identity is regretfully lost to me, a book called "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry.
And not until I began reading Mr. Barry's book did I understand that Rand Paul and Jimmy Dan Jordan are nothing new or even unusual in the American Congress--they are simply a continuation of the anti intellectual strain deeply rooted in American culture, a weed examined by Richard Hoftstader, but far more pervasive than I had previously appreciated.
In 1876, the same year George Armstrong Custer lost his scalp in Dakota, Johns Hopkins university was opened in Baltimore. The Union Army had court martialed its own Surgeon General for attempting to outlaw the violent purgatives then popular among Army doctors and the Union Army had a grand total of six thermometers.
 |
| Dr. Charity Dean |
In that time Henry Bigelow, professor of Surgery at Harvard laughed at the suggestion of Harvard President Eliot that medical students be given written exams. "More than half of them can barely write. Of course they can't pass written examinations. No medical school has thought it proper to risk large existing classes and large receipts [tuition] by introducing more rigorous standards."
In 1900 only 34 of 48 states even licensed surgeons.
Why? Because "There is not a greater aristocratic monopoly in existence than this of regular medicine--neither is there greater humbug."
Rand Paul did not graduate from college--he got into Duke University School of Medicine in a story as yet untold, and got his MD without first graduating an undergraduate program. He passed his boards in ophthalmology but he refused to take the follow up board exams, and instead created his own board exams.
 |
| The Smartest Man in Every Room |
In this, of course, he was attacking a system which deserves examination--the corruption of exams meant to insure quality which has undergone malignant degeneration in a system designed to generate profit for the test makers, and for the whole infrastructure of test prep courses and professional organizations it supports. But Paul, of course, sullies the righteous cause of expunging corruption in the certification and licensing process by attacking the very idea of standards, when in fact we do need quality controls, we just need good and meaningful quality controls rather than the cynical mess we have.
And what you get from Paul is the ugly face of sanctimony, as he baits Tony Fauci, in Senate hearings, saying that the COVID virus was "enhanced" and given "gain of function" in a lab in China with funds from Fauci's own NIH. Paul is echoing the conspiracy theorists who insist:
"Instead, government authorities — self-interested in continuing 'gain of function' research — say there's nothing to see here," he continued. "'Gain of function' research, as you know, is juicing up naturally occurring animal viruses to infect humans.
"To arrive at the truth, the U.S. government should admit that the Wuhan Virology Institute was experimenting to enhance the coronavirus's ability to infect humans."
It's Area 51 all over. Space aliens kept alive by the US government. The government lies to us. But we are smart enough to know.
If we are to believe in democracy and freedom, then we cannot believe in special knowledge, knowledge possessed only by those folks who the academic elite have sanctified to have such knowledge.
Of course, the universities and the NIH will argue, you can have the knowledge, but only if you do the work to be able to understand the knowledge. And to do that, you must study with us.
 |
| Anthony Fauci, MD |
In the internet age, more and more special knowledge is available from universities and podcasts, but it is dispersed among the rest of the hay which is simply untrue, at best, or magnified conspiracy trash, at worst.
Reading "The Great Influenza" you have to hand it to George W. Bush, who read the book, or at least read enough of it, to demand his administration prepare itself for the next big pandemic. He might have been stupid enough to buy into trickle down economics, stupid enough to take the bait offered by Osma Bin Laden and invade Iraq along with Afghanistan, stupid enough to believe in "weapons of mass destruction," stupid enough to miss the housing bubble which brought down the nation's economy and sent to to the precipice of economic collapse, but he was apparently able to read, and he found Barry's book convincing enough to order a response.
Rand Paul and Jimmy Dan, however are not that smart.
 |
| Government and the Infantile |
It may be SARS COVID 2 escaped from a Wuhan lab, as sort of Chinese version of "Crisis in the Hot Zone" but if it did you know for Goddamn sure we will never find out about it. What do you think a locked down society like China can do with information it does not want known?
 |
| Rand Fan |
Reading "The Great Influenza" you realize the ineptitude Michael Lewis exposes in our government is nothing new and in fact is dwarfed by the ignorance and complacency of America past. We are just being what we always have been, a country Churchill described when he said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities."
