4/27 Cont’d
Not unlike the sound a puppy makes when you stick its nose in the mess it just made, Trump railed and howled against the “lame-stream” media that treated him so unfairly. This brought about a lively debate on the role of the media in my FB newsfeed that I entitled:
Skin in the game
Here’s my skin. My HCP wife was infected. I was infected. I have two friends who had life-threatening versions of this disease. I have another two friends who lost beloved elders in nursing homes. My Republican brother is managing two Regional Medical Command Centers in NNJ. He has high praise for Democrat Gov. Murphy. My pediatrician sister cringes every time one of her young patients come in with respiratory symptoms because she can’t test them. News Flash. Nearly all of them come in with respiratory complaints. We have another Red Cross friend who has been taken out of commission for two weeks in storm-wrecked TN because she may have been infected but has no way to test easily.
This is the kind of skin I’m talking about. Not the thin abstract kind of orange skin of a man who is inexplicably still convinced this is all about him. The job of the media, particularly in times of crisis, is to convey the vital information we need to do our jobs and live our lives safely. Trump has inserted himself into a hypercritical information gathering process and offered mostly dangerous misinformation. All of his misconceptions are dangerous and play with people’s lives. At best, they are two hour political reelection commercials.
A conservative friend opined that “the media didn’t deserve any more press conferences” and I replied that neither they nor Trump get to make that determination. That the media provide a service to the American public and it’s our decision.
Setting the bar
The media is working harder, doing a better job than they’ve ever done before. From the camera operators to the anchors, reporters and editors, they know that if they screw up even a little, they’ll validate the Covidiot’s rants. The scientists and nurses and doctors are working harder. The essential workers are working harder. They’re putting their lives on the line while the gun toting, mask-non toting idiots are waving their phallic semis around.
Another friend worried that all the “gotcha” questions was lowering the WH Press Corps to Trump’s level. The old “don’t wrestle with the pig” argument. I responded that one of the roles of a free press, remember, is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. If you don’t understand this about the fourth estate, you shouldn’t go into politics. Given the unrelenting barrage of dangerous nonsense and politicking coming from him, chasing him off the podium was a public service.
When he’s in the public eye, I worry about the damage he’s doing to the public trust in our country’s leadership. When he’s out of the public eye I worry about what idiocy he is fomenting behind closed doors. I can’t decide which is worse. He’s a unhinged lunatic with bleach cocktail, ultraviolet rectal probes and black box snake oil cures. So if the press is diligent and question every lie, every bit of misinformation, it’s exhausting and sure, it’s gonna look like “gotcha” when it’s really “tit for tat.”
And in this instance he didn’t even give the press a shot at himself. Somehow, one of his handler’s finally got through that thick skull and made him see he’s cutting his feet out from under himself. He scurried away without taking a single question. Anybody want to take odds on how long he’ll stay off the podium? My bet is Wednesday. (I was off by 48 hours.) Mostly I pray they continue to “gotcha.” That’s their job.
It looks unpleasant and uncomfortable and in certain quarters actually draws sympathy where it isn’t deserved. I ask myself and you, like impeachment, is it or was it necessary? Congress, the judicial system and the free press are there to protect the balance of power. At what point do you ease off on the bar to let the pig slither under it. Then you look at the eased-up bar and say “this is the new normal.” The minute you do that, the bar is now forever broken. It can be reset, eased-up again and again. A GOP strategist friend confirms that yes, all politics is appearance, so yes, there’s that. But all governance is law, history, precedent and yes politics. There’s no comforting binary answer.
The Trump White House is and has been in roiling chaos since the beginning. Anybody with half a brain can make that determination objectively. Trump partisans and the nationalist Fauxters would have you believe that facts are fiction, chaos is order and bad is good. They’ve ripped entire chapters from “1984” and updated it. They say we don’t see anything good in Trump because we hated him (without just cause) since the beginning. I’ve hated him from the beginning because he’s an amoral prick who feeds on cruelty. Everything he touches withers and dies. If that isn’t justification, I don’t know what is.
We are the world
The popular line is, it will get better. That we’ll bounce back bigger and better than or same as before. Time to sing another sappy Zoom song about faith, hope and courage. Forgive my cynicism, but I think this is the year that we’ll look back on and point to as the moment we realize that everything has changed. I haven’t had a fever in 12 days. My appetite and walking routine is back to normal. Physically, I’m feeling, if anything, an excess of energy. This dour mood isn’t a product of the state of my health. It’s a product of the state of our nation.
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