Let's see. How can I screw this up?

This would have been a chance

Let me be clear from the onset. The following is not a real proposal. In fact, to some degree, some of it may have already been considered. I don’t know. I am merely looking not so much, at what the president can and cannot do, but why he is unable to do what he should do.

In the nation’s war against COVID-19, virtually the whole country is united. Healthcare workers are making tremendous sacrifices. The nation realizes this and appreciates their work and are doing whatever they can—sheltering in place and wearing masks to lessen their load, save lives, and put this pandemic behind us.

The list of suspects continue to go against the grain, bucking the advice of doctors, health and state officials. These are the fatigue-clad men showing off their guns, rebels without a cause carrying “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, loudmouths who simply don’t like the government or anyone else telling them what to do, and of course, Trump supporters who don’t believe in science, don’t trust the press and think there is a deep-state in Washington going after the president.

Sadly, there is also the president, himself, taking every opportunity to fight with his own medical advisors, state governors, Congressional leaders, the press, and anyone else bold enough to stand up to him.

He has been in a state of denial about the disease and its spread from the beginning, slow to act when denial was no longer an option, and a spreader of bad, misleading and often dangerous information. To his shame, he has made the simple act of wearing a mask an issue for debate.

The president’s quandary exists in his own mind. He thinks everything that is good for the country—masks, social distancing, and science—must be bad for him. His insecurity forces him to question any idea that doesn’t originate from his own mind. 

What he does believe, unfortunately, is that anything that does pop up in his mind is good for him politically—huge rallies, opening up businesses with as little restrictions as possible, and not listening to medical advice—and can’t be that bad for the country. If he wins, we all win.

The result of all this bad leadership has been the spread of the disease and increased deaths and suffering. He has also seen his poll numbers—the only thing he really cares about—go down. His declining poll numbers result in even more bizarre and destructive behavior.

It didn’t have to be like this. He could have done something early-on that would have helped both the nation and his political standing. I’m not talking about more testing and more equipment. These were never in the realm of something he could or would do because he never saw these as his responsibility.

There was, however, something he could have done that one could have expected a selfish, self-absorbed politician like himself to do.

I’m talking about MAGA masks.

He could have stepped up to a podium in February to address Americans wearing a MAGA mask—not meekly, but proudly. Not self-consciously, but pro-actively. If he had told Americans then that wearing a mask, along with social distancing was the greatest weapon we had, not only to defeat this disease, but to restore America to greatness, he would have been behaving like the strong war-time president he thinks he is. If he had told his supporters that MAGA masks, or any other mask, was not a sign of weakness, but rather a sign of moral fortitude against an enemy we might not be able to see, but we clearly need to defeat.

Would his supporters buy this? I don’t know. I do know they have bought every single other thing he has thrown their way. I think they would proudly wear masks if they saw him wearing one.

Those who don’t support the president might’ve worn mask with opposing logos. We are already a divided nation. Why not put some of that division to good use?

No one knows if everyone wearing masks in February would have reduced the number of deaths. I think I can say with certainty that deaths wouldn’t have increased if everyone was taking added precautions. I do think we would have been in better shape today if he had promoted masks instead of speculating (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t deserve) about injecting bleach or putting lights inside our bodies.

If the number of deaths were down because of something the president said or did instead of up because of things he didn’t say or do, I think that would have been good for his poll numbers.

This isn’t about Trump’s poll numbers or elect-ability. Four years of Trump as president is enough for me. I’m not interested in promoting MAGA either. I think it falls in the category of false and misleading advertising.

I am simply pointing out that this is one more example where given the opportunity to do the right thing and benefit from it, or do the wrong thing and not only do damage to himself, but do damage to the nation, our president will always choose Door Number Two.

He can’t help himself. He’ll destroy the nation. He’ll destroy you. He’ll continue to destroy himself and his presidency.

He’s not the fighter he says he is, as much as he’s a destroyer. He’s taken a complicated immigration problem and destroyed the whole process. He’s tried to destroy Obamacare putting millions of Americans at risk. He’s destroyed our relations with allies. His waffling and indecision at the beginning of the pandemic has destroyed the economy more than it had to be. He is doing everything he can to destroy Constitutional government. He has destroyed departments within the government, including the Justice Department and State. He breaks things faster than a child breaks toys on Christmas morning. It’s what he does.

