My bags are packed, I’m ready to go. But I’m not standing outside anyone’s door but my own waiting on an Uber to the airport. I am getting the heck out of dodge and flying across the pond to spend ten days in Ireland. Yes, this space will turn into the usual travelogue with the next entry. I don’t have a lot to say about the trip yet other than I have packing for international travel down to a science and it only takes me about half an hour to locate everything and get it all in order. I often do a theme color when I’m packing clothes for an excursion. It would be appropriate for me to choose green for this trip but I don’t have a lot of green in my wardrobe. ‘Difficult color, green’ is a line from something delivered as a bit of an insult but for the life of me I cannot remember where it’s from. I seem to be mainly doing blue and gold this trip. Stanford, forgive me.

I just finished up a brief run in a reading of a new play ‘Teachers Lounge’ for Encore Theatre and Gallery presented as a reading the past two nights. Seven middle school teachers in an inner city school and their interactions in the staff room as they deal with underfunding, indifferent systems, and try to maintain their sanity and their calling to teach the kids and help them grow. The themes, characters, relationships, and language are all there but there needs to be more – as the script develops, I hope we learn more about these people, their motivations, and their backstories. My character is detached and at the end of a long teaching career, showing up and going through the motions. A friend came up to me afterwards and suggested that perhaps he’s actually a ghost and that’s why he barely interacts. I hadn’t considered that. Might be an interesting angle as development moves forward.

I have felt the presence of ghosts this week. Not my usual ghosts of Steve and Tommy who have evolved into something more comforting and more just part of me over the years, but fresh ones to remind me of aging and mortality and that nothing, including long life, is promised to any of us. I found out this week that two men who were very much part of my past had died within the last few months. I wasn’t in routine communication with either one of them so it’s not surprising that I was unaware until relatively recently. The first was Bill. I met Bill in New York in the fall of 1987. It was my very first trip to NYC and I was over the moon at finally having made it to the Big Apple. I was there interviewing for residency programs in internal medicne – Cornell, NYU, side trips to Yale and Brown. The first night there, I attended my very first Broadway show on Broadway with my high school friend Bob Kummer – Into the Woods with the original cast (it was the second week of the run). The second day, after completing my interview about 3 pm, I headed back to Time Square and got in the cancellation line for Les Miserables to try my luck. A few minutes later, an attractive young man of roughly my age got in line behind me and we started to talk. He was interested in many of the same things I was. We kept talking. We made our way through the line and lucked into two tickets second row center. We kept talking. We went to dinner. We kept talking. We went to the show. I was falling hard which was a new experience for me.

I returned to New York to see him a few times. He came out to California the next year to see me. During all of that, I figured out he had far more mental health demons than I was prepared to deal with and that he was not a good person to have in my life. I ended up putting him on a bus back to New York around Christmas of 1988. We never saw each other again but every once in a while, he would pop back up with a letter or on social media. He became a social activist in the non-profit sector, always chasing after some elusive happiness that was always just beyond his reach. He constantly relocated to new cities and would become rapidly disenchanted when they could not render his life perfect. His mental health took a toll on his physical health and he had at least one stroke in his early 50s. He was never able to afford appropriate medical care and most of the time was without health insurance. He died in March. It appears to have been sudden, probably another stroke. The two of us would have been a disaster as a long term couple but his brief stay in my life created the conditions which allowed me to forge a successful relationship with the next man I met whom I found attractive. I met Steve about six weeks after I put Bill on that bus. I can’t say I quite understand what it was that Bill gave me, but whatever it was, it was allowed me to have the life I have had.

The second man who died in the last few weeks was Josh. Josh was Tommy’s ex. At the time I met Tommy in the fall of 2002, they had been broken up as a couple for some months, but economic necessity was forcing them to continue sharing the house they lived in. (It was Josh’s – inherited from his grandmother. Tommy’s salary as a nurse with the federally qualified health center wasn’t quite enough to allow him to move out and set up independent housekeeping). This rather peculiar situation led to my and Tommy’s budding relationship to have a somewhat more accelerated timeline than it might have otherwise and cemented us together more quickly than I might otherwise have allowed. (He moved in about nine months after our first date). Tommy and I would run into Josh occasionally over the years and relations were always cordial. There were happy endings on both sides. Tommy and I were a suitable match until death did us part. Josh eventually met his husband Greg and beame a bit of a historical footnote as Josh and Greg became the first gay couple married in Alabama when it became legal after Obergefell. I don’t know what happened to Josh. He’s about a decade younger than I am and I had not heard he was ill. Greg, unfortunately, developed a premature dementia and Josh took care of him at home as long as he could until he had to be institutionalized.

Both Bill and Josh inadvertently gave me great gifts by helping create the conditions through which my two marriages came to be. We never know how the threads of the tapestry are going to turn out as we can only see the full pattern in hindsight. I hope they are both at piece and my condolences to those who knew and loved them.

It’s been an unusual week. I last wrote one of these missives last Tuesday evening. Please excuse more typos than usual in that one as I was squinting through one eye. Some hours earlier, in the middle of Tuesday afternoon, my right eye had begun to itch and tear with some filmy discharge for no particular reason. My left eye is my bad eye so, with my glasses off, I couldn’t get a particularly good look at what was going on but it didn’t have any real pain in the eyeball, redness in the sclera or major visual change (the three signs that primary care doctors like me know mean heigh thee to the emergency room) so I posted my remarks, went to sleep, and woke up to even more swelling in my right eye on Wednesday morning. I went in to work, saw a couple of patients, and then my colleagues ganged up on me and demanded that I head off to the Callahan Eye Hospital ER.

Birmingham is fortunate to have a hospital devoted strictly to diseases and injuries of the eye. As eyes are basically exposed brain tissue, it’s not something you want a non-specialist monkeyeing around with Callahan has been around for decades as an autonomous enitty but is not being enfolded into the ever widening embrace of UAB. It was founded by Dr. Alston Callahan who was something of a local legend – and I had the honor of being his physician the last ten or twelve years of his life. He was a good guy. So I figured with some name recognition and my UAB faculty badge I could probably get fast tracked through their ED. I was treated well, but they had no idea ultimately what was wrong. Either viral or allergic conjunctivitis with a great deal more swelling than they usually see. My right eye has now been photographically documented for the eddification of further generations of ophtalmology and optometry students. I always get something weird when I get something. Armed with several different eye drops and some ointment, the swelling has receded, the tearing has ended and I figure I’m pretty much back to normal. I just hope it doesn’t recur.

