Missing

Maybe it's because most of us are still in the house, with all our information coming from screens and rumors, but I keep thinking of the Star Trek episode where Dr. Crusher is the only person who notices that the rest of the crew is getting scarce.  Where have they gone?  I can't remember what resolution the writers came up with, but only some of our fellow crew members on this big starship can be accounted for.

Dr. Lorna Breen was an emergency room physician at New York-Presbyterian Hospital.  She was in Charlottesville, Virginia, with her family over the weekend when she killed herself.  Or rather, in the words of her father Dr. Philip C. Breen, "She tried to do her job and it killed her."  Anyone familiar with the emergency departments of urban hospitals knows they are stressful and terrible in ordinary circumstances, so this was a strong woman.  

Sometimes strength is not enough.  Dr. Yelena Nepomnyashchaya "fell" from the window of her office in the Krasnoyarsk hospital where she was acting director.  At the time, she was on a conference call, objecting to the lack of personal protective equipment for her staff.  A few days later Dr. Natalia Lebedeva died when she also "fell" from the room where she was being treated for Covid-19.  I use quotation marks because nobody thinks these were accidents, certainly not her colleagues -- they have compiled a list of Belarussian and Russian doctors and nurses who have died from coronavirus.  For some reason, they don't trust the official count.

Could Russia be as incompetently governed as the United States?  It's stunning to contemplate.  Americans awoke to the news that they should have hoarded meat instead of toilet paper.  "The food supply chain is breaking," says the chairman of Tyson Foods.  Pork plants have closed after hundreds of employees tested positive for coronavirus or were already out sick.  Farmers with no place to send their animals are destroying them, which costs them money and makes meat even more scarce.  The U.S. supposedly has 2.5 billion pounds of meat in a strategic reserve, but if Jared Kushner gets to it first...

Unless somebody else is lying like a trump, we are the sickest country on earth by a large margin, with a million cases confirmed in spite of our shoddy testing procedures and more dead than the Vietnam War.  Republican politicians continue to concentrate on the important stuff, like getting the restaurants and casinos open and making sure most of the "small business" relief goes to publicly traded companies and luxury hotels.  They get little leadership from their Leader in all this, because he has bigger problems.  The New York Times not only documents his laziness, it even has a running total of the number of times he has praised himself, just about the pandemic.  (For a compendium of lies since January 20, 2017, you still need the Washington Post.)  Yesterday he had to block Piers Morgan -- Piers Morgan -- for writing a column which began, "SHUT THE F*CK UP, PRESIDENT TRUMP!" and then got very very nasty.  Today it's Howard Stern saying, "I would love it if Donald would get on TV and take an injection of Clorox."  Et tu, Howard?  This is tantamount to a death threat.  Expect a visit from the FBI.  Not the Deep State part, the part that spies on mosques.

So Donald and his court have been frantically documenting how hard he works and for how long, not boring stuff like listening to Presidential Daily Briefings but making thousands of calls and reading documents and not even stopping for lunch, they have to drag him away for a hamburger, really, the man is a dynamo.  Well, we all needed a laugh.  Trump has decided that he doesn't like the daily press kabuki because, while it's fun to abuse the press, they never cheer for him or chant "Lock her up!" or tell him, with tears in their eyes, "Sir, we would be lost without you, sir."  They just keep asking questions about additional calls to poison control centers,  to which he replies, "I can't imagine."  Now that's sarcasm.  I think.  I can't even tell anymore.  But when Mitch McConnell concurs with Piers Morgan, all the ice cream in the White House freezer (which is a much bigger and colder freezer than Nancy Pelosi's freezer) can't take away the pain.

Anthony Fauci has been missing from the last couple of White House briefings, probably because he has to listen to so much bullshit.  He was absent from Thursday's infamous "Lysol cure" fiasco; unlike Dr. Deborah Birx, he probably would have said something instead of staring at his hands, and fewer people might be gargling with Tarn-X.  In any case, Trump wants to banish both of them so he can address the masses without interruption.  And maybe no reporters.  Just turn on the cameras and leave.  Well, they told us about his stamina.

Stephen A. Crockett, Jr., at The Root noticed that "senior advisers" Diamond and Silk have been missing from Fox News since March 6.  Their disappearance was COVID-19-related, but not in a respiratory illness way:  it seems that their conspiracy theorizing was too much even for the Hannity-Carlson-Ingraham channel.  Looks like racism to me.  Yeah, definitely racism.  

I liked it better when the world just pitied us.