Destroyers certainly don’t make things. A destroyer like Trump will not make America great again. He couldn’t even pretend to do so by wearing something like a MAGA mask.

Postscript: A check on Google shows there are actually MAGA masks, although they seem to be getting mostly two-star reviews. No way of knowing what him wearing one would have meant for the nation.

Sometimes, bigly is not enough

One of Donald Trump’s biggest handicaps, and it’s not his golf handicap because I’m sure he doesn’t have one, but one of his biggest is his need to surround himself in bigness.

The biggest crowd. The highest ratings. The best people. Most persecuted president in history. The best economy—ever. The biggest, most beautiful wall, and we wouldn’t even have to pay for it. That’s the bestest of all. He ran in 2016 on making America great. In 2020, he’s running on making it greater. If he could run for a third term, it'd be to make America the greatest of all time.

While other national leaders conduct diplomacy, Trump exchanges “love letters”—with dictators, no less.

The trouble with living your whole life in the superlative world of EST—even if it exists only in your own mind, which incidentally, also happens to border on genius—the trouble is at some point life at the top—the best, biggest, highest, longest, most is no longer good enough.

Take missiles.

After escalating the missile crisis to the point where Russia and the United States between them had enough missiles to not only blow up the planet, but half the solar system, common sense set in. Both countries agreed to start reducing their stockpiles. That actually was one of the best decisions of the last half century.

Alas, not being the best nuclear power was unsustainable. Both nations are at it again.

Russia’s Avangard hypersonic missile system can fly faster and lower and pack a more powerful punch, giving Putin bragging rights.

It does look like the Cold War is on again, but wait! Trump isn’t your ordinary war time president. He’s America’s greatest war time president. You have to get up pretty early to get the jump on Trump because the man never sleeps.

Trump is the greatest, “anything you can do, I can do better” man. Putin will rue the day he ever met Trump, which is saying a lot because right now, Putin thinks the day he was introduced to Trump was the greatest day of his life.

Trump recently announced that he has America on a path to develop the world’s first—wait for it—“Super-duper missile.” If that doesn’t scare the living daylight out of Putin, I don’t know what will. Actually, he’s probably a little concerned that Trump won’t be re-elected. Best day ever could turn into the worst day ever.

It’s one thing to be the greatest war president ever. It’s another laurel in his MAGA hat to be one of America’s greatest medical minds. Fighting the greatest virus ever, which some people say was brought to this country in a Corona beer bottle smuggled across the border by a Mexican rapist working for Obama, calls for extraordinary skill.

We need a vaccine and we need it fast. How fast? Some of the best minds in the country say a vaccine might take as much as eighteen months, maybe a year if we’re lucky.

Trump laughs at luck. In the White House Rose Garden, he announced “Operation Warp Speed,” the push to get a vaccine by the fall.

Super-duper missiles? Warp-speed vaccine development? Is there anything the man can't do?

Actually, there is.

I’ve never heard anyone walk away after one of his announcements declaring it the greatest speech ever. Usually, his talks are followed by someone explaining what the hell he said.

Oops

“I was mistaken.”

This was Moscow Mitch McConnell’s explanation for having said President Obama did not provide a 69-page pandemic playbook for the incoming Trump administration.

Admitting mistakes, while sometimes embarrassing, is always a good thing. Realizing we’ve made mistakes is how we learn, admitting them is how we grow.

Because he is unwilling or incapable of doing either, Donald Trump remains an intellectual five-year-old. He is a 250 pound man-child who happens to be president of the United States because sixty million Americans made the mistake of voting for him in 2016.

Not everyone would agree with that statement. They don’t have to. How we vote isn’t necessarily a mistake regardless of the outcome, or whether the winner turns out to be good or bad, competent or incompetent.

In Trump’s case, we know he can’t speak intelligently, he doesn’t read, and is so thin-skinned that those around him must baby him to keep him from flying off the handle. When was the last time the leader of the free world had to be babied?

He also is incapable of making decisions. He simply thinks out loud, tells us what people—real or imagined—are telling him, or what he heard on T.V., or what he concocted in his own “brilliant” mind.

