And so the great state of Florida has decided against any vaccine mandates of any kind in either children or adults. What will happen? To figure that out, we need to travel back in time to December of 2014. At that time a person, never identified but presumed to have been in recent contact with a measles outbreak in the Phillipines, visited Disneyland, the so called happiest place on earth. That one person led to a chain of events that led to 131 cases in California, cases in six other US states, Mexico, and 159 sickened in a religious community in Canada. It was stamped out in April of 2015 through vigorous contact tracing and vaccination.

Florida is a state full of tourist attractions from Disney to Universal to the beaches to multiple cruise ship ports. All of these provide wonderful opportunities for strange biomes to meet and mingle and for highly contagious viruses to spread. We are already undervaccinated in this country due to the politicization of vaccine policy. In addition, the current administration is gleefully destroying public health infrastructure in the name of making America healthy again or some such. A significant drop in vaccine rates in a state, especially one like Florida where many come and go, will simply lead to higher and higher chances of epidemic infectious diseases that have been pretty much eliminated throughout our lifetimes again coming to the fore. It’s no longer going to be a question of if but rather of when. Perhaps Florida will be able to repurpose Alligator Alcatraz for children in iron lungs as that is where this is headed.

There’s a whole branch of mathematics and statistics that devotes itself to the prediction of events based on various probabilities. I wish I knew more about it as it would be useful information to have about now. However, given that this sort of research is likely politically verboten these days, don’t expect anyone to do the calculations. It’s the same folk who disprove conspiracy theories with mathematics. Elaborate conspiracies depend on tens of thousands of people holding silence. Human nature tells us that this never happens. Somebody always talks – pillow talk, an inadvertant slip while intoxicated, a deathbed confession. The larger the number of people that need to be involved, the less length of time a secret can be kept. Which is why I don’t buy into 9/11 was an inside job. With all of the people that would have had to be involved in rigging the towers and preparing the cover story, that secret couldn’t have been kept more than about three years.

Covid is still out there and is still a danger. Not like it was four or five years ago thanks to a combination of vaccines and natural immunity and viral mutation. But it can still make your life extremely unpleasant through long covid symptoms and it’s still killing people routinely. Am I going to continue to get Covid boosters? Yes. Those that are up to date in vaccinations are about 50% less likely to become infected and, if infected are about 70% less likely to require the ICU or die from the infection. They are also about 50-60% less likely to develop long covid symptoms after an infection. That’s good enough for me. I’ll let you make your own call. Most of us have opted not to continue vaccination. Only about 15% of the population got last year’s booster.

I’m about to launch back into an update of my Covid writings from 2020-2022. I haven’t yet figured out completely how to slant it. We’re sitting in a very different place culturally than we were when we were in the thick of the pandemic. There’s a piece of me that feels it needs to focus on lessons learned and how to be more prepared for the next pandemic which is becoming pretty inevitable with the current administration’s health policy. If Russia or China or India really wants to knock us off the world stage, sending some lethal viruses over should do the trick. Our society won’t be able to respond – other than with horse paste and injectable bleach.

I’ve had a request to write about what’s happening with senior housing given current cultural trends. I’ll try to gather my thoughts on that and maybe get to it later this weekend. My weekend is starting with a black tie gala. I hope it’s not the ball on the eve of the battle.

I never know which of these missives from the deeper recesses of my mind are going to strike home and which are going to receive a collective yawn. I’ll write something that I think is brilliant. I have all of my metaphors just right, the parallel constructions are spot on, and I think I’ve made some major cathartic conclusion. Crickets. Then there’s something like my last piece which I thought was a semicoherent drivel. People are still discussing it a week later and it’s been shared all over the place. This is why I don’t spend too much time thinking about what I write and just let it flow. Usually the less thought, the more it seems to touch at something deep within readers. Nor do I know what the current writings are really about or what they might become. My publisher is surfacing this next week after a prolonged absence and we will begin discussing possibilities.

The bad news continues to creep in through every available enntrance. I spent the long weekend trying to avoid both television and written news reports to give myself a break but even then people would mention something in passing or I would be in a public place with the inevitable television attuned to one of the more conservative news channels barking twaddle and tommyrot into the air. I am, however, like Sally Brown, determined to continue to support my new philosophy of optimistic nihilism so I have decided it’s time to look for silver linings in all of this. There have to be a few.

Let’s start with Robert Kennedy Jr., DHHS, and the MAHA movement. There’s a lot of focus on vaccine denialism, destruction of confidence in public health institutions, hobbling of the CDC, the FDA, and other federal programs which have helped us stay away from things that can kill us at young ages without us having to think too much about it. But there are some nuggets of positivity which should be encouraged. And perhaps the first way to guide resisters back to science based thinking is to accept those ideas which make a certain amount of sense. A refocusing of society on proper nutrition and whole foods isn’t a bad idea at all. And the federal government is the correct entity to make better foodstuffs available to all, help eliminate inner city food deserts and through subsity and distribution, make a more wholesome diet easier to achieve. Another idea that is percolating up through the MAHA ranks is an elimination of direct to consumer perscription pharmaceutical advertising. I’m all for this. It should never have been allowed in the first place. We believe, in our culture, that there should be a magical cure for everything available in pill form and that eternal good health is the baseline and anyone not enjoying that is somehow being shortchanged by someone or something who can be blamed. Sorry, life remains a 100% fatal disease. Good health is just the slowest way to die.

Is there a silver lining in the tariffs and economic mayhem? Perhaps this will begin to curb American’s addiciton to cheap disposable consumer goods. We all have far more in our houses than we need and many of us spill over into storage spaces full of things we haven’t touched in years. A trend toward fewer possessions of higher quality would not necessarily be bad for us, our society, or the planet. People are also starting to become more interested in the macroeconomics of the economy as well as the microeconomics of the household. The more of us that get that, the more likely we’ll elect representatives who will help manage the economy for the advantage of ordinary Americans, rather than the current shoveling of all wealth to the top as quickly as possible.

The attempts to federalize law enforcement through calling out the National Guard for unnecessary reasons, the overreach of ICE, and the general attempts to stifle dissent to unpopular policies are having some effect. There has been a general increase in understanding of the constitution, especially the 6th amendment with its requirement that defendents be given their rights. Jeannine Pirro has now been foiled by grand juries seven times in the last month who declined to indict charges she brought. In the previous decade there were only eleven cases where a grand jury did not indict on a federal prosecutor’s evidence nationwide. It’s also worken up a portion of the Democratic party and they are actually starting to do political opposition work rather than try to just protect their campaign funding.

