The Public Intellectual

 

Chicago Times, "The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances"

Daily Patriot (Harrisburg, PA), "Silly remarks. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of."

--Reaction to President Lincoln's address at the battlefield cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania November 19, 1863.

David Brooks

Even before there was television, before the internet, before X, there were people who could convey their thoughts to millions of people and have those thoughts considered, who could mold opinion, instigate discussion. Henry David Thoreau could sit in his cabin and write "Civil Disobedience" and "Walden" and his mind could touch the imperfect body politic.

Then came Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who could reach people in their living rooms via radio.

And then Walter Cronkite came into millions of homes with his carefully apolitical "CBS Evening News."

Mad Dog has to admit, he is as suspectable as anyone, more than most, as he now watches PBS News nightly, reads, actually reads not just the cartoons but articles, every week in the "New Yorker" and lately has added "The Atlantic."

More often that not, Mad Dog finds himself flinging a magazine across the room, shouting, "What piffle! What trumpery! What sophistry!"

And yet, with each new issue arriving at his door, with every evening the TV beckons, and Mad Dog looks with hopeful eyes toward an epiphany which never comes.

Dudley Dudley, Hero of the NH Seacoast

There are some public figures who have been given a spot on national TV, in newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal which have massive, expensive, extensive distribution. They have the stage and the spotlight. From some occult process a select few have been chosen by some powers to speak to the masses. 

For years, I've watched David Brooks, with whom I have a love/hate relationship, but I can't say our relationship has grown old. It's simply aged.

Why I still read him, I cannot say. Maybe a large part of it is he is still there. I don't care if he is widely read or influential--I care whether I agree with him when I read him and whether I find myself saying, "True that. Finally, someone has put into words my own inchoate thoughts."

That is rare, nowadays, with David or with anyone else.

The American Dream

Jill Lepore, George Packer get it right more often than not, but they too often meander away from the salient point.

Evan Osnos reports more than he tries to elucidate or persuade, and his recent piece on "The Oligarch in Chief" mentions a woman named Erica Payne, who has organized a group called "Patriotic Millionaires" who says its the mission of her group to avoid the mistakes of the intolerant left: "We're not going to talk about all this stuff that everybody else wants to talk about...transgender, L.G.B.T.Q, guns--everything that makes everybody mad."

I read that and said, "Finally!"

But then there is David saying stuff like this: "Nations that hang together through crisis have a strong national identity--they return to their roots. They have a leader who replaces the amoralism of the nihilists, or, say, the immorality of slavery, with a strong redefinition of the nation's moral mission, the way Lincoln redefined America at Gettysburg."

Back to Our National  Roots

And that's where Mad Dog goes into orbit. 

The fact is, Brooks is not revealing a forgotten or unappreciated past; he is creating a myth of a world which never existed and which is the sort of Disney history we teach children in some public schools. Brooks is engaging in that dreamworld of Stephen Speilberg, who, in a typically Spielberg moment in his movie "Lincoln" he has two Union soldiers, one Black, reciting back to Lincoln his words from the Gettysburg Address, as if that wonderful coda actually reached and was taken to heart by the vast armies of the Union. As if that dramatic moment at Gettysburg, which actually, was not so dramatic, in the days before public address systems and sound amplification, but which did get recorded in some manner and eventually some people heard about it. 

But in a Spielberg-esque/Brooks telling, these soldiers now knew what they were fighting for, and would go out singing the Gettysburg address, like Onward Christian soldiers, and take it to the battlefield trampling out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored. 

Yikes.

There was no one, unified nation in 1863. Most of the soldiers who died at Gettysburg had no desire to free Negro slaves. The armies that fought for the Union were often comprised of coerced soldiers who wanted to leave and go back home.  For all that has been said about Lincoln's extraordinary sermon at Gettysburg, it was just that, a wish for what he hoped the nation could be, not what it was.  He was trying to lead a second American revolution, but until Grant ground down the Army of Northern Virginia, there was no such entity. And when the war was finally about to be concluded, Lincoln looked back over it and tried to make sense of it in his immortal Second Inaugural Address, and that, as Frederick Douglass (a frequent critic of Lincoln) said, was a "sacred effort."

