It’s storming outside my bedroom windows. If life ever leads me away from Birmingham, I’ll miss Southern thunderstorms. The rains of the Pacific Northwest are gentle, dreary, and at times seemingly unending but the rains of the Deep South mean business and come crashing down with a son et lumiere show which will arouse even me in the middle of the night from my torpor and I am a very sound sleeper – a leftover from residency training which teaches you to sleep at unlikely hours in equally unlikely places. I find these days I get some of my best sleep around three in the afternoon as I am digesting my midday meal and am seated unmoving at a desk trying to write notes. I will start awake ten minutes later to find I have typed several pages of a single letter. Given that next to no one ever reads my notes, I could probably include this and no one will be the wiser but that protestant work ethic forbids my doing any such thing.
The pope is dead. I doubt the visit from vice president Vance had anything to do with this but the man does seem to be having a run of ill luck recently. But given he seems to be a man who sold his identity and soul for power, I’m not terribly sorry for him. The cardinals will soon be flocking to Rome as the swallows to San Juan Capistrano and the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio and we shall have conclave and colored smoke again. It will be interesting to see if the church will continue the incremental reforms pushed by Francis or if there will be a backlash and the next pope will be of a more regressive nature. I pay attention to Catholic church politics as six of the Supreme Court justices are Catholic and Opus Dei seems to have an outsized role in conservative jurisprudence and construction of social policy. Opus Dei appeared to loathe Pope Francis and his more progressive stance. We’ll see whether they celebrate or mourn when the white smoke appears from the chimney of the Sistine chapel.
In terms of national politics, we passed April 20th without a declaration of martial law or exertion of emergency war time powers by the executive branch. There had been some chatter that this would happen on that date but it seems to have fallen by the wayside as society begins to push back against the worst excesses of the administration’s power overreaches. The courts have finally begun to understand that speed is of the essence and rulings are being issued in a timely fashion to prevent egregious wrongs. Institutions of various stripes are publicly standing up and saying no to unreasonable demands. Even within the GOP, politicians are beginning to understand that high powered administrative officials chosen for ideology rather than for ability is a terrible way to run a modern state in a globalized world. Policies are beginning to be understood as capricious whims rather than well thought out high level strategies.
I attended the Birmingham rally affiliated with the 50501 movement this past Saturday and took my shift manning the Alabama Equality table. Alabama Equality (http://alabamaequality.org) is a nonprofit group advocating for the LGBTQIA community throughout the state providing advocacy, education, and support for a constantly embattled minority that’s become more and more of a local punching bag using the old ‘we must protect the children’ trope. Consider joining – it’s only $25 a year and we need as many allies as we can get these days. I’m on the board and you can message me privately if you have further questions.
I remains convinced, after looking at the various banners and signs that were present at Railroad Park that the antiauthoritarian movement remains too diffuse with too many constituencies pulling in too many different directions. There needs to be a solid unifying theme that everyone can get behind. My suggestion is to cast everything using the constitution as a frame of reference. How does your issue or cause relate to the administration’s breaking, bending, sidestepping or ignoring the constitution? Cite the actual clause and wording and previous supreme court decisions that uphold it’s meaning. If everyone does that, the administration is put in the position of constantly having to defend unconstitutional actions. Also, most Americans, no matter their politics, hold the constitution with a certain reverence and constantly reminding them that the administration currently in power continuously acts against it may start to open up a wedge. It might also start pushing congress into reasserting it’s constitutional role which it has largely abandoned due to fear of mean tweets.
I went down a rabbit hole of disinformation about covid and other infectious diseases last night. The amount of antiscientific nonsense that’s being passed around social media from both the left and the right is enough to make me wonder just what is taught in high school biology these days. The right wing is trying to undo a couple of centuries of increased knowledge of infectious disease and public health and push the history of the pandemic into some new narrative frame that has something to do with deliberate lab leaks and Anthony Fauci acting like some sort of Bond supervillain. The left wing is trying to blame all current mortality on covid run wild. I read some long screed where someone was naming off all of the famous people in the 80s and 90s who had died in the last year or so and trying to make all of their deaths covid adjacent. This geriatrician can tell you that the elderly die of all sorts of things and that they were dying of these things long before 2020 and will continue to die of these things for the foreseeable future. Our bodies are not immortal and we will all succumb to something. We all know healthy vigorous 80 year olds. There are not anywhere near as many healthy vigorous 90 year olds. And vigorous healthy 100 year olds are rare indeed. It doesn’t help that the wholesale destruction of medical science by DOGE and its minions is making accurate information on infectious disease rates in the US nigh on impossible to come by. I keep hoping I’ll find something that will give me appropriate and accurate information on what’s happening week to week but I haven’t had much luck.
My Accidental Plague Diaries will be coming out in new editions with new commentary looking back at the pandemic from the perspective of five years and a reinstalled Trump administration later. I just finished the retrospective analysis of volume I. There will be more information about this project, which is the first part of a much longer planned arc of writings about where we are with healthcare in America as we approach the intersection of the Baby Boom with the inevitable limitations of human biology as the body ages. My publisher has a plan. I just write. Another piece I’m working on is a sermon for the UU church to be given in July – ‘Moral injury, moral evil, and the American Healthcare System’. That should be a fun one.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 