I’m sure there are others but I can’t think of them right now. I’m too tired. I’ve been immersed in a couple of legal cases which I have to have reviewed by the middle of the month. One of them is fairly straight forward. The other had 8,000 pages and they just sent me another 4,000 last week. It’s going to take awhile. At least, with nothing theatrical, I should be able to plow through it all. It just all has to be done by the first of October when I go into vacation mode for two weeks.

Another day, another hosepipe of bad news heading our direction. Stories of the day include another mass shooting of children, this time during a school mass in Minnesota. The right wing has seized upon the fact that the mentally ill perpetrator was trans and are banging the alarm bells to round up and incarcerate the dangerous trans folk before they can kill more of our children. So I did a little research. There have been about four and a half thousand shootings with more than one victim over the last decade in the US and of those, fewer than ten were committed by trans identified individuals. There never seems to be any discussion of how we have hollowed out the mental health system of this country systematically over the last fifty years, how we allow pretty much anyone to purchase firearms that have no purpose other than as weapons of war and mass killing, and how there are now more guns in the country in private hands than there are people. That combination pretty much ensures we will continue to have mass shootings until we as a society make demands that the gun lobby cannot overcome. Of course, the perpatrator posted for weeks on the internet about their intentions but as the DHS office in charge of monitoring domestic terrorism was turned over to a 22 year old intern who promptly fired 80% of the staff and instructed the remaining 20% to focus on ICE/Border issues, no one was paying attention.

The second one is that the government continues to insist on opening more and more detention centers for undocumented residents, going so far as to repurpose the Japanese American internment camp at Fort Bliss in Texas, site of one of the more shameful incidents in 20th century American history, for a new life and purpose. Meanwhile, in Florida, Alligator Alcatraz is to be closed after having been in existence for less than two months at a loss to the Florida tax payers of a quarter billion dollars, revealing just what a grift and performative exercise this whole thing is. Especially after it was revealed that ICE detained and questioned a working fire crew battling the Bear Gulch blaze in Washington because there’s nothing more dangerous to the homeland than an active group of firefighters trying to control a forest fire that’s been raging for some weeks. The ICE goons keep going after soft targets as it might actually strain them or put them in some danger to actually go after known gang members. On a closer to home and tangential note, a dispute is boiling up between a local municipality and a Hispanic focused grocery store that certainly has a colorful stench surrounding it.

Then there is the insanity in the health system. The head of DHHS, the esteemed Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that he can diagnose children as having ‘inflammation’ and mitochondrial challenges’ just by looking at them and that this is what public health needs to focus on. I’ve been in clinical medicine for more than forty years now and WTF is ‘mitochondrial challenge’? There’s a new piece of quackery that arises every few years to entice the gullible to buy expensive supplements to fix the basic problems of human existence like physical and psychic discomfort and somatization and body changes of aging and I guess this is just the latest. At least there will be Covid shots availble this fall but the indications are being ratcheted way down. You’ll need to be over 65 or have a medical condition which will make you more susceptible to infection to fit the new criteria. (Pro Tip – most pharmacies will allow you to self attest to the ‘more susceptible to infection’ category). The senior leadership at the CDC is exiting rapidly following the twisting of science to try to validate political positions rather than rationally seeing where the science leads. Demetre Daskalakis, one of the best minds regarding public health and infectious disease released a scathing resignation letter pointing out just what is wrong with RFKs handling of our health systems. Of course the right wing is piling on with the usual invective because 1. He’s openly gay. 2. He has a funny name and therefore can’t be a real American and 3. He dared use the phrase ‘pregnant persons’. I’ll let you look it up and read it on your own time. I can’t help but wonder what Bill Cassidy, who was the deciding vote to confirm RFK and is a physician thinks of his basic betrayal of basic medical ethics.

After seeing a bit of this weeks cringey cabinet meeting in which sycophantic phrases were bandied about like so many shuttlecocks in a game of existential badminton, I can’t help but wonder who is really calling the shots in DC. The president appears to be barely coherent. The cabinet appear to be about to go all Night of the Long Knives on each other. And yet the orders keep rolling on our completely reshaping society and how we interact with each other. Somebody somewhere is making sure this happens. And it’s not Elon Musk. He and Peter Thiel are probably playing around with the huge data set that contains all three hundred million plus social security numbers tied to all of our other personal data which DOGE uploaded to the cloud and which is now being used by who knows whom for who knows what purposes. That particular move will make it very easy to start putting Big Brother is Watching You in place for us all.

The administration seems to be intent on securing DC with sympathetic individuals. National Guard units from red states have been called up to ‘combat crime’ but they’re all stationed around the Mall and other low crime tourist areas where they are easily seen and photographed and they have been put to work doing the jobs normally done by federal employees that were axed in the DOGE purge such as clearing litter, spreading mulch, and basic repair work. And now the administration has taken over Union Station from Amtrak. I can’t help but wonder if this is a plan to secure the city from anyone coming in to remove the current administration should they decide to stay, no matter the outcome of coming elections. At least the airports are not within DC proper and will be a little harder to claim. I looked up the top states for violent crime rates – The top 5 are New Mexico, Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee. Four of those five are solidly red states. The administration appears to be going after Illinois next. It’s number thirty on the list. (Alabama is number eighteen).

Then there’s the economic meltdown from the craziness of Trump’s tariffs. The removal of the de minimis exemption for packages has pretty much paused most of the world’s postal systems from shipping anything to the US as the rules are completely unclear and changing from day to day. If you enjoy ordering things from international retailers, forget it. It ain’t happening. Not to mention all of the small businesses that rely on small lot shipments internationally to stay afloat. Gone. The administration appears to want to remove us from the global economy which has allowed us to grow and sustained us for the last century. I suppose we can become a hermit kingdom and international pariah. It’s worked out so well for North Korea.

There are some glimmers of hope. Pope Leo and the Catholic Conference of Bishops have come out swinging for gun control after this week’s shooting. A few of the Democratic governors, most notably Newsom and Pritzker, have started to understand how to battle the administration in the political arena. Pretty much every special election in the last few months has shown a ten to twenty point swing towards the democrats due to the extreme unpopularity of the majority of the policies descending from the White House. But we’ve still got over a year until the midterm election. It’s going to be a very long year.