And what is that "strong national identity" Brooks speaks of? Drive around the states of the old Confederacy, or the Mountain West or the Southwest from Arizona to Texas to Oklahoma and tell me what that national identity is.

Sherman, Obadiah Youngblood

And what does he mean by a nation returning to its roots? What are the American roots? No discussion of roots can occur without examining the slave culture of the South, or of the ongoing insurrection of Jim Crow, that guerilla warfare employing the Ku Klux Klan and lynching, the ruthless suppression of unions from Washington State to Pittsburgh to Chicago. 

Read American history as written by Howard Zinn or even Oliver Stone, or Emma Goldman, and find us some common roots. 

What Brooks, and what so many other public intellectuals give us is nothing better than the typical Sunday sermon about a fantasy he wants to believe in, which he wants us to embrace as reality, but which is a history blind to reality.

And there, my friends, you have the true art of the Public Intellectual.

Those Nasty Bilinguals

If you speak three languages: You are trilingual.

If you speak two languages: You are bilingual.

If you speak one language: You are an American.

--Variously attributed, at least one such to Obadiah Youngblood

 Tonight, staring out at me from the TV Stephen Miller, President Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff, said that President Trump wants to arrest 3,000 "bilinguals" a day with hopes of deporting all these undesirables.

Not even Professor Google, nor his closest aide, Mr. AI, knows whether Mr. Miller speaks any language other than English.

All this brought to mind a woman who worked for me some years ago. 

I had always felt quite abashed that, despite 5 years of French in school, I can barely manage to order in French at a restaurant, not to mention being unable to converse in French. Whenever I go to Europe or watch my beloved Nordic Noir TV programs every evening, I marvel and feel more and more feckless as I observe these Europeans shifting effortlessly between English (which everyone seems to speak in Northern Europe) and Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, even Russian, whatever. The Irish may speak Gaelic, the Welsh speak Welsh, but they command English as well.

But not all people envy, or even applaud multilingualism.

A woman who worked in my office years ago leapt to mind as soon as I heard Stephen Miller intone "bilinguals."

This woman was in her late 50's when I hired her, and she learned our new computer system way faster than I was able to. She was not intimidated by learning stuff she did not previously know about. She thought she could learn anything. She was very bright on many levels. When our photocopier broke, she found a sticker on it with a 1-800 number, called it and got directions to fix the machine, all without my suggesting it. (Would never have occurred to me to look.) She was a musician and sung professionally, and she knew all the different keys and she and she  could read music and while she had never taken a music theory course, she hadn't needed to. She knew what she needed to know. She was observant and funny and just plain smart.

But she had grown up dirt poor in West Virginia, lost all her teeth by age 30, and never got past the 3rd grade. She stole canned marmalade from local grocery stores to feed her sister and brother and herself when her parents absented themselves, which was not infrequently.

She was self taught and she refused to consider herself intellectually deficient, and she was correct about that. She could learn anything. 

On the other hand, she complained about going to the McDonald's near her home where the adolescents behind the counter chatted with each other in Spanish, before turning to take her order in perfect English.  And she was enraged to hear customers eating at tables there, speaking Chinese. She would imitate how they sounded, with her good musical ear, and it did sound like Chinese to my American ear, but she did that to deride and denigrate those Chinese speakers.

"Why are these people allowed to speak Chinese or Spanish in there?" she asked indignantly. "This is America, Goddamn it! Speak freaking English!"

I told her, "You know, with your great ear for sound, I bet you could learn Spanish or Chinese in about a week. Then you could blow them all away at McDonald's."

She was horrified, "Why would I want to do that? I'm American. I belong here. It's them who should be learning English!"