In the midst of all of this, I managed to get through the second weekend of Second Samuel with four more performances met with adulation from audiences. I thought about adding an eye patch to my character but decided that might confuse things a bit and make people think they’d wandered into The Pirates of Penzance by mistake. The show went very well in general. The eleven of us in the cast came together and made a good ensemble. It’s a play that very much depends on ensemble, chemistry, and the creation of a sense of community. You don’t need expensive production values or completely accurate costumes and set dressing to period. The play is about close knit community, what happens when it feels like it has been deceived, and the realization that the bonds of love, friendship, and mutual support are far more important than the little differences between us and that it’s not necessary to know the secrets of others to accept them as whole and good.

I think that the times we are in made the play resonate with audiences far differently than it might at other times. We are all needing to rebuild and reaffirm our communities to hold us close and protect us as the world becomes more and more confusing and unstable. Our society is currently celebrating transactional relationships rather than ones based on mutual understanding and respect and we all need reminders about what’s really important in life and money isn’t the be all and the end all, despite what’s being celebrated in the corridors of power. As another play that’s now some 85 years old and that also addresses the importance of family and community and mutual respect over money and profit – you can’t take it with you.

Why do I continue to perform? The obvious answer is that it’s fun to get a certain amount of respect and occasionally a paycheck for playing lets pretend. But that wouldn’t keep me coming back show after show on stage after stage (my current count since beginning to perform seriously in 2003 is about 85 stage productions). I think it’s more about being able to be a storyteller. Since the human species developed language abilities about 150,000 years ago, there’s been a need for stories and for those who tell them. Distant ancestors sat around neolithic campfires and told stories of the past and the ancestors, they anthropomorphized the natural phenomena that affected their lives and created the mythologies which still underly much of our culture. Millennia later, with the development of urban living, stories needed to reach larger audiences and the Greeks created the amphitheater and a chorus to recite the story in unison to provide the volume needed for all to understand. And then, one fateful day, a member of the chorus stepped out of line and took on the persona of a character in the story and the western idea of theatre was born.

It’s an incredible privilege to be a storyteller. To get others to stop what they are doing in their busy lives and gather together to watch and to listen. Whether in a church basement or a sophisticated stage with motorized scenery and hundreds of lighting insturments, magic is created for a time. The story is passed along. The words may be centuries old or written last week. The story may be ripped from the headlines or one that has been told many times in many ways and with which all are familiar. But each time, there is a new spark of understanding that passes among performers and audience. We don’t know what will become of it. Some are quickly extinguished. I’m now performing regularly with young people who saw a show I was in fifteen or twenty years ago and that experience was one of the things that led them to seek out their own adventures. I won’t be able to keep it up forever. My eyes will make wandering around in the dark backstage dangerous. My knees will keep me from doing certain kinds of repetitive movement. My brain will stubbornly refuse to retain and regurgitate my lines in the way they’re supposed to come out. I’ll hold on to this gift as long as I can.

Those currently in charge who are dismissive of the arts want to create a far poorer society for us. The arts help us understand things in new ways so we can problem solve (look up the story of Mendelev and how he came up with the periodic table for a good example). They are a mirror in which we can see ourselves, the noble, the good, and the ugly and begin to fix our problems. They are what nourishes our right brain – which is just as large and complex as our STEM oriented left brain. They can gut federal and state funding for the arts. They can close museums or try to force new rules for interpretation. They can censor or forbid certain types of artistic expression. It won’t work. It’s never worked. As long as their is human imagination, there will be artists and they will be compelled to create. Creation is one of our most basic instincts and not subject to political whims.

It’s going to be tough times financially for awhile. Basic costs for food, housing, and energy are skyrocketing while uncertainty in the political and economic landscape dries up opportunities. If I prioritized money over all else, I’d dial way back on my support for performing arts in this community. I have no idea what my financial future holds any more given how all the rules are changing. But I hold on to the old adage Radix Malorum est Cupiditas and, like Ephraim Levi, I’m going to treat my money like manure – not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

I survived birthday weekend which included four performances of Second Samuel, a trip to the Birmingham Jefferson County Civic Center to see the touring company of Beetlejuice – the musical (enjoyable, but not good material. At the end, I only had one word in my brain – Why?) One group of friends took me to brunch, another group of friends took me to dinner, the family called, and I had something approaching a thousand well wishes on various social media platforms. I am busy reading and responding to them all it. It may take several more days to complete the task.

I secretly love social media birthday rituals. Everyone emerges on that day to leave a quick greeting and then vanishes again and the result is, at least at my age, a cross section of the intricate tapestry of life. The prize for longest acquaintance of course goes to my father who has witnessed all 63 years on some level, but I also heard from my childhood best friend whom I met when I was three, other neighbohood kids, middle school and high school classmates, people I crossed paths with at Stanford, at U of W School of Medicine, in the Seattle of the 80s, the Sacramento of the 90s, patients, families of former patients colleagues, and all of the endearing oddballs that make up the core of my life whom I collectively refer to as Bohemian Birmingham. There are well known opera singers, Broadway names, semi-famous authors, clergy, physicians, automotive mechanics, and the woman who used to work behind the counter at my dry cleaners. When I see my past unspooling in that way, I almost feel that maybe, just maybe, I’ve made some sort of positive difference in the world and that’s all any of us can really do.

I’m not sure what positive difference the latest series of journal entry essays are going to have on anything. I haven’t figured out if they amount to anything yet or if they’re just so much ephemera which will eventually disappear amongst the forgotten bits and bytes of random storage. The Covid writings, as they had singular focus, hold together. Attempting to create some sort of coherence out of the collective insanity roiling the top levels of our society just seems like a fools errand and way too diffuse to tie up in a neat little package. Perhaps I’ll repurpose some of it in someway. I just write what my publisher tells me he needs…

Most of the noise this past weekend in regards to the news cycle is about the flagrant disregard of the emoulements clause of the constitiution and the gift of a garishly over decoraded 747 by the Qataris to the president. I’m not overly disturbed as the object in question appears to be the world’s gaudiest white elephant gift. To bring it up to the standards required for the executive jet would require about a decade and billions of dollars in retrofitting and upgrades. It has no practical purpose other than being a shiny new toy and even Trump is unlikely to use it much once he again becomes a private citizen and responsible for flight costs. (No, I don’t think he’s going to be god-emperor for life…)

I have been much more concerned about the news leaking out on the health front (and I am not referring to the nation’s highest ranking health officer taking a bathe with his grandchildren in what amounts to an open sewer – if he wishes to find out the realities of bacteria, let him. I just hope he’s the one who gets sick and not the kids). I am referring to the information coming out about the massive house budget bill which is intended to formalize cuts so that the first term Trump tax cuts to the fabulously wealthy can be extended.