Two musings in a row. That’s not something that happens too often these days. I guess I’m having to do some decompression or cleansing of the system or jetting out of the drains or whatever metaphor strikes your fancy and, as it’s my page and my writing, you all get to travel along with me if you so choose. Or you can scroll on by. Free will is still a thing. At least until the current administration shuts it down for being unpatriotic. I kid – they aren’t really going to come after anyone for their thoughts. But they seem to be dead serious about making sure we all understand that expressing our thoughts in certain ways is a good way to bring the full power of the US government down on individuals in sometimes a spectacularly cruel fashion – to demonstrate the consequences of not adhering to the party line in terms of history, science, culture, politics, economics, health, and dozens of other things where truth and fact are now regarded as so many political commodities and easily replaced.

Today I have been thinking about death. I last directed a musical in 2012 – 42nd Street for the Gardendale Arts Council – the budget was low but I was able to cajole a number of talented people into performing and on the artistic staff so the end result was actually pretty good. I had a number of high school and college age kids in the ensemble tapping up a storm. Two of them, Brandon and Angelicca, both died this week in their late 20s/early 30s. I can still see them as young people, grinning after a successful performance, not knowing or suspecting that their lives would be cut short not that many years later. This of course has got me thinking about other friends who died young – in traffic accidents, of suicide, murdered, of particulary nasty cancers. Because of theater, I tend to hang out with and have a lot of younger friends who should be outliving me and whenever one goes, I mourn the loss of the talent, and the light they brought to the world. Their creativity. Their humor.

I’m of an age now when my peer group are now all grandparents and starting to leave through the usual natural causes of aging organs or the cumulative effect of bad life choices. I’m well aware I’ll board the train myself one of these days. I’m not planning on it happening for a while but I am preparing for it. In my profession I’ve seen the thousand and one disasters that happen when there has been no preparation so I urge you, if you’re an aging adult, get that will updated, prepare an advance directive. Look around your living space and think about what needs to happen if you don’t have the ability to easily navigate stairs. Or if your memory isn’t quite what it once was. Or if you lose your ability to drive safely. I’ve thought through all of these possibilities for my life and have plans in place but most of us don’t because the inevitability of aging, debility and death remain the ultimate taboo in our society.

The first baby boomers turn 80 in just over four months. I refer to the 80s with my patients as the uncertain 80s. Most people – if they have had good fortune, good genes, good health care, and good choices, make it into their 80s relatively independent and unscathed. However, most people do not make it into their 90s in the same shape. The 80s is when most of our bodies and minds will fail. The policies being put into place by this administration are gutting health services for the aging. The current model of long term care/nursing home is going to become economically unsustainable very rapidly. As people on the lower 4/5 of the socioeconomic ladder age, given current trends, they’re likely to start plunging into poverty and ultimately homelessness which will lead to death. Their bodies won’t be able to hold up to those kinds of stresses.

But this seems to be ultimate goal of the current administration, a supplantation of our current reverence for life with a sort of necro-state designed to rapidly lower the population (other than those in the very top tier who don’t have to worry about a doubling of grocery or energy prices or a raising of rents out of reach of the younger generation). HHS is in the process of introducing rules to prevent the FDA from regulating the claims (and likely the ingredients) of patent medicines taking us back to the good old days of the 1890s when the American public poisoned itself at enormous rates. An inability to afford basic necessities will push more and more people onto the street where new laws against vagrancy will sweep them up into camps rife with disease (you didn’t really think all of these new camps would be reserved strictly for immigrants did you? They will be kept full with as many classes of undesirables as necessary to keep the contract money flowing). The federalization of law enforcement and the steps toward militarizing the national guard against the population of Democratic leaning cities does not bode well for anyone. We aren’t in a shooting civil war yet but the chess pieces are being moved into place. And then there’s Covid – with a recent pandemic that’s being erased from public consciousness for political reasons. It’s a virus that we still don’t completely understand and which likely will have significant long term effects on the population. But we’re highly unlikely to be allowed to study what they are as that would contradict the official narrative.

Put this all together and I see a couple of things coming. First, life expectancy in this country, already significantly lower than most other developed nations, is going to start moving down. The Boom and Generation X, who have aged seeing parent figures age successfully into their 80s and 90s are going to have difficulties matching this and are going to be livid that the quasi-immortality they have been promising themselves for decades will not be theirs for the taking. More and more young people, already being hammered by economic changes, student loans, and other such things that prevent them from maturing into such usual milestones as homeownership and parenthood, are going to be asked to help take care of aging family as there won’t be other options, adding further economic strains to family units.

While at times it’s lonely being responsible solely for myself in my aging state, I am thankful that I know enough about how all this works to prevent myself from being a significant burden as I complete my life cycle. But I’m not planning on closing that circle for a few years yet. I’ve got a few more things to do. Like finish all of Dickens’ novels – Read Little Dorrit last month. Four more to go.

It’s not quite a week post Shakespeare and I’m still trying to put my life rhythms back together. Sleep patterns are adjusting, stress level has gone down a bit, some things that have been sitting on the ‘to do’ list for a while have been stricken off. My big chore for the weekend is to get my final decision in regarding my fall trip. I have it down to two options and I’ve promised myself I will have a decision made by Sunday. I still haven’t come up with a decent travel companion with similar tastes, bucket list and finances. Some day… Or I strike it rich and start treating friends.

As I’ve come back to the surface and I’m starting to pay attention to the world outside of my condo, office and the theater, it looks like we’ve all stumbled into more of the Upside Down than I would have thought possible a few months ago. In the last few days I’ve seen mouthpieces for the administration opine that we should have taken Hitler’s side in World War II, that McCarthyism was a good thing and should be reestablished, and that the key to future success is the deportation of all non-native born Americans. Considering that pushback against these senitments has been muted at best and certainly there’s been none coming from the party in power, I can only assume that we’ve pretty much arrived at full blown fascism. There’s nothing I can do about it, just circle the wagons around me and the people whom I care about and hang on as things will get worse and there’s no white knight coming to the rescue.