So, if she was watching Stephen Miller tonight, I know that somewhere out there in America, Mr. Miller has found his audience. 

The Joker Rules: Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon The World

 

Batman, for me, got left behind with the black and white TV era and Adam West, but I'm aware he lived on in multiple movies, comic books and Madison Avenue renditions.  I might have this wrong, but one of the characters he fought was the Joker, who seemed to have no greater purpose than destruction. Question for the Jorker: What are you against? Answer: What've you got?

The Joker

The Don

The Godfather, for me, was not about the Don, or even his heir, Michael, but about Sonny Corleone, who, learning his brother has enlisted to fight in World War II explodes. You would fight for strangers? For Sonny anyone who would respond to appeals to patriotism is a "sap." And nobody outside the family matters. His family, his tribe is all that counts. The idea of a country is absurd. We see the place this mindset originated as Michael wanders the Sicilian countryside and villages and notices there are very few men around, and he is told that is because they have all been killed in vendettas, fights among the families.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=435mkg6_eGQ

If life imitates art, then lately, it feels as if we are living in the universe of these tales--the Joker has finally seized power, defeated Batman, and Sonny Corleone lives--it is his world now, where all that matters is the deal, enriching your own family and those who fight alongside you for you and yours.

The Joker now tries to take down Gotham by attacking its strongest institutions: the universities, most particularly the most famous, Harvard, and public TV and radio, legacy news organizations, newer news like CNN, the diplomatic establishment, and the military, and medical institutions (the CDC, the NIH, university hospitals, the public health service). And he loves to luxuriate among those erstwhile villains, the Russians (Putin), the Saudi monarchy--who am I to judge just because you dismember a journalist?--especially those who are fighting erstwhile good guys (Volodymyr Zelensky). 

So the hero, Zelensky, is now a pariah and the villains, once again the heroes. Vktor Orban, the dictator of Hungary: hero. Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who dismembers journalists who displease him: hero.  

And now, Mr. Putin has erected a statue/wall frieze of Stalin in the Moscow subway, to greet all the commuters--and he has come full circle 1984 style, with the old vanquished and discredited now back in fashion, to be adored again.

Can't wait to see what other creepy crawlies from history are going to be getting their faces on postage stamps next. You know who I'm thinking of.  And for that matter, Mussolini did make the trains run on time. 

And let us not forget his embrace of the version of the Joker who preceded him in Israel, the mutated Bibi Netanyahu, who, whatever he once may have been, has now metamorphosized into someone who claims you can really fight a "war on Hamas" or "a war on terrorism" and defeat an idea--that is the idea of resistance, no matter what its name. And he sells the endless war as a "war" against a discrete enemy, which has gone by many names, most currently Hamas, but even if "Hamas" undergoes a corporate restructuring, there is no doubt there will always be a successor rising from the ashes. It's really whack-a-mole: slam one, another pops up.

Lillian Hellman called her era "Scoundrel Time," and we have certainly passed through that, but currently, it feels as if we have slid beyond that, back to the time where the disease is not confined to the stage at Nuremberg, but has spread out into the thousands of spectators, waving their flags and banners, a contagion uncontainable by any sort of vaccination, untreatable by words or ideas. 

We live now in a world depicted in another movie, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the 1978 Donald Southerland version, where there are no space ships invading earth. The "infestation" has no defined borders, just little pods drifting in among humanity, its tentacles reaching out, entwining and replacing us.

Off With Their Heads: Trump Shoots Harvard on 5th Avenue

We are not the first, nor likely the last, nation to be burned by revolution. The French, of course, went after their aristocrats--even their scientists. Lavoisier, the man who discovered oxygen, among other important things, went to the guillotine because he was an aristocrat and people just then didn't care much about oxygen, but they knew they resented aristocrats. The Chinese had their cultural revolution under Mao, which targeted the intellectuals, college professors, and dragged intellectuals before rural peasants to be denigrated, if not beheaded. 