These are all observations from the last three and a half years of his presidency, but these facts were all true and in plain sight when he was running in 2016. That’s why voting for him was a mistake of massive proportion. We are not seeing a new or different Trump. He’s the same man-child, intellectual idiot now that he’s always been.

His presidency began with a mistake and the mistakes continue to mount.

He puts people in positions of authority only to have to remove them because he made a mistake.

Sometimes people remove themselves because they realized joining his team was a mistake.

Every encounter with Speaker Pelosi has turned into a mistake for Trump.

Making that “perfect” phone call was a mistake.

Promoting bleach as a cure for COVID-19 was a mistake. It certainly wasn’t an example of sarcasm.

Every day of his administration, from the estimate of the Inauguration Day crowd size to opening up America without adequate testing, has produced new mistakes by him or his accomplices like McConnell, Barr, Giuliani, Rep. Nunes, Pence and just about everyone else in his inner circle. Until now, few have admitted to making a mistake. 

McConnell’s admission that “he was mistaken” is something—if he was, in fact, merely mistaken.

What exactly is a mistake? The dictionary defines mistake as an action or judgement that is misguided or wrong—like giving the wrong answer to a test question. Most people don’t give the wrong answer intentionally.

So, what is a mistake not?

Your money or your life

There’s the old Jack Benny joke where he is being robbed and the thief demands, “Your money or your life?”

After a long pause, the frustrated thief asks, what’s taking so long?

“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.”

This question is being asked again of the whole country—and no longer does it get a laugh.

“Your money or your life,” has become a lot more complicated as we wage this war against the corona-virus. Part of what makes it complicated is the role that money plays in our lives and the inequitable distribution of it over the last fifty years.

We are engaged in a war against a corona-virus. The virus can only win by continuing to exist, by infiltrating our society. “Just looking for a home,” like that nasty old boll weevil.

Our victory depends on denying the virus a home, or if it happens to move in, like an uninvited guest, kicking it out as quickly as possible.

Until we can acquire overwhelming firepower against the disease—vaccines, medicines, herd immunity, which sounds a little archaic, but I’m not much of a joiner in the first place—our best weapon is social distancing, sheltering in place.

The virus’ war plan calls for guerrilla maneuvers—randomly striking when no one is looking, catching us when our guard is down. This tactic, commonly resorted to by enemies that don’t have the big guns, little bugs for instance, can be very effective simply instilling fear.

So, we have two combatants, one microscopic bug striking a lot of fear and doing real damage by attacking, attacking, attacking; and one large human race passively shutting down its economy. Something doesn’t seem right, and yet, as Donald Rumsfeld said, and I never thought I’d be quoting him, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had.”

Passive avoidance is the best weapon we have right now. The good news is, it’s working.

We are at sort of a standstill right now with the enemy, by gaining the upper hand, limiting the spread, in spite of incurring heavy casualties. That doesn’t mean the enemy isn’t also out there, waiting, waiting.

Scientists, who know something about fighting viruses, are urging us to continue sheltering in place, at least as much as possible. However, some soldiers—and in this war, everyone’s been drafted—some soldiers are grumbling as soldiers tend to do. They are getting impatient. They want to confront the enemy by meeting him head on.

They are playing into the guerillas’ hands.

This war has come down to what a lot of wars come down to—a battle of will power.

Troops are being distracted from what the original war was all about—saving lives, to the new war—saving the economy. A certain panic is setting in as the stock market crashes, jobs are lost and bills go unpaid.

We might not be able to see the bug we’re fighting, but a quick glance at the evening news and state houses around the country tells us insurrection is in the air.

Again, it comes down to our money or our lives.

Money should be a medium of exchange. It started out that way and made life a whole lot easier. Farmers didn’t have to carry a chicken with them when they needed a new pair of pants, tailors didn’t have to take along a rack of ties when they went to the butcher.

Somewhere along the line, but the last fifty years stands out, money became a measure of wealth and hoarding it became a national pastime.

The true measure of a man has come down to how wealthy he is. When wealth becomes so important, the loss of wealth becomes a crisis, something some people would be willing to risk their lives to prevent.