Since I last paid major attention to politics, the president of the US has had private conversations with Putin (on American soil no less) where his aides were obviously distressed by the nature of the talks (pity there was not someone in a tree). The leaders on NATO dropped everything and raced to DC along with Zelenskyy to shore up support against Russian aggression. The secretary of defense keeps firing top military officers who insist on speaking truth rather than the lies he wants to hear. The Supreme Court continues to hand down decisions designed to speed up the conversion of government from tripartite to unitary executive. We’re busy opening concentration camps with cute names suitable for T-shirts and other merchandising opportunities. The Department of Health continues to suppress public health data.. All signs point to a sledgehammer about to be taken to the Smithsonian to rid it of degnerate history exhibits. And the FBI is being weaponized to attack Trump’s personal enemies. It’s enough to make anyone turn to drink and I have no idea how to parse it in such a way that I can even begin to wrap my brain around it.

On the Covid front, cases and hospitalizations continue to climb, especially in the West and Southwest. What few CDC numbers I can still find plus wastewater studies confirm this. Why this should be is unclear. It looks like we’re settling into a bimodal distribution with peaks in late summer and in midwinter. The peaks are likely related to human behavior and more extremes in temperature, whether cold or hot, pushing us indoors for either heat or AC and into closer proximity to our fellow beings. It’s still around locally. A local theater lost its star for the majority of the run of a cabaret show due to a covid infection last week. I haven’t been sick in some months following my winter from hell. It’s been nice to have felt normal for a while. This is probably a sign that I’ll come down with something next week. What likely saves me is the nature of my job which requires me to wash and sanitize my hands a dozen or so times a day which is going to reduce my environmental exposure.

I’m trying to figure out what I should write next. The posts about the state of all of our lives I’ve been writing for the last six months or so don’t lend themselves to much of anything other than Substack and I’m starting to think I need to embark on a project with a more definite goal in mind. Is there anything within my usual purview that people want to read about? Both of my vacation options come with some significant down time where I can possibly break the back on a new project of some sort. Perhaps a play in iambic pentameter. I tried that once. It was not a successful experiment. The juices just aren’t flowing at the moment.

Perhaps Richard II took more out of me than I quite understand given all of the various production disasters which I have detailed in previous missives. Anyone who wishes to judge my ides for themselves can do so at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gvaegg120 – I have no idea if I managed to pull off even half of what I was going for. Maybe, maybe not. If you skim through it and like it, Yay. If you skim through it and hate it, tell me. I’m an adult, I can take it. You don’t improve without constructive criticism.

In lieu of my usual musings, I present the following. One of my Richard II cast used his experiences working on the show as part of a school project and, as part of that, asked me some questions. Here they are with my answers.

Can you give me a brief explanation of who you are and what your theater experience is like?

I’m a well-educated, highly imaginative man who has always tried to balance my right and left-brain lives in some way. I excelled in the hard sciences in high school and college and there was a family tradition of medical education that pushed me toward becoming a physician. I also always had a healthy interest in the humanities, reading voraciously and taking classes in history, sociology, literature, philosophy, and religion. At the age of sixteen, my high school built a new arts building with a theatre (we had never had one before). I had never done theater as a child but had been taken to live performance since I was old enough to sit still and had always enjoyed it. Something clicked, however, when I walked into that space and looked at things like the fly system. I wanted to learn how to use it to create. So, I signed up for technical theater and learned the basic elements of design, stage craft, and production. I found my niche as a stage manager and was later encouraged to try directing. I directed my first show, a one act, at the end of my senior year of high school.

When I went to college, I found there was a tradition of dorm theater. My freshman year, we decided to do a dorm production of You Can’t Take It With You. As I was the only one with directing experience, I got the job. The end result was reasonable It was seen by some upperclassmen prominent in campus theater who decided I had talent and was taken under their wing and I moved up the ranks in campus theater as both stage manager and director. Later, in medical school, I continued to stage manage and direct in community theater circles. It all came to an end when I hit residency and every fourth night on call.

I was away from theater for the next fifteen years building my medical career. In my early forties, after some life reverses, I felt a need to rebalance and decided to return to my old passion. I was encouraged this time to try performing. I had never considered myself a performer but figured what the heck and made the leap. Amazingly, I kept getting cast. Over the last two decades I’ve performed in over eighty productions in Birmingham and am occasionally given the chance to direct.

What inspired your production of Richard II?

Bell Tower Players, with whom I have worked off and on for a decade, is the only community theater locally that routinely does the classics. They have done a few Shakespeare plays in the past and a few years ago, decided to do Shakespeare in the summer and asked me to direct. My first production with them was A Midsummer Night’s Dream and last year we did The Merry Wives of Windsor. I wanted to challenge the group and move out of the comedies and didn’t think we were ready for any of the great tragedies so I decided that one of the history plays might be appropriate. I chose Richard II as I thought it would be castable out of our usual group and because it’s a particular favorite of mine in terms of its themes.

The play was chosen nearly a year ago and, as politics in the US progressed through that time, I began to think more and more about the themes of the play and how the major one that I wanted to highlight was that of power – how it is used, abused, and misused and how it can destroy an individual and ultimately a system of government. As I kept thinking about this, I decided that it would be interesting to highlight the parallels between Richard’s world and our own. Various ideas occurred to me and one of them was that the play was a memory play taking place in Richard’s mind as he awaits his inevitable death in his cell at the end. The technical limitations of our space and budget made me throw that out but I was intrigued of the idea of the jail setting and my original idea morphed into that of a political prison and more and more pieces fell into place as I continued to study the play.

I took ideas from varying sources such as Man of La Mancha, The Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Bent, the TV series Oz and scrambled them all together in my mind. I developed the idea of making the prison a temporary holding cell that has been thrown together, that it was a church basement to tie it closer to the audience’s actual experience, and came up with the idea of the color palette for the costumes to get the audience to subtly reflect on the meanings of the colors in various cultures. Then it was a matter of translating the action of the play into the milieu of the setting. What takes the place of throwing down gages? What does a tournament look like? How would a gardener show up to talk about plants?

Why do you believe community theater is important?

There are two words there. Community and Theater. I think the former is the most important. Community theaters are for the forming of a community, whether it be the show family created for each project or the group of people who find a theatrical home and return for production after production in some capacity. The theater is the team project. The thing that cannot be created by any one individual, but which requires everyone to do their part. Sometimes the smallest pieces become staggeringly important like with scissors. The pin is the most vital component. They are the training grounds where young people can get their first experience before moving on to more professional settings. They are the place of refuge for those who enjoy performing or creating but whose lives and life patterns preclude them from aspiring higher up the ladder. They can showcase incredible talents that will never be seen on Broadway and who deserve to share their gifts with the world. I see a lot of attitude among some in our area that they believe themselves too good to work on a small, low budget community theater show. I believe you’re never too good and that if the project is right for you, you can do smaller projects and mentor and inspire and raise the general quality of the art being produced.