Eventually, both countries realized they needed somebody who knew how to build factories, and a navy, fashion munitions,  and lead armies.

Now, we have President Trump pulling every lever he can pull to defund Harvard, cutting it off from students from abroad, a source of income, but also a source of ideas and cross pollination, in a world which depends on the free flow of information, ideas and innovation. 

American scientists will be in the same position Hitler's nuclear scientists found themselves--cut off from rapidly advancing technology. Hitler dismissed the idea that America might be working on a nuclear bomb as absurd, the product of "Jewish science," which it was, in part, but it was science that worked, and which produced the atomic bomb, which, had Hitler not died in April, would have been dropped on Germany by August.

And then we have RFK JR saying measles vaccine is more dangerous than and does as much harm as the disease itself, saying that Europe has more measles than we do and they vaccinate, which is of course an end run around the truth: Which Europe is he talking about? 

Yes, Kazakhstan has 3,000 cases a year, but then again, they are not vaccinating their kids. 

As Paul Offit has noted, not only does RFK JR prevaricate about measles, he says polio vaccine did more harm than good. And yet, one has to ask, whatever happened to polio?

The EU countries, like the US (once) vaccinate against measles, and as a result, measles has been unheard of in those places.  In the US, the only places we saw measles were among cults which refused vaccinations. Until now--now we've got the gullible and the willful and the uneducated and those distrustful of authority hearing from an unimpeachable source, RFK JR, and Trump, that vaccines really are dangerous and don't trust those elites who are trying to inject you with nefarious stuff.

Paul Krugman notes that he, even Paul Krugman, a Noble prize winner, harbored some underlying resentment against Harvard because they rejected him at age 17 for undergraduate college--Harvard's loss, clearly. They missed a good one, and likely Harvard misses thousands of kids destined for glory every year as they try to process 50,000 applications from kids whose school grades from 14 to 17 years old are supposed to reveal talent and potential. 

And even when they guess right, as in the case of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, those two guys arrived at Harvard and only stayed a year, concluding Harvard really had nothing to offer them worth staying for, and they had higher mountains to climb. Harvard often frames the rejection by these two successful people as evidence that, well, we know how to recognize genius, but the truth is, these geniuses chose Harvard, not the other way around. 

They did the version of that Tony Fauci story--which he has never directly denied--that when Cornell medical school offered Dr. Fauci a faculty position, he said thanks but no thanks, stunning the faculty. How could he turn down such an honor? And he said, "Someday I'm going to be either very rich or very famous--but if I stay at Cornell, I'll be neither." Which means, some people of great ambition look around at institutions like Harvard and Cornell and realize they would be constrained by those places, not enabled, and they say, "Keep your honor; I'll fashion my own fortune."

As Thoreau said, it is a man's opinion of himself which determines his fate, not the esteem of others.

But, all that said,  Harvard is a major employer in Boston and in Massachusetts, and it's health care system is innovative and vast, and its accomplishments in wide swaths of medical research are too numerous for an accounting in a mere blog. 

Harvard may be insufferably arrogant, but so what?

Kids from Harvard College talk about holding back from "dropping the H bomb" on prospective employers, dates, parents of friends and potential lovers, until the strategically right moment, when they expect it to have the maximum effect in establishing their superiority. The "H bomb," is, of course, that single sentence, "I went to Harvard."

So what? Let them cling to that. Some people cling to guns and religion. Others cling to Harvard.

Personally, I never wanted to go to Harvard. The kids from my high school who went to Harvard were such excruciating nerds I could hardly imagine how depressing it would be to have to spend four years with them.

Yale looked better--but I did not look good enough to Yale.

Do I want to burn down Yale? No. I did okay without Yale, and without Harvard. Let their alumni sit around their clubs and dinner tables congratulating themselves for being among the elect. Their good fortune didn't hurt me. Given my own limitations, I did okay  for a mope.