The kind of money necessary to free up the hundreds of billions of dollars required to make the math work is not going to be found in most of the Doge shenanigans. The National Park Service, the Corporation for Public Broacasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the like are all a mere pittance. The big money exists in a very few pockets – the Department of Defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP. The first target is Medcaid where the goal is to trim 880 billion dollars from the program over the next six years. The total Medicaid budget for 2024 was about $607 billion so the $88 billion a year is about 14.5%. These cuts will remove about 10 million Americans from the Medicare rolls. Of those, about 3/4 will be unable to find replacement health insurance, taking the uninsured population from the current 27 million to about 34 million (or from about 8 to 10% of the population). The details of just how these cuts will be implemented and what programs will be cut are not entirely clear. There are likely to be new work requirements – I’m not sure what industry is going to be hiring nursing home residents or the chronically ill homebound but there does seem to be a shortage of air traffic controllers in Newark. There will likely be new and substantial copays on most services. Most who live in poverty live on very tight budgets and all these will do is make people forego services unless their health is in dire straights. One thing I’ve noticed about congress is that none of them acts as if they’ve ever known an actual impoverished person. I have known many and worked within some of the poorest regions of the country over the years and I know just how devestating even small economic bumps can be.

I’m not saying there’s not fat in the system. There is. Quite a lot actually. The USA spends about 18% of its GDP on health care. No other advanced nation spends more than 11%. We are an extreme outlier and our health system is awash in cash. It’s simply a question of how and what we spend it on. Our current spending trends have gotten us over the last fifty years or so from number one in the rankings of health outcomes internationally to number 37, between Costa Rica and Slovenia.

The current mandarins of no public health experience that have been put in charge in DC have discovered that we are spending an enormous amount of our health care dollars on the management of chronic disease, far more than the rest of the advanced world. They are busy touting vitamin supplements and other panaceas without paying any attention as to what it is about our health care system that is so different from everyone elses. Part of it is the idiotic tying of health care to employment which came about in the 1940s by historical accident and which prevents a singificant portion of the population who cannot be employed (the young, the elderly, the infirm) from accessing health care without laws and federal programs that grant access such as Medicaid and Medicare.

THe biggest difference, however, is embedded in our cultural DNA. We, in the USA, are afraid of aging and death. We regard the perfectly natural processes which lead to our senesence and ultimate demise as being diseases which, by definition, must have cures. We regard death as a failure of the health care system to perform properly. If it all worked perfectly, we’d all go on forever, sort of like Cher (who will turn 79 next week). Our system is mortality based. We expend our resources to prevent death. It’s been estimated that up to 3/4 of an individuals total health care expenses over their lifespans are spent in the last six months of their lives. Preventing death is very expensive and ultimately futile. The mortality rate for society has stubbornly remained at 100% no matter what interventions we have tried.

Most other societies base their health care systems around morbidity, not mortality. They spend their resources on trying to keep their populations healthy. They do not spend lots of money to try to keep a dying person from dying. The societal compact accepts that this is not a wise move and no one asks for or expects prolonged ICU stays for the dying or continuing dialysis in the terminally demented, or one last round of salvage chemotherapy in the semicomatose. To keep their populations healthy they have all hit upon some common themes: an understanding that healthy adults come from healthy young people come from healthy children come from healthy infants come from healthy parents. This is ensured by making healthcare easily accessible, free, and arranging social supports so that children and their parents can be properly nurtured with parental leave, free childcare, access to appropriate nutrition and the like. Healthcare is designed around primary and preventive care rather than around specialty and high tech care. Health systems are controlled by clinicians and public health authrorities with years of training and experience, not by administrators and corporate executives whoss expertise is in the maximization of profit.

MAHA, having discovered chronic illness, has a tried and true playbook for its reduction called the health systems of the rest of the advanced world. Instead of persuing any of this, they’re planning on increasing the uninsured rate by 25%, putting new financial barriers in place between patients and health care access, shutting down long running research programs that have taught us an incredible amount about what chronic disease is and how it works, and discrediting most of the advances of public health of the 19th and 20th centuries. We can return to 18th century public health standards if we so choose. 50-70% of children did not reach their fifth birthdays and those that did make it to adulthood were generally dead before the age of fifty (unless they were in the miniscule aristocratic population that had access to basic sanitation).

I have a lot more to say on all of these subjects. Maybe this is the next book. I’m not going to say it now. It’s late and I feel like curling up with a book and a cat.

I’m still trying to figure out where I’m going with these journal/blog/substack entries covering the age of Trump. They aren’t really book material. They aren’t changing the world in any meaningful way. I feel a certain amount of bleakness at the never ending barrage of destruction of any societal institution that does not bow in fealty and at the unfettered joy expressed by those of opposing political opinions at unleashed vituperative anger masquerading as public policy. We’re more or less undoing the Enlightenment values upon which Western civilization has operated for the last three centuries or so and I don’t much like the look of what’s rising up in their place. A society based solely on being against concepts or ideas rather than one trying to use the gifts of reason and intelligence to move us forward just doesn’t seem like a swell idea.

The nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Casey Means, holds no medical license. She completed medical school and entered an ENT surgical residency. She did not complete it, dropping out in her last year, claiming a disillusionment with modern medicine. Nobody drops out of a residency at that stage of training for that sort of reason. I’ve been around long enough to know that she was likely asked to leave the residency as she wasn’t up to scratch and they weren’t going to be able to grant her credentials. Someone will do some sleuthing and uncover the truth. Since then, she has become a wellness guru and fixated on better nutrition being a better source of health than modern medical treatments and has a long association with RFK Jr. I have no objection to wellness. I have no objection to alternative and complementary medicine – it’s very useful in helping a lot of people maintain homeostasis. I have an objection to the rejection of medical treatments that have been tested and proven for feel good ideas with no science behind them.

