Strong and stable

To start with some good news:  Chinese media report success in treating COVID-19 with the HIV drug Kaletra/Aluvia.  The company that makes it, Abb/Vie, has not been able to verify this because the Chinese medical data is classified, like Pence's briefings.

I don't have any more good news.  Our immediate future involves no sports, Broadway shows, Boston Marathon, Disneyland, Metropolitan Opera, audiences at TV tapings or visitors to the Capitol.  The Supreme Court is in recess, which is not necessarily bad.  Louisiana has postponed its April 4 primary, while schools and colleges are closing everywhere.  Cher has rescheduled her tour for autumn.  Movie premieres have also been pushed back.  It's non-business as usual.

Another Mar-a-Lago partygoer has been diagnosed with the virus, Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami.  Just interviewed on MSNBC, he looks and sounds a lot better than his host.  Less than an hour before the stock market closed, Trump and an honor guard of smiling, nodding courtiers appeared in the Rose Garden to announce "a national emergency.  Two very big words."*  Confidence is high.  He then lied about a wondrous new Google website that will answer all your questions and take your temperature (and that does not actually exist yet), and snarled to a reporter, "I don't take responsibility at all" for our tardiness in testing.  When will the fake media learn that Trump accepts only praise and credit, never blame or responsibility?

And then he shook hands with the CEOs of pharmacy companies, because the point was to prop up their stock prices with the prospect of $50 billion in government money.  He shook hands.  I hope they all went straight to the Silkwood showers, because Trump looks and sounds seedier than he did on Wednesday night.  Even Ivanka had enough sense to stay home after meeting an Australian government minister who has tested positive.  For Daddy it was just a substitute for the hatenannies he has reluctantly cancelled.  I'm surprised he didn't wear a MAGA hat.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi has been trying to put together a plan to help working people who can't work and sick people who can't afford treatment, in meetings with Steve Mnuchin.  Historians will try to grasp a national emergency in which the President of the United States hated the Speaker of the House so much, he refused to be in the same room, while Americans died.  They will fail.  The House bill needs to go to the Senate but there's nobody home -- Moscow Mitch decided they needed another three-day weekend.  Also, the Republicans don't know how to vote until they get tomorrow's tweets.  Americans die.  The economy sags and cracks.

But not everyone is suffering.  Jared Kushner did some profit-taking in the neighborhood of $50 million, which is a very nice neighborhood, while he approved the virus response and continued to solve the opioid problem.  (To be honest, I had forgotten that was one of his.)  He works so hard, I almost don't like to complain.  He read twenty-five books about the Middle East before telling the Palestinians they could like it or lump it.  I assume none of them was by Edward Said.  Clearly Kushner is doing all the heavy lifting -- why do we need Trump?

At the other end of the social scale -- the Bottom-Out-of-Sight, as Paul Fussell called them in Class --
we're looking at a Spanish flu scenario.  That pandemic took advantage of the millions crowded into refugee camps, military bases, troop trains and ships, prisoner of war camps, housing for munitions workers, etc., galloping among people who were already exhausted, malnourished, sick, wounded and stressed.  The United States has more people locked up than any other country -- convicts in prisons, those awaiting trial who can't make bail, and our new "guests" in the squalid Trump camps on the Mexican border.  The bottom of the pyramid will take all the weight from the raving incompetence at the top.  This will be very bad.

"Strong and stable" was the campaign slogan of the hapless Theresa May, former prime minister of Great Britain.  She repeated it at every opportunity until it became a joke, because her government was anything but strong, more inert than stable.  Right now, it looks like a condition we could all happily embrace.   Forget Reagan -- it's Eisenhower the Republicans should be trying to re-animate.  People are tired of all the shouting and the daily chaos.  They want a nice old gentleman who might mix up his words but doesn't make them yell at the television, doesn't have an opinion to share about everything from the gold standard to the Golden Globes, doesn't pal around with the most vicious authoritarians he can find.  If he actually knew the Constitution and how government works, that would be comforting, too.  Anybody come to mind?

Anyway, tomorrow is the birthday of Albert Einstein, designated as pi day.  Eat some pie.  Be kind to yourself and avoid crowds.



*Fortunately he didn't have to say the name of the World Health Organization director, Dr. Tedros Adhanom-Ghebreyesus.