It
seems now popular to use a metaphor of war
to describe the national response to the Coronavirus pandemic. The “new” Trump
(new only in the fact he is holding regular press conferences for the first
time in his presidency) actually said in one conference I watched (albeit under
his breath) that he was a “war President” (I believe he meant wartime President). The craziness of
that concept did not escape me.
Nevertheless,
the media and other politicians have taken up the metaphor with gusto. It
should be noted that the only War they or Trump are referring to is WWII. This
was the War in which most of these politicians grew up watching Romanized depictions
on TVs and movies, as oppose to all those other “little”, unpleasant wars that could be
turned off nightly with a push of a TV off button, such as Korea, Vietnam, and
Iraq.
The
idea, of course, is that we need to “recruit” national involvement in a
conflict. They are suggesting that the American people need to rally in a
patriotic way, as what occurred with the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.
New York Governor Cuomo actually compared pandemic responses to "WWII missiles”,
not considering the fact that the US didn’t use missiles in WWII. It is a
Romantic application of history that has no place with this new reality. Its
use is the foundation for Trump’s manic insistence to assess blame for the
outbreak and divert attention from his own actions.
This
infection is not a war with an enemy of defined resources. Trump is no “wartime
President” and has, along with most of his supporters, shown themselves to
be ineffectual in dealing with the crisis. Like Keystone Cops called in to
bring law and order, they have mostly wrought confusion and dangerous delays.
It would be humorous were there not so much peril to their folly. At this point
I think it unlikely they will ever be able to fully gain the Nation’s
confidence.
If
there is any war in progress, it is the three year war waged by Trump and the
Republican Party against Science. Good Science demands that ego, cupidity, and exploitation
yield to objectivity, analytics, and ethical behavior. Trump is so far off the
mark I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him tossing rolls of toilet paper to
the Press Corps, as he threw paper towels to Puerto Ricans.
His
action in 2018 to eliminate the National Security Council’s Directorate for Global
Health and Security, mandated to prepare the Nation to respond to a pandemic (simply because it had been created by Barack Obama - his psychotic nemesis) was
criminal, as any crime would be before a victim surfaces.
His
singular inability to truly focus on anything but himself has, and continues to,
thwart the most important element of a pandemic…it is international. Donald Trump’s
America First has clearly come to
mean America Alone. This has been
obvious for the past three years as it has impacted such things as immigration,
commerce, and climate change, but the negative ramifications to those issues are not
even close to its dire impact on this pandemic. This is true not only for the
health aspects of this crisis, but also for the economic consequences.
Donald
Trump will not improve and he will be
held accountable. But what we need now is the application of Science combined
with international cooperation, not declarations of war. We need clear
communications from trusted sources. The world will be so better off if somehow
the media, Congress, and the scientific community would stop deferring to Trump
as if he were some kind of leader.
C’mon
Obama, step into World and earn your damn Nobel Peace Prize.
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