How has being a part of community theater personally impacted you?

My adventures in community theater have taught me an enormous amount about human beings and human nature that has come in handy with my day job in medicine. It has helped me become a better and more creative problem solver. It has taught me communication skills that no class would be able to. I am definitely a more fulfilled, richer, and possibly more interesting person for all the things I’ve done.

What has been some challenges you’ve faced with Richard II?

I believe very strongly that good theater requires a cast to be an ensemble. That they learn to be comfortable with each other. To support each other. To work together as a unit. That way, when things go sideways, and they always do, they can handle it as a group and keep the show moving forward with minimal disruptions. With Richard II, I had a cast of sixteen, ranging in age from 19 to 86. Some had had decades of experience on stage. Some were complete novices. I had to figure out how to get them working together, to help them craft performances that balanced each other, and to keep them from being so scared of the language. As I say repeatedly, Shakespeare wasn’t writing Shakespeare. He was writing popular entertainments, and we need to approach it in that way to make sure it’s of interest to a modern audience. If everyone were to stand centerstage and declaim each speech in measured cadence, the audience would be asleep in twenty minutes. It has to be interesting. It has to be understood by the audience (which is more about intention and the actor understanding exactly what he or she is doing with what motivation) than it is about every word being perfect. We do these plays four hundred years later as Shakespeare was not only a brilliant poet, but also a keen observer of the human condition. It’s that latter which makes the plays still relatable and why we continue to enjoy them.

This particular production also had some major production issues. The lighting system died so I made the decision that we would simply use the work lights. As a concept, I didn’t hate it as that’s the kind of lighting this prison space would have had, but it meant we lost all control over using lights to help tell the story or to isolate particular areas of the stage that could have made it easier for the audience to follow some of the changes in setting in the Richard story. The costumer ending up in the ER twice in two weeks put costumes behind and I wasn’t able to refine some of the choices the way I might have otherwise. There were also significant difficulties with certain actors abilities to learn and retain their lines. One of them I planned for, the others I did not.

What about challenges with other productions?

I wrote, starred in, and helped produce a show called Politically Incorrect Cabaret that went through a dozen editions over fifteen years. We took it to venues in five states throughout the Southeast. The stories of that show are legion including unheated venues in below freezing weather, unairconditioned venues when it was over a hundred. Drunk tech crews (and one time a drunk cast member). Collapsing floors. Performing without a tech rehearsal. A power outage with the show done by candlelight and flashlights. I’m amazed that some of those actually made it on stage. But it’s semi-improv nature allowed us to get away with a lot.

I’ve had costumes disintegrate on stage, set pieces lowered on my head, falls off of platforms, a skid across the stage on my backside when a fellow cast member got a little over exuberant with a planned shove, been stuck on stage with a twelve year old when someone missed an entrance leading to five minutes of improv, missed cues, reordered lines, broken and missing props. It’s all part of what makes live theater so special.

I learned long ago to make Geoffrey Rush in Shakespeare in Love my spirit animal when it comes to theater.

What do you hope the audience takes away from Richard II?

I want them to leave the production thinking about something differently. Whether it is a different thought about our political moment, a new way of thinking about the possibilities of Shakespeare, or an increased respect for what Bell Tower Players and the performers are capable of achieving.

Can you share a story where you’ve witnessed the power of community theater positively impact another person?

I’ve seen a number of the young people with whom I have done community theater in the Birmingham area go on to professional careers. Perhaps the most famous is Jordan Fisher who will always be twelve-year-old Chulalongkorn in The King and I to me. Others I’ve worked with have gone on to national tours, Broadway, television, and national ad campaigns. I celebrate each and every one of them for their successes. Some get jealous. I don’t. I’m where I need to be.

Nearly twenty years ago, I played Mayor Shinn. The girl who played my younger daughter, eleven at the time, was just beginning in community theater. She went off, got her training and came back to town as a young adult and sixteen years later, I again played her father in Into the Woods in which she was a magical Cinderella.

What do you think about the health benefits (mental health or otherwise) of community theater, especially as a doctor?

Working in theater requires keeping ones mental faculties in shape and a certain level of self-discipline. It stimulates creativity, helps with memory, and often comes with a certain amount of aerobic exercise, especially when performing in a musical. A lot of stage performers continue to perform into their eighties as their training, and their performance regimens keep them in tip top shape.

As a geriatrician, when I find out that my patients have some sort of background in performance or music, I encourage them to pursue it on some level. It helps them tie in to pleasant experiences, encourages social connection and there is research that shows that both physical and cognitive abilities improve

What is your hope for the future of community theater?

That it will be seen to be as much a part of a healthy civic community as a sports team or an educational system, or recreational opportunities. The arts are as deserving of public funding as other aspects of civic life and should not be relegated to the whims of private funding or thought of as being less than other things we willingly fund like sports stadiums. Theater, more than any other art form, is the mirror of society as it exists as a collaboration between the performers and the audience. No two performances are ever exactly the same as no two audiences are ever exactly the same so the energy in the room is never duplicated. A film is always exactly the same. A play or musical is constantly reinterpreted for new audiences with new experiences and new historical context. It can always reflect both our better selves and those parts of ourselves we would rather not see.

I’ve been meaning to write a long post for some days but something keeps getting in the way. Work progress notes, social obligations, exhaustion and recovery at the painful process of getting Richard II on stage and in front of those not involved in the creative process. And now it’s 11 PM and I should be thinking about sleep but, instead, I’m letting my fingers do the walking across my laptop keyboard and we shall see what ends up spilling out. It could be anything as I’m just punchy enough to not censor myself in quite the way I usually do when composing these glimpses into my interior life.

We’ll start with Richard II – four more chances to catch it tomorrow (Thursday) and Friday at 7:30 and Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 at Bell Tower Players in the East Lake UMC Cafetorium at Oporto-Madrid Road and Second Avenue South. The cast, ranging in age from 19 to 86 and in experience from second show as an adult to decades on stage are embodying what I think is important about community theater: Coming together as a community to tell a story that cannot be told by a single individual. Personally, I’m relatively happy with how it all turned out although I am busy, as I watch it multiple times in performance, nitpicking at all my directorial choices and beating myself up on what I now perceive I should have done differently. Live and learn. This is the third Shakespeare I have directed over the last three summers and each has presented very different challenges. Will there be a fourth next year? Let me recover completely before making a final decision (although I have been noodling around with some ideas for The Tempest).