I am no fan of big pharma and its stranglehold on much of the health care system and I’ve been present for much of the rise of overpriced blockbuster medications of dubious utility being directly marketed to consumers. I try to work with tried and true generics that have been around for decades and which have a good track record and it takes a lot for me to write a prescription for some drug with an unpronounceable brand name full of Zs, Xs and Qs that’s being advertised repeatedly on 24 hour news channels. But I approach every patient I care for as an individual. Some will be helped more by pills, possibly simply from placebo effect. Some will do better with a lifestyle modification. Some just need to come see me and have me do some active listening. Being a good doctor is understanding one size does not fit all.

If the MAGA reformation of the health system dubbed MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) is the way forward, I’d like to see at least some consistency. Where are the federal dollars reducing grocery prices of nutritious foods. When Michelle Obama made healthier eating habits for children her signature movement, she was pilloried by the right wing constantly and the Trump administration wasted no time in plowing under her White House kitchen garden during their first administration. I don’t see a sudden shift of course back this direction. This is the administration gleefully planning to cut SNAP and other nutrition programs. Where are federal initiatives to reduce food deserts and return us back to more thriving independent grocers. Consolidation in that industry over the last four decades has led to more and more markets closing in ‘unprofitable’ neighborhoods. Is the federal government going to work to reduce high fructose corn syrup in the food supply (the ingredient most strongly tied to obesity). My shorthand in terms of reducing ultra processed foods is ‘if your grandmother wouldn’t recognize it as food, maybe you shouldn’t be eating it’. What are the plans to reduce these? They are often the cheapest and most shelf stable alternatives. How is the government planning on reducing burdens on families so that there will be time to cook and prepare food more routinely at home rather than running through the drive thru? Slogans are nice but if they aren’t backed up by actionable policy, they get you nowhere.

In other news, the Catholic Church has selected a new pope. Leo XIV, the former Robert Prevost of Chicago, becomes the first American pope. The fact that he is of European, Latin and African heritage makes him a living symbol of what has made this country strong over the centuries, taking in people from all over the world and allowing them to contribute in their own ways to a stronger and more resilient nation, the antithesis of what the current administration is trying to achieve. I can’t help but wonder if the selection is a major rejection of the cardinals of authoritarianism as personified by Trump. I think it’s also a strike back at the US Bishops and Opus Dei who seem to feel that the church lost its way sometime around the Spanish Inquisition and wants to head back to some sort of draconian patriarchal past. Pope Leo’s time in Peru gives him a strong background in Liberation Theology and he appears to be relatively young and vigorous for a Pope so I can see him steering the Vatican into a much stronger position for moral justice in international affairs. I’m not sure where he stands on LGBTQ issues but as long as he at least leaves us alone, I’ll give him a pass. I found it interesting that a man in a dress appeared on a balcony and asked to be called by a new chosen name and no one in the world had any difficulty with the concept.

The administration seems to have spent this week firing Democrats from any position where they could be found including the Consumer Protection Board, the National Holocaust Museum Board, the Library of Congress, and various other agencies. We’re getting close to a one party system at the top. It does not bode well. Previous mass firings seem to be coming home to roost. Newark Airport appears to be non-functional due to a lack of air traffic controllers (I haven’t flown in or out of it in forty years so it doesn’t affect me much but it is indicative of the complete lack of planning that appears to be going on at the top). The national weather service isn’t able to provide its usual data as we head into hurricane season. There are inadequate staff for most of the National Parks as we head into summer tourist season. And yet there appears to be plenty of money for high ranking executive branch members to golf and vacation on the public dime and for a vainglorious military parade that seems to be more appropriate for North Korea than the USA.

Other people write much more cogently about all of these issues than I do. I’m trying to figure out where to start taking these essays so that they just aren’t a lukewarm rehash of the last few days political headlines or a regurgitation of someone else’s ideas. I haven’t figured it out yet. Should I concentrate solely on health and performing arts topics, the two areas I know well? Do I do deep dives into specific policy issues? I just haven’t figured it out.

On the personal front, I celebrate my 63rd birthday in just over 24 hours. That makes me ten years older than either Steve or Tommy ever got. I’m feeling a bit strange about that. I’m also beginning to feel somewhat old for the first time. If you buy into the medieval concept of life entering a different phase every seven years, I’m heading into a new one. The one I’ve just completed is what I’m referring to as second widowhood, Tommy having been gone for seven years now. So what’s next. Preparation for old age I expect. Or possibly my age of exploration – the seven years in which I’ll get to do most of my adventure travel. We shall see. I just can tell that my physical stamina is declining and the memory isn’t quite as sharp as it once was. I’m dropping lines in my current show more than is usual for me which bothers me some. It makes me think that I have perhaps five more years of being able to do the stage thing and then I’ll have to hang it up except for select projects. I’ll still be able to direct.

If you want to see me on stage hopefully not dropping lines that anyone will notice, two more performances of Second Samuel this weekend – Saturday and Sunday at 2:30 and then four next weekend. East Lake United Methodist Church.

As the USA rollicks along in what appears to be a never ending path of destruction for destruction’s sake, I cannot help but think of the parable of the fence which comes from the writings of G.K. Chesterton. I doubt anyone reads Chesterton much anymore other than perhaps his Father Brown mystery stories. It’s too bad, he was one of those early 20th century English authors who could bore through the conundrums of modern life with a pithy word or two. His parable of the fence, looks at the dangers of reform without thought. To make his point about the abolition of laws or social institutions, he uses the metaphor of a fence has been placed for some time so that no one is still aware of the purpose or intent behind it. The reformer who comes along demanding that the fence be removed should be countered with no, it should not be removed until you can explain why it was erected in the first place and how removing it will not cause unintended consequences. There’s little understanding of why the various regulatory agencies and functions of the federal government which are being so gleefully undone came into being. I doubt much of anyone in leadership, especially among the DOGE minions has any understanding of what the systems they are undermining actually does or why they were put together in the way that they were.

That’s not to say that federal systems and programs should not be reformed. They absolutely should. To use one with which I am intimately familiar, Medicare, as an example. Medicare’s legal constructs and language were originally conceived nearly a hundred years ago and it became law sixty years ago. It was put in place to allow the elder post-employed population access to health care for acute disease. No one was worried about octogenarians with multiple chronic diseases – they didn’t exist. And no one at that time thought through the consequence of conquering the more common acute diseases of aging which ended up creating a large number of chronically ill elderly. Medicare is desperately in need of reform so that its function more closely matches the health needs of today’s elders. But that’s unlikely to occur when reform power is turned over to a bunch of post-adolescents with no clinical experience and no understanding of how aging works (as they’re still in that phase of life when aging and its attendant issues are a completely foreign concept that will only happen to other people).