Who wants to be a cheerleader for Harvard? It's the place we love to hate. It's the neighbor who can afford his Mercedes and parks it in his driveway just to let everyone see it. But if his restaurant employs fifty locals, and attracts people to the movie theater next door, well, I say, let him enjoy his Mercedes. Doesn't hurt me to have to look at it. 

Actually, my Toyota has heated leather seats and having ridden in both cars, I actually prefer my own.

Truth be told, Harvard University as a whole, especially in healthcare, does much more good than harm.  

Trump however, knows that attacking Harvard is good politics. His base loves it. And then he says he'll build trade schools with all the money the federal government once spent on Harvard; maybe he'll build trade schools  right in Harvard yard. So that's the thumb in the eye. We'll tear down your school and build our own school in its place.

And, of course, we should be building more trade schools. We need more plumbers, HVAC, electricians. Just try getting any of those skilled workers to your house any time soon--and those jobs cannot be outsourced to India, the way a radiologist's job can be.

Fact is, we can do all that, and still keep Harvard. 

So, killing the elite university feels good to Trumplings everywhere--they all cheer when the bloody head is held high from the guillotine. 

The question is, are we better off with that severed head, or were we better off with it still attached?

So, now, we have the dream come true: 

Headline:  Trump Shoots Harvard In Broad Daylight on Fifth Avenue

Subheadline: Homeland Security Arrests Yale and Princeton as Co-conspirators. No charges pressed against Trump.

Mauthausen, Justice and the Long Arm

 Joseph Bernstein's New York Times Magazine article today tells the story of his father, who was blown up in Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland  37 years ago, and the Libyan terrorist, Abu Mas'ud, who built or planted or planned the bomb, is now being brought to trial at age 74, in America.

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

Bernstein asks about the meaning of justice. Mas'ud was one of Gaddafi's terrorist/spy network operatives, and was acting under orders. The murder of his father and the other passengers happened almost 4 decades ago and the accused is now an old man.

Michael Bernstein's State Dept ID

Some of those concentration camp guards who have been found in the USA or in Germany are now so demented they cannot recognize their own children: Can justice be served if the criminal cannot recall the crime, understand what is happening in the court room or function on more than a vegetative level?  

"My father was an American citizen, and so the latest justice to which he is entitled, given the context, is the prosecution of an old man, for a crime he is charged with committing 36 years ago, under orders.

Since the Nuremberg trials, it has been a principle of international law that crimes legitimized by a state bureaucracy are still crimes."

The man who drew Michael Bernstein to Berlin was in his 70's, and his crime, although committed nearly 40 years earlier,  was shooting an unarmed prisoner in the back as he tried to escape. The shooting was recorded in writing, in the meticulous records kept by the SS at Mauthausen concentration camp, and the accused remembered the crime, the day and, after much evasion and dissembling, when confronted with the actual log and his name clearly written there, he broke down and admitted it. 

I am left wondering why the SS would even bother to record a single death, the executing guard and the name of the inmate, as if it mattered to these guys.

But, Michael Bernstein had tracked all this down, and the guard was living happily in the United States and Bernstein thought justice demanded, at the very least, the man be deported as an SS murderer who had been given refuge by the United States 8 years after the end of the war. The technical basis for the deportation was he lied on his immigration form. The moral basis was he was an SS concentration camp guard who definitely murdered one inmate and likely others.

In 1988, deporting a man from America back to Germany was not simply a matter of sending some masked ICE agents around, and loading him on some sketchy airplane. Michael Bernstein had to get on a plane to Berlin, along with other State Department officials, and make arrangements, and once he had done his job, he hopped another airplane for the trip home to Bethesda, Maryland.  And thus was he fated to be blown out of the skies by another agent of hate, this time a Muslim, whose hate was no less lethal than that of the Nazis.

