"If we stop testing right now, we'd have very few cases, actually." President Trump (June 15, 2020)
"In recent days, the media has taken to sounding the alarm bells over a 'second wave' of coronavirus infections. Such panic is overblown." Vice-President Pence (June 16, 2020)
The president's quote is really deep, in a Monty Python kind of way. If we stop prosecuting people for murder, the United States would have no murderers. If we all stop watching porn, we'd have no porn stars. True dat. I'm not sure if the president was implying something or confused or just at a momentary loss for anything meaningful to say, but I will give him props for rhetoric akin to the truth.
Mike Pence likewise told some version of the truth. If you include the plummeting virus numbers in New York, the country has "stabilized." If you look at the U.S. minus New York, the virus is on a rampage and overwhelming many of the early re-opening states. Best, I suppose, to include New York in the mix and hope nobody notices. Even then, however, Pence left himself an out when he claimed that talk of a "second wave" was overblown. According to experts like Dr. Fauci and Mike Osterholm, we are in the middle of the first wave. So, technically, all the current illness and death is still under a first wave aegis. The vice-president is technically correct when he pooh poohs second wave concerns because the second wave is months away. Don King would be proud of Pence's rhetorical style.
My doublespeak hat is also off to a certain west coast university that announced in an email to faculty that "4,000 people were tested; no students tested positive." Wow. Sounds amazing. Until one realizes that just 5,000 students were on campus and "people" and "students" are not synonyms. Very few students were actually tested. The email, while technically true, may as well have said, "4,000 campus walruses were tested; no students tested positive."
I've never seen a western democracy mislead its citizens the way American leadership is doing right now. All these lives at stake, and we are being fed contortionist rhetoric and flat-out anti-science nonsense. I grew up during the Apollo program. Science was popular, it was respected, and citizens actively sought the best science information. What is taking place right now in the United States is horrifying. Literally a fourth of the populace has committed to anti-scientific conspiracy theories. People refuse to accept sound scientific advice, and they value their own opinions over lifelong, credentialed experts. If tens of thousands of lives weren't on the line, the whole situation would be absurdly comical.
I simply cannot believe the populace that cheered on Apollo has ended up at this intellectual destination -- stuck in a viral fog by an anchor of idiocracy. We have had every generational advantage to exercise critical thinking and unyoke ourselves from demagogues. If we can't recognize the trickerations that the president, vice-president, and various governors are feeding us, we deserve what we get.
Bob Dietz
June 18, 2020