Middle America has finally started to figure out that tariffs are, in fact, paid by domestic consumers and not by foreign governments as their Temu and Shein prices all doubled and tripled overnight. Empty shelves should start appearing soon at big box retailers as overseas shipments stop arising. MAGA seems to think that domestic manufacturing can take care of this and doesn’t seem to understand the length of time and the amount of money it would take to reconstitute the manufacturing sector. Corporate America isn’t about to sink those kinds of dollars into fixed costs in an uncertain economic environment and the only institution large enough to shepherd something like this through the myriad hoops to fruition, the federal government, has been running the kind of people with this kind of expertise out of town on a rail.

It’s going to get really interesting this holiday season when there are no toys on the shelves, no decorations available, no stocking stuffers in the 99 cent aisle, and no artificial trees – nearly all of which come from China. We’ll start to see if American’s gather in the town square like the Whos of Whoville and celebrate anyway or if they’re going to turn on each other in snarling mobs fighting over the few items that are available. I give books as Christmas gifts and there shouldn’t be any difficulty with my finding something appropriate for everyone on my list in that category. If the Democrats are smart, they’ll start working on a PR campaign portraying the current occupant of the White House as the grinch when the holiday season turkeys come home to roost.

In other economic news, there was an announced 100% tariff on foreign films. I’m not sure how you would even do that in a globalized economy where even major Hollywood releases contract out special effects work to non-American companies all the time. The days of film being cans of celluloid shipped round the world are long since over. Different pieces of the end product come from different places and it’s all sent back and forth over computer networks as it’s essentially all digital these days. I expect that one will be walked back and quickly forgotten. But pretty much every complex product has components from multiple nations within. I don’t see how we’re going to have much in the way of functional high tech medical equipment soon. Ventilators, dialysis machines, ECMO, MRI scanners, PET scanners – all have vital components that are not manufactured domestically. When they start breaking down through normal wear and tear, how do we keep them running without replacement parts available?

Today’s really silly idea was reopening Alcatraz as a federal prison. Someone has been watching too many old movies. There are reasons why it lasted less than thirty years as a prison. It was incredibly expensive to run – everything has to be barged in and garbage and sewage need to be barged out. The corrosive effects of salt water lead to skyrocketing maintenance costs. It would require billions to retrofit a crumbling 1930s infrastructure to modern standards. The glorious birthday military parade is dirt cheap by comparison.

The latest casualties in the culture war appear to be the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (NPR and PBS) and the National Endowment for the Arts. CPB runs about $535 million and NEA runs about $205 million annually so together they’re about 1/15 the cost of an aircraft carrier. The arts infrastructure in this country runs on a shoestring and is incredibly fragile. The cancellation of already awarded grants this last weekend is going to send any number of opera, theater, ballet, modern dance, film festivals, visual art festivals, and museums budgets suddenly into the red. Some will survive. Some will not. In earlier generations, private philanthropy supported the arts as a civic duty. As a member of a number of arts organization boards, I have noted that current generations simply do not. Private wealth is flowing more and more toward conspicuous consumption and less and less toward civic endeavor. I’m going to have to reread Thorstein Veblen again – I think he got it right. Artists will continue to create in some way but the ecosystem that has allowed most communities of any size to have robust cultural offerings is likely done for and only those who can afford to travel to larger metropolises and pay premium prices are likely to have continued access.

Speaking of the performing arts, I am in technical rehearsals for the play Second Samuel which opens Thursday night at East Lake United Methodist Church under the aegis of Bell Tower Players. If you want to see me in a fully type cast role, it runs this weekend and next – evening performances on Thursday and Friday and matinee performances on Saturday and Sunday. It’s a Southern Fried comedy with a twist and message that’s timely.

We’re at the 100th day of the new presidential administration. The practice of tracking the progress of a presidency from the actions of the first hundred days began with FDR’s first term. As the inaugural was in March, he laid out in July of 1933 what he had accomplished to staunch the pain of the Great Depression and laid the road map which this country has followed, with a few twists and turns, for nearly a century. A vision of a balancing by the state of the power of the haves so that the much greater population of the have nots would have a better chance at bettering themselves and the lives of their descendants. This has, of course, been anathema to the forces of capital and the halves who have played a very long game in terms of collecting and then reasserting power, having found a willing vessel in our current president. Thus the very rapid series of changes over the last hundred days (obviously worked out far in advance by brighter minds than those who gather in the cabinet room) which are working to tilt the balance back towards the haves.

Given my opportunities in life with a prep school education followed by a stint at one of the most elite universities in the country, I’ve always been around people who belong to the upper echelons of wealth. I don’t come from that sort of background. My parents were academics who eventually were smart enough to write a successful textbook which funded a glorious retirement in which they spent several decades traveling the world until my mother’s encroaching genetic dementia kept that from continuing. I have a little money. I earned it. But I’m still not a member of the ruling class. I must still work for my money rather than have my money work for me. When around those with real money, I am always very conscious of my place in their world. As a physician (or as a member of a fine arts board), I am very much the help. I’m a very specialized kind of help that has value but I’ll never be a member of the club. It doesn’t bother me. I’m perfectly happy hanging out with what I call Bohemian Birmingham. They’re much more interesting than those whose behaviors and relationships are constrained by the needs of capital.

A new car appeared this week in my condo parking garage. When I first saw it, my eyes sort of bugged out. I had no idea what it was but I could tell it was a lovingly hand crafted Italian sports car that put the Maseratis and Lamborghinis I’ve seen over my life to shame. It belongs to one of my neighbors and is a Pagani Huayra roadster and is perhaps the most gorgeous piece of machinery I have ever laid eyes on. Pagani only makes about fifty vehicles a year and there are fewer than six hundred in existence and the base price of this model is more than the value of every home I have ever owned added together. I don’t begrudge my neighbor his luxury goods. I have a couple of very nice possessions myself. But I remain bound by the social rule I was raised on – to those whom much is given, much is expected in return. I spend on myself, of course, but I also try to plow significant resources back into my communities – my church family, my theater family, my music family, my adopted city. I believe I can have both: a nice life for myself and a better existence for those around me. Maybe I’m naive but if the vaunted billionaires who are busy reorganizing society for their benefit would strengthen our society and culture just a bit more, maybe we could have a stronger collective. There are a few who have done this – Bill Gates, Mackenzie Scott – and they have been demonized by the right wing as their support for the have nots offends as some sort of communistic enterprise.