But Bernstein's son wonders if there is a difference between the man his father pursued, who pointed a gun at a specific human being, and pulled the trigger and the man who antiseptically assembles a bomb, who has no personal knowledge of the people his act will kill, who functions as part of an organization whose overall goals he might embrace?

American Army Air Force pilots dropped bombs on civilians. Why are they not murderers? Because there was a war. Not that the children of Hiroshima may have been able to understand that distinction. But it is an important distinction.

And when you think of Hamas, and their operatives, who may strap a bomb to a pregnant woman and send her into a busy market one week, and then the next week murder babies in their cribs with their own hands, are they any less worthy of retribution than Mas'ud?

Oddly, I have actually walked around the grounds of the Mauthausen concentration camp where Bernstein's father, some might argue, was the last victim. I had been on a Viking cruise and one day they mentioned that the concentration camp was only a 90 minute bus ride away. I had never seen a concentration camp and was surprised to learn Austria had concentration camps, but this was a bone fide concentration camp alright.  

I went to see it in the rain

It was not set up to simply incinerate people. 

Mauthausen Concentration Camp

It was a work camp. The prisoners were sent to work in a nearby quarry, where they worked within sight of townsfolks who also worked in the quarry, but the prisoners carried large blocks on their backs, back up the hill to the camp area.  

The townspeople did not much like the SS guards, who lived in the village, sometimes billeting with townspeople, and they tended to be what in America might be Hell's Angel's types, drunk at night, prone to fighting, destruction, nasties. But the townspeople could not say they were unaware of the camp.

Gas Chamber At Mauthausen

The camp itself, brought to mind Hanna Arendt's famous observation about the banality of evil. Looking at the low, one story buildings, it was hard to imagine anything very significant went on inside. And even inside, it looked very factory like, business like. There was a small one room gas chamber and a single oven for cremations, but it was not entirely clear who they selected for murder. For the most part, apparently, they simply worked prisoners, mostly Jews, to skeletal death and when they could no long haul boulders, the SS  simply killed them. Likely in that gas chamber, and then likely incinerated the bodies. I wonder if those ledgers recorded all that as well. 

Abu Gharib

There was a large field nearby, where they kept Russian prisoners of war and the conditions there were hard to reconstruct as there were  no permanent structures, just tents apparently.  But there were thousands, and the field was no bigger than a football field. Many died. What happened to their bodies is unclear to me. The single oven would not have been sufficient for large numbers.

As far as punishing a 74 year old man for crimes he committed 40 years earlier, I see no problem with that. 

An American man, at age 70, in prison for a murder he committed at age 20 once argued that every cell in his body had been replaced twice over in those 50 years and so he was like a wooden ship in which every plank, every rope had been replaced--it looked like the original, but it had been completely rebuilt and was no longer the same boat.

But as long as people can recall childhood events, friends and lovers from 50 years ago, and enemies--I would argue they are still the same person and punishment should follow them as long as the law can provide due process and sufficient records and evidence of their crime.

If for no other reason than deterrence. The man Michael Bernstein pursued, the lethal Mauthausen guard, said that he had really no other options than to join the SS and working as a guard. Times were tough. He was uneducated, and the food and housing for concentration camp guards was better than anything he could have acquired any other way.  All he had to do was to shoot the occasional human being in the back.

Church Near the Camp

So, when we are faced with choices and one seems pretty attractive compared to the alternatives, one thing which might make it less attractive is the idea that if you choose the short term gain, there may be some long term pain awaiting.

You Can Choose Your Friends

Christopher Hitchens noted that nobody needs a church or a religion to tell them that certain actions--murder, rape, theft--are bad. You don't need to look up the Ten Commandments to know killing someone is bad. We all share, no matter what culture we come from some basic notions of what is good and evil. 

Aryan Nation

I would argue that Hitchens may not be correct in this, as there are some tribes I studied in college, where they would laugh when someone else's baby crawled into a campfire because that was one less mouth to feed, and as that famous scene in Lawrence of Arabia attests, the Arab who shoots a man dead for drawing water from an oasis well had no remorse, as local tribes guarded wells as if they were sacrosanct. 