Speaking of the performing arts, the Kennedy Center honorees, the first under the new regime, were announced this morning. Given the seizure of that cultural institution’s levers of power by the executive branch and the battles that have ensued (and I am fully expecting a renaming to The Trump or The Trump-Kennedy Center before too much more time elapses), the choices actually aren’t that bad. The rules have always been important contributions to America’s cultural landscape, be living, and be willing to attend the ceremony. Given that most artists are of political beliefs incompatible with the current executive party line, there were plenty of jokes about Kid Rock and Scott Baio being amongst the honorees. Seeing Gloria Gaynor on the list makes this burgeoning gay adolescent of the late 1970s heart happy. And my sister is probably reserving her tickets to see Kiss. (She’s been a huge fan for nearly fifty years to the point of having a working Kiss pinball machine in her basement).

This of course brings us to the continued rise of authoratarianism which has moved from creeping to Maserati driving I-80 across the Bonneville Salt Flats over the last few weeks. Some 19 year old DOGE operative best known as ‘Big Balls’ got punched in the nose by a 15 year old girl on the streets of DC and the rhetoric of DC being a crime ridden slum (it’s not) is everywhere and we’re federalizing law enforcement and moving in the National Guard. Their much touted sweep of the streets netted 23 arrests, mainly of low level offenders. If the streets were full of thugs and murderers, you think they might have found a bit more. The truth is, of course, that violent crime rates are significantly lower in DC and nationally and have been decreasing for years, other than a brief spike during the pandemic shutdown. Birmingham, which has long been touted as a ‘dangerous’ city as it’s majority Black, has a murder rate this year 50% lower than last year and most of the city, even in Black neighborhoods is quite safe. I’ve almost never felt endangered in my nearly thirty years here.

The issue, of course, is that this is another testing by the administration of just what they can get away with before there’s pushback by the courts or the public. The vast majority of the population strongly disapproves of the administration’s policies and its heavy handed ramming of Project 2025 down our throats. But there has yet to be any unified opposition that the majority can get behind. The Republican party under Trump has spent the last decade concocting a mostly fictitious narrative of urban America as a hellscape of out of control ‘woke’ minority governance, invading hordes of undcoumented immigrants, and public schools performing sex change surgeries on elementary school students. It’s all ridiculous if you spend any time looking around at objective truth but it’s an easily understood story and it’s reinforced in easily digesitble sound bites by a well financed media machine. The Democrats have not spent much, if any time, creating a strong and easily understood counter narrative. Human nature relies on stories to understand the complexities of the world. The side which can best tell the story usually wins. The other side gets its exhibits scrubbed from the Smithsonian.

Trump remains a chief symptom of out of control vulture capitalism determined to transfer all things of value from the commons to private ownership of a new aristocracy. The prestigious institutions – universities, media companies, professional associations – that could best offer a counter narrative are all busy rolling over and offering up their bellies to the administration to scratch as their leaders choose private privilege and membership amongst the elite over public good. Where does it end? I don’t know but the tensions between the various groups behind the transformation of society – religious zealots, insanely wealthy capitalists, tech bros – all of whom are using the current administration to further their own goals seem to be getting worse and when Trump is gone, as will happen – he’s not immortal – the jockeying for position and dictating of the direction we next head is going to get awfully interesting. Do we end up in Gilead? In Brave New World? In a new industial serfdom? One thing history teaches is that anything is possible. This is all not the sort of thing I should be thinking about right before bed.

Someone told me this past week that I was Birmingham’s answer to Kevin Bacon. Everyone in town either knows me or knows someone who knows me. I suppose that’s what comes of having a number of very different circles of acquaintance – UAB, VA, aging adults, elder care and policy, classical music, theater, writing/spoken word, liberal religion, liberal politics, patients, patient families etc. With all this going on, there’s no way I’m going to leave town when I retire. I’m much too embedded in everything that goes on around here. A couple of people have asked me if I would consider running for local office once I retire. My answer to that is not just no but hell no. I am no fan of how modern politics is conducted, I have a few skeletons I would like to keep firmly in the closet and not trumpeted across the blogosphere, and I much prefer working behind the scenes as an eminence grise. With Richard II out of the way, I’m going to keep my head down and stay home for a few months and play catch up and maybe take a vacation for a couple weeks. Who am I kidding. Someone will ask me to take something on in the next few weeks and I’ll be off to the races again. Somebody stop me.

I’ve been through some troubled tech periods in my time but the last few days with Richard II may take the gold star. And that’s saying a lot, given my adventures with Politically Incorrect Cabaret over the years. (Butler buildings without air conditioning in 100 degree summer weather, abandoned boot factories without heat in freezing winter weather, windstorms on sea piers, more than a dozen dressing in a small emergency exit corridor, llamas just outside the stage door, Katrina damaged houses in NOLA without intact floors or walls, Wiccans out back hauling each other up and down with pullies attached to various body piercings etc. etc.)

Bell Tower Players has somewhat limited technical facilities and capacities. We perform in the cafetorium of an aging church building. There have been issues with the lighting in particular for years, likely due to an aging electrical system. We scraped together the money to replace all the heavy duty Fresnels and can lights with new LED instruments which consume far less power and can have color adjustments made without gels. For some reason, during first tech, the entire house right bank of lights would die every ten minutes or so. Eventually I made the executive decision to perform under the fluorescent work lights. Not ideal by any stretch but they at least stay on and allow both actors and audience to see. We disconnected the board and unpowered the lighting system so, of course, first dress the lights proceeded to turn themselves off and on at random moments and in random color shades. The poltergeist in the lighting system was effectively banished final dress by throwing various circuit breakers.

Costumes were behind due to the costumer having had to spend a day in the ER last week and another day recuperating. We had the majority ready for first dress and planned out the fixes and the need for distressing so he loaded them all up to take them home and work on them the next day. On his way in for final dress, he had a car accident and was back in the ER and there was no way to get the costumes back to the theater for the run so final dress done without costumes. They did make it in time for opening last night – I would have asked for a few additional fixes but time’s up. To add insult to injury, on the night of final dress, after the run, I went to the ED to check on my costumer and hit a pothole and blew out one of my tires. By the time I got home at 2 am I was fried and did something I have never had to do before in my last 23 years of dual careers and took a mental health day to recuperate.

