My identification with the sick President, as my fellow septuagenarian and fellow human being, is wearing thin. I feel particularly alienated by what I read about a video he make in the Rose Garden, I think it was. In this video, the sick President claims to have discovered a cure for the virus. He thanks God, in fact, for giving him the disease so he could fortuitously discover this miracle cure.
I don’t know the name of this miracle cure. My memory is mercifully failing me. But it was a drug cocktail, given to him by his doctors, and not presently available to the general public. I had hoped through my identification with the sick President, as a fellow old, white, guy, to see my future should I become ill with the bug. That no longer seems possible. The sick President has taken a path not available to me as a member of the general public.
I felt our paths earlier to diverge when I sensed a possible duplicity in the sick President. He argued for example that we should not allow ourselves to be dominated by the bug. We should not wear masks, or wash our hands all the time, or socially distance, or avoid large gatherings such as baseball games. We should live our lives as we had before the virus arrived. We should Pretend it does not Exist. And yet, as soon as the sick President got a fever, he had himself taken by helicopter to a hospital as if the virus does exist. This indicates either that he did not believe what he previously said or that he failed sufficiently to imagine that the virus does not exist.
The Sick President’s Philosophy of the Virus seems to me, thus, internally inconsistent. He says one thing and does another. I become even more confused when he argues that, per his own experience with the wonder drug, the virus is really no big deal. No worse, he says, than the “normal” flu. Well I must disagree. The “normal flu” is no laughing matter to an elderly person like myself. And certainly the COVID was a big deal for the 200,000 who have died from it.