But, in general, that guard knew what he had done was evil, and he took comfort in the commendations of all his fellow SS guards, who shot prisoners for sport. And he denied having every been an SS guard at a concentration camp. He knew it was evil. On some level, they all know, as did the October 7th Hamas terrorists, that what they were doing was evil and justice ought to, if we can manage it, pursue them all until they are dead.

From Pasteur to Bobby JR

 

During the dreadful year of 1918 influenza killed more people than the bombs and bullets.

The Black Plague killed somewhere in the neighborhood of half of all people in Europe. No war ever killed half of all the people in Europe.

COVID killed millions.

Now they're saying shiny things with hooks are bad for you.

So, if you are really concerned with Defense or Homeland Security, you would focus not so much on huge things, like rockets and bombs, but on tiny things you cannot see with the naked eye: microbes, viruses and all like that. You would make public health your first priority.

It's no accident then, and really not much of a secret, that the United States government has a secret facility at Ft. Dietrich Maryland to house, study and possibly weaponize infectious agents rather than nuclear bombs. 

Now vs Then (or RFKJR Now)

One thing which requires government, or at the very least a functioning health care system, is protection of the population from epidemic illnesses.

As dreadful as malignant disease is, as widespread as diabetes and coronary artery disease are, nothing quite threatens any organized society--which functions only when people can congregate and engage in commerce, education and group efforts like construction, transportation and government--nothing threatens all that like infectious disease.

One thing government has done for religion, even in a country which once valued the separation of church and state, is it has battled epidemic infectious diseases so people could congregate to worship together.

But now, we have the anti-science mob, who say, "I do my own research," and who now prevent the population from getting direction and advice from those folks who really do actual scientific research.

A few years ago, up here in New England, a fearsome outbreak of Respiratory Syncytial Virus tore through communities and hardly a soul did not know some family who had an infant, toddler or preschooler who wound up on a respirator and the hospitals were overwhelmed.

Remarkably, the American scientific establishment has now come up with a combination of vaccine and therapy which has, in a very significant trial proven to be quite effective at preventing the virus from hospitalizing kids and saving them when they get really sick with RSV. 

This vaccine triumph has happened at the end of a long, arduous, fraught, frustrating road, with many failures and sometimes harm to patients, but it is a remarkable achievement.  Bet you haven't heard. No surprise there. Your ignorance is by design.

The vaccine is actually given to pregnant mothers, who develop antibodies and pass them on to their incubating offspring. This is necessary because RSV kills kids less than a month old, and very often before age 1, so there's no window in their short lives to vaccinate in these neonates.

Parents are and should be understandably cautious about vaccinating a pregnant woman, so the study and its safety assessment and its efficacy should be widely discussed and examined, and you know women will be going online to educate themselves. It's a big decision, but there is good information, if only it were available.

Typically, the Center for Disease Control, puts out a lot of information about stuff like this, and it had a whole press package ready, until RFK JR nixed it. Nobody is going to get any "propaganda" from the CDC, the NIH or any federal department of public health as long as RFK JR is Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here's Paul Offit says of RFK JR:

He has restricted CDC attendance at scientific conferences, eliminated presentations to large audiences, and limited updates on CDC websites. In other words, he [RFK JR] has muzzled the CDC.

And Offit should know, as Offit is on the FDA advisory committee about vaccines. What we have here in RFK JR is really just one bizarre actor in the freak show that is the Trump Administration.  

RFK JR  is a man who was selected because he is the ultimate in oppositional/defiant personality Mr. Trump so loves. 

But, in this case he is positioned to do a world of harm.