We opened last night. Small, but appreciative audience. I’m hoping houses improve. (Hint hint to all my local friends whom I come to see in their shows…) In general, I’m pleased with my cast who are giving it their all in a not so easy piece to perform and are holding to my directorial strictures and overall vision. Is everyone ready for the RSC? Of course not but they are working together as a company and an ensemble and supporting each other so that each gets their moments to shine but at the same time unify with each other to tell the story. I think people are getting what I’m doing with the piece politically with its modern settingand dual layer of story between the prison environment and the collapse of the Plantagenet kings into civil war. It may take me getting the pulse of several audiences to know for sure.

Now that my job is over as far as Richard II is concerned (other than showing up for performances and glad handing the audience), I can start concentrating on other things. Important stuff like what am I going to do this fall in terms of performance career (I’m not contracted for anything until January) and if I take a trip in October, where am I going to go? I’d also like to get some writing done that has specific end goals and isn’t just these random musings. I’ve also got to fix the floor where the great washing maching flood of 2025 buckled the parquet and I’m feeling an urge to do some decluttering, especially as I may be losing my office relatively soon. Most things in my academic office can be thrown out. A lot of the files date back to California but there are books, and diplomas and artwork that will need to be rehomed.

It also, of course, means that I’m paying attention to this modern world for the first time since last weekend. I’m not exactly sure that I wouldn’t enjoy putting my head back under my pillow for a few more weeks but forewarned is forearmed. What have I learned? The Republicans are attempting to force through a mid-decade census which only counts citizens and to base reapportionment on this. Fortunately, the constitution is pretty clear on both the timing of the census and whom is to be enumerated so I don’t see this going very far. Of course, it will depend on the courts actually doing their job regarding interpreting and defending the contstitution and the Roberts court has shown itself to be somewhat questionable in this regard, not to mention having minimal respect for stare decisis. The president still does not appear to understand what a tariff is or does and his followers are bewildered as they stare at higher prices and import fees. I have the feeling that all of the bored high schoolers in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off who were drifting off as Ben Stein was droning on about the Smoot-Hawley tariff grew up to be MAGA economic advisers.

The biggest threat regarding the census proposition is that it would be an easy step to move from certain classes of persons from being non-enumerated to being non-persons. And once people become non-people it is very easy for the state apparatus to eliminate them one way or another. It fits in with the way in which programs are being erased which support the disabled, the chronically ill, or others unable to exist physically or economically without some sort of assistance. Without support, these populations are naturally reduced as disease and despair lead to higher death rates. If you read through the philosophical ideals of Stephen Miller and some of the other idealogues in the administration, they envision a future where 340 million Americans are winnowed down to 100 million young, white, healthy rich folk and what happened to the others is not really of any concern. We’re not all that far away from American families having to choose between groceries and support for grandma.

Political theater is playing out in a grand manner in Texas. Gerrymandering is a tool as old as election districts and both sides are guilty at various times. Currently the Republicans are more blatant in their attempts to enshrine minority rule. Quorum busting is also an old technique which has been used by both sides at various times. It’s not illegal and the various threats are likely only so much saber rattling, but given the current adminstrations complete disregard for laws, rules, norms, and ethics who knows where this one is going to end up. All it does however is draw attention to a need to bend if not break rules in order for the Republicans to retain power in the midterms and middle America is starting to see that.

The Epstein files remain the gift that keeps on giving… something. No doubt Trump is in them. The two were close. No doubt Trump is guilty of bad behavior. He’s been well known for it for fifty years. Were laws broken and cans/should Trump be prosecuted? That’s the sixty-four dollar question. Highly likely given the circumstances of his life but I’m not going to rush to judgement without evidence. The Republicans, having used them to beat the Democrats over the head for years, are going to have to come clean at least about some things or, given the more salacious components of the whole affair, it’s not going to disappear from the headlines and the Democrats are going to keep fanning the flames going into next year’s midterms.

I’m thinking a cocktail or two before tonight’s performance may be in order.

T-3 and counting. Three tech/dress rehearsals before Richard II in unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Things are coming together so I am going to put on my best Geoffrey Rush from ‘Shakespeare in Love’ and assume it will all work itself out because it almost always does and that’s the magic of theatrical live performance. I do have to give kudos for my cast and staff for holding on to my fever dream of an idea about having this play about the abuse of power leading to the collapse of a societal order being used to mirror how those same dynamics are playing out in today’s world. It will be up and running and I’ll have had some audience feedback the next time I write one of these epistles and I guess I’ll know whether the show is a success or a craptastic flop. It takes really bright, talented people to create a theatrical disaster. The unimaginative and untalented just create mediocrity and not the disastrous flame outs that become theatrical legend.

I had my annual review this past week. I am gainfully employed for another year. Neither UAB nor the VA seems dissatisfied with how I get my job done. As I’ve been doing it for them for nearly three decades, I more or less have it figured out. I guess this is my penultimate review. I’ll have another one next summer but I plan to be retired before the summer of 2027 comes along. Of course there’s a lot that could change between now and then. Things remain unstable in federal agencies, academia, and health care due to the caprices of the current administration and I haven’t a clue where we’ll all be heading next month, much less a year and a half from now. I’m being encouraged to continue thinking outside of the box and coming up with new ways of positioning senior care in a constantly changing environment. I don’t mind a challenge but I think this one is beyond my capabilities.

As Richard II exits my life, I have to figure out what’s next to keep the creative juices flowing. My publisher remains out of pocket so the writing projects for him are on hold. My last few auditions haven’t led to any results. I am in talks for a few projects for the fall that won’t require a cattle call audition. (Good – I hate them and I’m not especially good at them). I do want to take a trip abroad in October of some sort but haven’t gotten anything narrowed down yet. I’m thinking something relaxing with some beach time but we shall see. I also have to get out to Seattle to see the family this fall. It will all puzzle together somehow and around about Halloween I’ll be looking at my schedule and lashing myself for my usual over commitments.

There hasn’t been much happening in covidland recently. Antivaccine voices are being magnified for political reasons and I’ve read things blaming covid vaccines, specifically spike proteins for everything from new onset schizophrenia to liver failure to increased asthma this summer. (First and second, not a shred of scientific evidence and third more likely due to heat domes and air quality). From what I can tell, vaccine will be available for fall boosters for those who want them (and only about 15-20% of the adult population is taking advantage) but given the actions and rhetoric out of DHS and CDC I wouldn’t count on much for next year. It looks like Kennedy is going to remove the regulations and laws which have shielded vaccine manufacturers from liability (a necessity to keep them in business in our litigious society). If that happens, manufacturers of all vaccines are likely to start withdrawing from the US market. Catch up now.