I don’t hold out much hope for the current administration actually leading us into a new American golden age. A head of Department of Health and Human Services who doesn’t believe in germ theory but who seems to be trying to return us to medieval thoughts about miasmas. A head of Department of Justice who seems eager to flout the law at every opportunity. A head of Department of Defense who doesn’t understand the need for classified information. A head of Department of Homeland Security more interested in glamor photo ops and Gestapo style raids than obeying law and procedure. Cabinet meetings that are predominantly a chorus of sycophant courtiers praising the king. None of it bodes well. I continue to wait for red state consumers to walk into their local big box store and be confronted with empty shelves and see the mental gymnastics they’ll go through to come up with any reason for it other than the truth.

At least there is more and more organized pushback from the courts, from the Democratic party, from the public who are using social media to quickly put together coordinated demonstrations. It’s still far too diffuse for my taste and requires some unification behind simple ideas and some accepted spokespeople who can wrest media attention away from the administration. J. B. Pritzker, governor of Illinois, gave his audition for that sort of position in a significant speech earlier this week. It remains to be seen if it will gather any traction after the next few news cycles. I still love Mayor Pete and how effectively he communicates when allowed but I’m also politically astute enough to know that he will not play to a large enough coalition on a national level. To restore balance, the middle needs to be moved left and that’s going to be a very delicate balancing act and it’s going to require countering many decades of organization on the right. And the first thing the left must do is stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Simple minded purity tests have got to go or they’re going to get nowhere quickly.

I finished editing the script of Shakespeare’s Richard II yesterday. I cut about 550 lines of the 2850 in the play. I think I need to cut another 100-200 to allow it to play at a proper pace to a modern audience but I don’t see where those cuts are yet. That may need to wait for rehearsal and putting scenes up on their feet. If you’re in Birmingham and interested in playing with me and Shakespeare this summer, rehearsals start June 23rd and performances are the weekends of August 7th and 14th. Drop me a line. Given the way I’m conceiving the play, I need all ages and genders so drop me a line if you’re free during that slot and classical theater and language doesn’t scare you. It’s a play about power – it’s use and misuse so expect a lot of parallels to current politics to work their way in.

Before that happens, Second Samuel goes into tech at Bell Tower Players this next week running Mother’s Day weekend and the weekend after. It’s a Southern Fried comedy with a twist and an important message in this day and age. I’m strictly supporting cast and don’t really mind having a princess track with lots of down time. A week after that closes, I get two weeks off. Heading to Ireland – a place I have never been. I went off to REI and bought myself a trek pole this last week. If I’m going to be wandering around the Cliffs of Moher, I figure I better start practicing what I preach regarding fall prevention and third point of balance. My current mantra? FLOOR HARD! FALL BAD!

The judiciary, academia, and the legal profession are pushing back against the worst excesses of the current administration which, of course, is leading to doubling down and further testing of boundaries by various executive branch agencies. This week, we’ve seen DHS and DOJ declare that the 4th, 5th, and 15th amendments to the constitution do not constrain executive power in its zeal to pursue undocumented immigrants and remove them post haste without due process. At least one American citizen, and probably more has been deported without any legal proceedings whatsoever which is blatantly unconstitutional.

The DOJ continues to be politicized into a weapon to threaten critics and opponents of the administration with the latest test being the arrest of a sitting judge for actions in her own courtroom. DOJ also seems to be doing its best to cow the legislative branch and attorneys of all stripes who might object to any of the motions they are making. We’re getting to the point where people who do not agree wit the direction policy is going are going to have to start getting uncomfortable in their stands. If they don’t they’re going to have some serious explaining to do to their children and grandchildren. Go along to get along has never been a great choice during times of conflict and it certainly doesn’t end up in the history books. There’s not a whole lot this soon to be sixty-three year old academic geriatrician can do other than continue these writings which are my version of speaking out against injustice. I don’t know what I’m going to do with this phase of my output. It’s too diffuse to make a good book or three, unlike the covid writings which covered a single topic in depth. I’ll repurpose some of it for other things and some of it will just be out there in various forms for people to discover… at least until dissenting opinions are made to vanish from various archives.

In health news, we’re likely to return to an age of endemic preventable disease again. The first to do this is likely to be measles due to its ease of spread and high risk of contagion. Herd immunity requires a 95% vaccination rate in the population and there are certain individuals, such as infants, who cannot be vaccinated so it needs to be pretty universal to keep it under control. The rate at which vaccine misinformation is spreading and antivaccine ideas are taking hold, including at the highest levels of DHS, means we’re well on track to falling below the vaccination rate where measles can be contained. Children will die. Fortunately polio does not require quite as high a population vaccination rate as it is less contagious.

DOJ operatives are attacking medical journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, perhaps the most prestigious medical publication in the world, for having bias by reporting on science rather than on ideology or allowing in alternative facts which might fit a political narrative. They’re also going after Wikipedia for not conforming to ideological and political narratives, claiming that anything with which they do not agree is propaganda which should be kept away from the unsullied minds of Americas children or some such. But these are also the people who are busy removing the North Carolina Woolworth counter which was the site of a famous civil rights sit-in from the Smithsonian. You an try to deny, erase, or falsify history, but eventually truth always emerges to bite you in the butt.

The thing I’m waiting for is the full impact of the idiotic tariff/trade war with China to emerge sometime between mid May and mid June. The tariff announcements of April 2nd, which became a major bone of contention on April 9th, have led to a drastic drop in imports, canceled orders, decreased cargo handling and the like. It takes about four to six weeks for goods to arrive in bulk from the far East and make it to store shelves. Expect your local big box to have a lot of empty spaces in the very near future. It’s been about eighty years and four generations since Americans last had a time when they couldn’t get exactly what they wanted when they wanted and I don’t think they’re going to take kindly to a world in which that may not be possible.

