Public Service Announcement

Do Not Drink Bleach! Do Not Pour Bleach Into Your Orifices! Do Not Inject Bleach!


My mother explained the hazards of drinking bleach when I was about six. She said that it could kill me. I'm proud to say that I have followed my mother's advice for the last 56 years and have not ingested any bleach.

My father had a bad run-in with bleach when I was about 10. He mixed bleach and ammonia while cleaning the bathrub. My dad rarely cleaned the bathtub and had no real idea what he was doing. He wound up in the hospital, hallucinating a third-person perspective from the ceiling of the room. I have learned from my father's example and clean bathtubs only when absolutely necessary.

To the topic at hand, yesterday's "bleach and bright light" task force briefing. I am not going to pile on President Trump. The guy is 73 years old, trying to play a role for which he is miserably equipped. He knows New York real estate. He pretty much intellectually whiffed at everything else until his presidential run. He was about as prepared for a pandemic as either of my grandfathers would have been at 73. My paternal grandfather was a milkman; my maternal grandfather was an anthracite coal miner. They were smart men. They knew their businesses, but weren't really expert at anything else. They would have been as lost as President Trump. The advantages my grandfathers had were that neither was presumptuous. They knew what they didn't know, and they weren't motivated to fake it.

In some ways, I understand what President Trump is experiencing. My last term at Penn State as an English major, I needed one additional credit of English, and there were no one-credit English offerings. I suckered my advisor into approving an ENG 400 exit course, which he assumed was English. It was, however, a job prep course for people graduating in engineering. I had absolutely no idea what anyone was talking about in any of the classes, but I kept my mouth shut, wrote the required job application cover letters and inquiries, and got an A. Had I actually volunteered to ever answer a question in class, I would have been dead meat and probably tossed from the course. The president's problem is that he hasn't learned to keep his mouth shut.

That brings us to the core issues with the president's social history. How does any man go through adult life without anyone telling him that he has no idea what he's talking about? What kind of weird insular psychological existence is that? And does President Trump understand that he's in a bizarre narcissistic social cocoon?

In my business, I am wrong more than 43% of the time regarding things I really care about (mainly because my money is at stake). On not-so-rare occasions, I am horribly wrong. It's true that I once won 17 consecutive games in a public contest. But it's also true that I've lost eight in a row and nine out of 10 quite a few times. What must it be like to have people acknowledge your 17 in a row, and never give you grief for any of the losing-eight-straight? After 50 years of nobody in your immediate orbit highlighting your losses, what does that do to you? Do you come to believe the terrible mistakes didn't really happen? How do you get to know what you don't know?

So no, I'm not going to pile on the president for his sudden love of bleach. In fact, I'll leave you with my version of a gentle song.


(To the tune of "The Bitch is Back," and with serious apologies to Sir Elton John)

I was corona-fied as #45,
Caught the bug cause
China spit in my eye.
Times are changin',
Though the rich stay fat,
But the fever will not get you
If you bleach your back, oh, oh, oh.

Open Georgia Friday,
That's all right.
Friday night steakhouse,
Sick by Saturday night.
I can bleach you all
At your social do's.
I get high in the evening
Sniffin' chloroquine, too, oh, oh, oh.

Use the bleach, use the bleach,
Have it as a snack.
I'm stone cold sober, an unfortunate fact.
Use the bleach, use the bleach,
Cause I'm smarter than you.
It's the reason I say
The things that I do, oh, oh, oh.


April 24, 2020
Bob Dietz