And that’s how this administration is operating to exert control across society. It’s actually rather clever. They’re not directly telling an institution what they can or cannot do, they are placing levers of power over the flow of dollars so that institutions will police themselves and fall into compliance with the political will of the current executive branch. Media companies are being blessed with ‘bias monitors’ as a condition of federal approval of mergers and acquisitions who, if they do not like a news story can trigger federal sanctions. Universities are accepting federal monitors who will check on admissions and hiring to prevent forbidden DEI practices or their federal funding for research grants and the like will be withheld. Critical voices are rapidly becoming complacent. And inconvenient truths are being erased. Take H5N1 bird flu. CDC is no longer tracking cases or spread. If it starts human to human transmission, there will be no early warnings and we won’t be aware of an emerging pandemic until it’s far too late to do anything to try and stop it.

Trump continues to turn the White House into Mar A Lago North. The pictures of the unsightly patio over the former rose garden lawn have done nothing to alleviate my fears over just what all else he has planned for the residence. And we found out this week that he is going to raze the east wing (no huge loss) for a huge gilt ballroom which appears to be modeled on Versailles (showing that he has no understanding of the neoclassical design of the building and its decor). I’m sure we will soon be treated to pictures of him on a dais smiling over a ballroom full of over dressed sycophants. It brings to my mind the old trope of the glittering ball just before the revolution that’s a mainstay of old Hollywood and potboiler novels. We’re reaching a revolutionary inflection point – inequality, hoarding of resources, an armed populace. It may get interesting in a year or two.

I’m having a grumpy night. It’s a night off from Richard II rehearsal so I used it to try and get a jump on my clinical work so it wouldn’t all be hovering over my head this weekend. However, no sooner did I sit down to try and work through various inboxes full of issues that really don’t require physician input when I fell into a doze and woke up about two hours later out of sorts. I did get the stuff I needed to fet finished done but getting ahead will have to wait for another day. My feelings of fatigue continue and it probably didn’t help that we were hit by a major thunderstorm just about then which passed directly overhead. There’s something about the sound of pouring rain that always wants to make me sleep.

Richard II is coming together. Five more rehearsals until it is presented to the public. The cast are starting to get their lines down. Characters and performances are pretty much there. The set is done. The props are done. The costumes are in progress and should be done this weekend. Sound and light cues are at least understood and we’ll try to get them all programmed into the system on Saturday. I hope that my vision comes across clearly and that people understand the show as I understand it. I guess I’ll find out. I’m preparing myself mentally for people to hate it as it is very nontraditional and because it comments on modern politics. It’s somewhat dicey to do that in modern Alabama. Fortunately the sort of people who are likely to attend Shakespeare performed in a church basement are likely to be intelligent enough to get what we’re doing.

The drain line on my washing machine backed up this past weekend and caused a major flood in my main hallway. There was already some minor damage from a previous flood from the HVAC line six months ago but this one did a real number on the parquet with a lot of the tiles buckling. I’m waiting for it all to dry out thoroughly so I can take stock and figure out what it’s going to take to repair it. It’s always something. Fortunately I have an emergency home repair fund squirreled away, having learned a few things from bitter experience. Water/plumbing issues have been the bane of my existence since moving in here five years ago. I’ve had to have the kitchen sink drain line repaired, the shower hot water line fixed twice after it kept backing hot water up into the toilet, the HVAC drain dealt with, the two year saga of redoing the drainage on my deck, and now the washing machine drain. All I need is an exploding toilet to get a Bingo on my card.

I did a little noodling around covid data this week. Numbers are increasing, but not by a lot. It’s becoming harder and harder to find reliable sources of information as the federal government continues to try and rewrite the pandemic narrative for political reasons. Acute phase covid doesn’t appear to be the major risk at this point. Long covid, seems to be the major issue moving forward with significant cardiorespiratory and neurological problems becoming more and more prevalent but as money is being diverted away from these sorts of public health issues, it’s really tough to figure out what may be going on. Beware of just googling. More and more of the hits appear to be from pseudoscience organizations with political agenda who are trying to make the health issues all about vaccines and vaccine side effects rather than the actual disease. I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t engage anymore. It just sucks up my time and energy to no avail.

There are all of the usual political outrages. Other people analyze them better than I do. I’m not a historian, a social scientist, or directly involved in politics myself. The trends I find most concerning, besides the undermining of the health system and the advancement of knowledge, are the steps being taken to muzzle news reportage and the flow of information. Both CBS and NBC are under major fire from the administration for reporting news in a way that the administration does not regard as favorable and with threats to broadcast licenses etc., they are backing off. The way things are going it won’t be long before all of the major media outlets news reportage will be parroting administration talking points and unfavorable stories will be buried. And does something actually exist if we don’t know about it? There will be independent sources and investigative reporters who take their jobs seriously but that information will be relegated to the fringes of the media landscape and difficult to find, especially with the loss of net neurtrality.

Emil Bove, Turmps personal lawyer, was confirmed to a seat on the third circuit federal court of appeals. Bove has made no bones about his adulation of an authoritarian executive and that he thinks it’s perfectly OK to act in an illegal manner and to ignore court rulings in order to achieve that end. The SCOTUS confirmation of absolute presidential immunity for official acts has given the cover necessary for him and his ilk to move forward. Now that he is on an appeals court, I expect either Clarence Thomas or Sam Alito to step down from the supreme court opening up a seat and dollars to donuts, Bove will be the nominee and in a position to move the judicial levers even closer to the executive for the taking.

And then there’s the ever rising cost of living which current policies are not going to address. I have a number of much younger friends who are being decimated financially by skyrocketing rents and food costs. As these are being driven by forces of vulture capitalism, and not by the presence of immigrant communities, the administration’s focus on shipping people out, no matter how valuable they may be to our society, isn’t likely to help. The administration has been crowing about the amount of tariff revenue they’ve brought in. The MAGA movement still doesn’t understand that that was money we paid in higher prices of imported goods. It wasn’t paid to us by entities outside of the country. Apparently basic economics hasn’t been taught in American high schools for the last forty years.

Twenty-one months….