It's not like Kristi Noem, the Tammy Faye of the cabinet, with her artificial eyelashes, super blush cheek highlights, who delights in dressing up like a "bad-ass" she-warrior and prancing around borders and prisons, when she is not executing her own pets--the harm she does, while cringe worthy, is nevertheless limited to a few thousand unfortunates--the harm RFK JR and his godfather, Trump, will do can run into the millions.

RFK JR does not believe in germ theory. When he tries to read the scientific literature he reads with a conspiracy theory mindset--finding malevolent intent in every lab, in every paper.  Doing his Own Research RFK JR read Tony Fauci's article on the superinfections seen in fatal cases of measles, and--Aha!--memo to world: RFK JR discovered people do not actually die of measles pneumonia, but of a bacterial (staph aureus) "super infection" pneumonia. So why vaccinate against measles when it's the bacterial that's killing people?  

Of course, this is like saying the man who hemorrhages to death in the emergency room after an auto accident died of bleeding, exsanguination, rather than from the auto accident.  

People whose lungs have not be ravaged by measles or influenza or leukemia or lymphoma do not get staph pneumonia. 

RFK JR does not want you getting your information from the CDC, or the National Institutes of Health. He wants you getting your information only from him. He doesn't have to burn books or medical journals: He can keep you from ever holding one in your hand. He doesn't want NIH doctors going to medical conventions to share their study results with other doctors, because that is like some sort of ritual in a secret society and all the rest of us are left out. Of course, FOXNEWS and RFK JR himself could attend these meetings, but then they'd have to sit through hours and days of presentations, looking at slides, listening to questions from the audience challenging or supporting the findings of research scientists and that is just such hard work and boring!

Better to do your OWN RESEARCH and just know things without bothering to do all that hard work!

And learning stuff means you might have to be faced with stuff you've never heard of before and that can be so unnerving: Ask your school age child, or your college student offspring if they have ever heard of Alexandre Yersin.

Mad Dog will bet you dollars to doughnuts not a single kid will know.

These kids may know about Caesar or Napoleon or Hitler or any of a variety of merchants of death, but ask them if their schools ever taught them about Yersin, or, for that matter Jonas Salk.

Yersin

You can Google these guys, but just briefly: Yersin worked in Pasteur's lab but he had wanderlust badly and wound up in French Indochina just in time for a major outbreak of the black plague in British held Hong Kong. He managed to not only identify the bacillus which causes plague but he raised an antiserum to it so when it made it's way to Vietnam he was able to save his the people all around his village clinic,  and even though he is French, from the country which subjugated their country, there are monuments to Uncle Yersin in Vietnam today. They do not think of their erstwhile Tony Fauci as an authoritarian to be denounced: they know what he did and they understand how his science saved them.

Polio Ward

As for Jonas Salk, Dave Garroway summarized his achievement best. He had to introduce Salk at a banquet and as he was getting dressed in his tux, his seven year old son asked him what the big occasion was, and Garroway said he was going to introduce Jonas Salk, the man who invented the cure for polio. 

And the kid asks, "But what's polio, Dad?" 

And Garroway turns to the audience and says, "Can you imagine any kid of our generation who never heard of polio? That's the best introduction I can possibly give."

I suspect that was the best introduction Salk had ever heard.

These men, Salk, Yersin, along with Banting and Best, who discovered insulin, and saved the lives of countless children and they are the real heroes in history, although that history is not taught in public or even in private schools. 

Best & Banting

The history of the world is a pretty uninspiring thing, when you look at what men have done: hitting each other over the heads with clubs, and then escalating to arrows, then guns then nuclear bombs. But there is another history, that of science which changes for the better the lives of every citizen, in his own village, in his own family.

That is the history RFK JR does not know, or if he knows anything about it, he responds to it in some lunatic way, defying it, denying it, condemning it. I can only imagine where his pathology arose. 

If those who are horrified by Trump would only keep the spotlight on RFK JR, eventually, even the most obtuse will see the truth. The camera has only to show the man and his disease often enough.

And sunlight, ultimately, may prove to be the best disinfectant.