A major story that everyone is ignoring is the serious and growing tensions between India and Pakistan. A Pakistani ‘terrorist’ attack on Tuesday targeting Indians and tourists in Pahalgam, Kashmir, is blowing up into a major crisis and confrontation between two nuclear powers with Pakistani forces opening fire and India threatening to withhold Himalayan headwaters from flowing into Pakistani river systems. I’ve long thought that if we were to have a World War III, that it wouldn’t begin in the Middle East, but rather in the Himalayas where India, Pakistan, and China all come together, dependent on water from the mountains which is decreasing due to climate change just as all of their populations are burgeoning and demanding higher standards of living. I don’t think the current administration’s eviscerated state department in which many of the senior diplomats have been summarily cashiered is going to be up to the delicate negotiations necessary to calm this particular trouble spot down. And god help us all if the president starts to notice and begins tweeting.

One of my regular readers complained to me yesterday that there had been no update on the cats. Binx and Edward are both fine. They seem to occupy themselves doing various cat things which include lying comfortably next to each other on the bed to having some sort of vituperative hiss and yowl fight under the dining room table at 3 AM. I rolled over and went back to sleep on that one. The one human occupant of the household has a busy weekend planned. Dinner and a show last night (Tiny Beautiful Things at Terrific New Theatre – great performances. Had some issues with the script structure). Errands this morning. Dramatic improv class this afternoon. Opera Birmingham dinner tonight. Brunch with friends Sunday. Opera vocal competition and banquet Sunday afternoon and evening. And I have to squeeze in working on lines for Second Samuel (first act is there. second act needs help) and finishing my last dozen progress notes. It will all get done. It always does.

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.

My first alarm goes off at 6:45 am. Then I start hitting snooze. The number of times I hit it depends on the hour I actually have to appear vaguely awake and professionally competent at a desk or in front of a patient. I have a bit more leeway on Tuesdays and Thursdays, where it’s strictly deskwork before striking out on housecalls than I do on Monday, Wednesday and Friday when I need to be an exam room around 8:15 or so. Clinic schedules are unforgiving and I do try to follow them. I usually only get off by more than a half hour when there’s an incredibly complicated or needy patient or patient/family system that must be dealt with then and there. If you come see me and I’m running way behind, don’t get mad at me, throw me some compassion because I’ve probably just finished up with something that was incredibly stressful and I’ve taken a moment, pulled myself together, and put on my breezy and insouciant persona for your benefit while I’m still trying to handle some very tough stuff on the inside.

Usually sometime around 7:15 or so I open my newsfeeds and wonder what fresh hell is this, at least that’s been my usual reaction for the last three months. I glean other information throughout the day and, if it’s a brain dump day, I’m usually putting these essays out around 9 or 10 pm before I put on some TV and try to unwind a bit before repeating the whole cycle next day. I type them out in about an hour and hit post without thinking too much or rewriting or anything and hope I’ve caught the zeitgeist well enough that people might be interested in reading. They started as Facebook posts. They became a blog. Now they’re becoming a Substack. I’ve migrated everything since the change of administration over to that site and new posts will appear there as well. Those of you who have been barraged with notifications during the migration, I apologize. I’m still a newbie with Substack and haven’t completely figured everything out yet. Moving forward, though, there should only be one or two notifications a week as that’s about how frequently I write these – unless I’m travelling, then they become a daily travelogue until home again, home again…

There’s a lot going on and a lot of topics I could write about flowing from current politics and the degradation of society (and if there’s something in particular you want me to take on, I am open to suggestions) but what struck me today is what’s not being talked about. What are the stories that are missing from the headlines? The Sherlock Holmes dogs that didn’t bark in the night. In some ways they’re just as fascinating as the things we are all arguing about – until we’re distracted by the next outrage headline.

Public health: There’s a lot out there about what the cuts that are being made to various agencies under the purview of Health and Human Services: the CDC has been decimated. The FDA is becoming nonfunctional. Various federal teams that ensure safety in everything from automobile traffic to consume products are being laid waste. What’s missing? Easily accessible data. During the pandemic, it was easy for someone like me to understand what was happening in real time. Federal data was collected, curated and made public. The teams that allow that to happen no longer exist. We aren’t going to really know what’s going on with morbidity and mortality at a national level going forward. Is this opaqueness deliberate? The pessimistic piece of me thinks that this is a precursor to massive cuts to the health services that keep those with chronic illness alive and that we really won’t know how these policies shorten lives or be able to trace higher mortality rates back to the source. No one has really been digging into this as far as I have been able to determine.

Immigration and Deportation: We have heard the stories about the laziness in record keeping leading to ‘administrative errors’, the unidentified bands of goons kidnapping people off the streets, and the blatant disregard of due process and constitutional rights. I have yet to see or hear a single story of a member of ICE or the Border Patrol or DOJ who has quit their job out of disgust or moral injury. This means that there is a large bureaucracy whose members are perfectly fine with these actions. (I know the leadership was purged of people who might have stood up early in the process but there hasn’t been time for a full purge of the rank and file). If they’re perfectly OK with this, what else are they perfectly OK with? We all should have been taught sometime around middle school that ‘just following orders’ is not a justification for illegal or inhumane acts. I don’t see the news cycle or rallies contributing at all to getting these individuals to see things in a different way. How does one reach them?

Assault on Academia: Harvard showed up with a backbone and flatly refused, as a private institution, to kowtow to the federal government’s funding threats or illegal weaponization of the IRS. Harvard was 310 years old when Donald Trump was born and has weathered a lot so my money is on it in this particular contretemps. I read somewhere that the reason the president is picking on the schools he’s picking on is that they are the schools to which Barron applied and was not accepted. Given his petty vindictiveness in all other areas of his life stretching back over six or seven decades, I’m inclined to think that there may be a kernel of truth in this. What I’m more interested in is what’s going on behind the scenes in other academic institutions, both public and private? How are they coordinating? What are the alumni of the high profile institutions being attacked up to? What are they doing to protect international students from blatant overreach? (Deporting students on valid visas as criminals because they have a ticket for littering). How are their ties with academic institutions in other countries being affected and what supports are being offered? American scientific research has global implications. There’s been almost no reportage on any of these subjects. I understand that these institutions are probably trying to lie low and not draw attention to themselves but when and where do you speak up and use your bully pulpit? I read today that France is working diligently to scoop up American researchers who have been negatively impacted by federal funding cuts. The US’s opening itself to German physicists, chemists and engineers as the Nazis cracked down laid the groundwork for much of our dominance in the latter half of the 20th century. We’re just going to be on the other side of the equation this time.

On the personal front, I can’t say everything’s coming up roses but things have gone remarkably well the last few days. I have made arrangements to take time off in late May and early June. I’ll be pulling a Donalbain. (There’s your Shakespearean allusion for the day – coming from the guy who’s diligently working to shape Richard II into something that will play for a modern audience in August). I nearly have all my lines down for Second Samuel and should be comfortably off book for Monday’s rehearsal. And my desperately needed nurse practitioner position for my VA housecall program is back on and has a start date of early June. Perhaps I’ll celebrate with a shot of single malt before bed.

It’s been a reasonably productive weekend. I finished the first draft of all of the new material for the current writing project (more details on that later when I have a better understanding of how it fits in with other projects and a timeline for actually appearing in print). I took a look at the current series of long posts on the blog and decided to migrate everything after January 20, 2025 from their current homes over to Substack to try and get them to a bit wider audience. It will take me a few days to complete that task but I’m under no deadline. No, I’m not going to start charging y’all $9.95 to read them. I’ll only monetize if all of a sudden thousands upon thousands start reading them and it’s too good a chance to pass up. I don’t expect anything like that to happen. I don’t think I’m that good a writer and my current writings are just too diffuse. Unlike the covid writings which were focused enough so that books made sense, these are wandering through all sorts of facets of public health, medicine, politics and don’t have a core focus. I suppose I could make them all anti-Trump all the time but if any of you have actually read my writings, you’ll know that I don’t consider him the source of most of our current issues. He’s a symptom, not the disease.

I’ve been trying to decide what sort of dystopia we’re all cheerily barreling our way towards. I keep hearing 1984 and Brave New World and the classical literary ones we all read in high school, presumably to warn us against the kind of society we’re now concocting. And there are the inevitable comparisons to Nazi Germany and other historical authoritarian regimes. But I don’t think any of them quite capture the sense of lunacy of which we’re all in the midst. They were all promulgated by intelligent, serious people who understood how politics and economics works, not the know-nothing reality TV rejects that empower the current administration. There’s only one dystopia that comes close – Terry Gilliam’s Brazil from the 1985 film of that name. It has it all – an administrative error caused by a literal bug in the system that no one can seem to rectify and which destroys lives, a bureaucracy constantly looking over their shoulders while being distracted by mindless entertainment, an infrastructure in various states of collapse, an elite enjoying their privileges while a disgruntled proletariat takes potshots at the symbols of such, even women addicted to plastic surgery and eternal youth. I just hope I don’t have to escape from it in the same way that Jonathan Pryce does at the end of the film.

The political news of the last few weeks has all been about the now you see them, now you don’t tariffs which change faster than the Ansager in Politically Incorrect Cabaret. I haven’t a clue where they currently stand nor do I think does anyone else. I just feel for small businesses who have outsourced their manufacture to China. Many will go under when they can’t get their orders filled without paying 145% tariff as they come into the country. Unlike the makers of smartphones and computers, they don’t have the clout to go hat in hand and with a few million dollars in bribes in order to get a carve out. In the rest of the world where smart people control economic policy, there are meetings and strategizing and understanding that we live in a global economy and they’ll just give the US more and more rope. We’ve pretty much forgotten about the headlines of two weeks ago when we were all up in arms about military plans being shared in Signal chat groups where random folk were being added in. It’s so yesterday’s news.

The administration has still not been able to return the Salvadoran here on asylum who was picked up and sent to that gulag due to an ‘administrative error’ despite multiple judicial orders and a 9-0 supreme court decision. The state department claims he is alive and secure but that they cannot retrieve him if El Salvador doesn’t want to give him up. Funny how we were able to get a whole camera crew worthy of a major Hollywood production down there to take propaganda video of the arrivals but can’t get one person wrongfully detained released. In other detainee news, DOJ has not been able to produce one shred of evidence in court that the Tufts graduate student they snatched off the street had any ties to terrorism or was in anyway antisemitic, the excuses made for her detention. There have been multiple stories of Europeans, Canadians, and Australians being turned back at the borders just because they can. We’re supposed to be hosting the Olympics in Los Angeles in 20228. If I were the IOC, I would remove that right now until we can decide to treat foreign visitors with respect.

The more immediate concern to me is that the World Pride celebration is scheduled for Washington DC for May of this year. This large LGBTQIA event has been years in the planning so no one wants to cancel at this late date but I fear for the safety of international visitors coming to participate and I won’t be in the least surprised if the administration either instigates or allows some sort of violence to take place that will allow them to continue demonizing LGBTQIA folk and enable some sort of crackdown. I might have thought about going, but not in this political climate. Going to DC to take part in a celebration of alternate sexualities strikes me as unwise at the moment. I’m not a coward. I would consider going for a protest knowing that there will need to be a certain amount of street disorderliness and that there are plans for handling that on my side. Forewarned is forearmed.

The symphony chorus acquitted itself well this weekend with Bernstein’s Missa Brevis and Chichester Psalms, at least that’s my read from audience reaction and hearing back from people I trust who attended. They were fun pieces to sing. We come back in October with Beethoven’s 9th symphony under a new chorus master as Philip Copeland is moving on after seventeen years at the helm. I assume they’ll still want me in the Bass II section as I can hit those low growly notes fairly well. I’m itching to go public about another ASO gig next year but I can’t discuss it in this forum until all the contracts are in place.

The respiratory illness season seems to finally be abating. At least I and my colleagues are finally seeing a let up in the number of cases of bronchitis, chest and head colds, and various flu symptoms that were running rampant a month ago. I wish I could give you solid updated numbers but the gutting of the CDC means that meaningful statistics are not currently being collected and published in an easily searchable form. I can say that the number of measles cases is now up around 800 and continuing to spread. There will be more dead children before that dies down. RFK Jr. made remarks where he acknowledged that the MMR vaccine was the best way to control the spread. The anti-vaccination wing of MAGA turned their full fury on him for that so he’s unlikely to follow up with any real action. I’m waiting for some of these lunkheads to turn against indoor plumbing as it’s more natural to poop on the back lawn.

Back to rehearsals tomorrow evening for the play Second Samuel with Bell Tower Players. I’m playing the town doctor. Type casting. It opens mother’s day weekend if you’re local and enjoy southern fried dramedy. I’m also starting prep work on Richard II which I am directing this summer for the same company. Trying to make judicious cuts to get 2800 lines of poetry down to about 2000 so as to be able to pace it properly. We’ll see how that goes.