The economy has slowed, but it still exists. An economy is nothing more than the exchange of goods and services. That isn’t going away. We didn’t become the wealthiest nation in the world for nothing. Money is everywhere. Well, not everywhere. For the most part, it is in all the wrong places. 

It’s hanging on the walls inside mansions, or floating in marinas, or in that Lamborghini that just passed. Money is flying through the ether in split-second trades between banks and investment firms, never staying anywhere long enough to do any good, but always growing. Maybe it’s time to put it where it can do the most good.

If the people and corporations that have spent the last fifty years trying to corner the money supply—and I’d have to say, they’ve done a damn good job—decided to give some of it back to the American workers whose labor created their wealth, then maybe some of the anxiety about loss of income might be alleviated.

If they remained convinced that they’ve earned every last nickel they have, which is pretty much every last nickel of what was in the economy to begin with, then government should declare that this national emergency, which asks workers to sacrifice their jobs and income, can also ask the wealthy to sacrifice some of their wealth. The tax rate for the super rich could be raised to 45-50 percent, which would still be light-years from what it was in the fifties, but a substantial help in protecting the economy.

More income, less wealth. It might not be the perfect solution, but neither is more wealth, less income. People losing some of their wealth right now might be mad, but they aren’t desperate. People losing income are so desperate, they’re willing to put their lives on the line. This makes the wealthiest nation on the planet a little less than the greatest nation.

If one appreciates that money’s role is as a medium of exchange, they’d understand that all the things that were needed before in the economy before corona-virus will be needed again.

Everything is relative. Whatever money could buy before, it will be able to buy again, regardless of how much money is floating around, which is all money should ever be doing in the first place—floating around, doing its thing. All these transactions will again be pumping money into the economy. The economy isn’t going anywhere because we are not going anywhere—unless we lose the fight against the corona-virus because we lost the will to fight because workers lost the little money this great economy has been meagerly doling out to them.

Now, there might be less money floating around when all this is over, but whatever amount is out there will be enough to get the job done, because that is what money does—get the job done. The rich will still be rich, the poor will still be poor and the middle class will still be in the middle, complaining about the poor and striving to become the rich. The distance between the fewer rich and the fewer poor might be a little less. 

There might even be a bigger group in the middle, which might be the final step in putting social distancing behind us.

Just Asking

I don’t know if all the coronavirus talk going around was the catalyst for the question, or if it was just something that was going to come up at some point no matter what. Some things are inevitable.

Art Linkletter made a dog-gone good living bringing the darndest things kids say to the American audiance's attention.

The question I’m referring to did come from a kid, which is encouraging in its own way. In a world changing faster than many of us can keep up with it’s comforting to know kids haven’t changed—at least those kids under the age of six or seven. They still say the darndest things.

I was having a conversation with my grandson—just talking about anything that came up. The planets. Pro wrestling. Fights with school bullies. We were all over the map, which is where we both like our conversations to go. He even commented that the two of us were “very similar” in that way, after asking the question in question.

He’s right. I’m ten years retired from my last real job, and he’s probably about a decade away from his first. We’ve both got time on our hands.

In the middle of our conversation, and it may have been the result of the crazy times we’re living in or it was something he thought up on the spur of the moment, he asked the question.

“Papa, how long do you think you’re gonna live?”

There really is no good answer to this question. He’s too old and too smart for me to say forever. Pulling an exact age out of the hat, regardless of what age I picked, was only going to open up a whole new can of more wormy questions.

Rather than pick an age, I just said, “I’m hoping for at least another month.” I said it in a way that let him know I was joking and that I planned on being around for a long time. I just couldn’t tell him how long.

The more I thought about this question, which I’ve thought about enough to tell this story several times, the more I realized that we often don’t give kids enough credit.

His question may have been unusual, even unexpected, or it may have been totally normal and to be expected. I’ve only been asked it once in the direct manner he posed it, but with seven grandkids, variations of this question have come up before.

The reality is, I’m 73 years old and he’s seven. If nothing else, his was a legitimate question.

So maybe kids don’t say the darndest things.

I started thinking about some of the things adults ask their kids. Darn it if they don’t say some of the darndest things, too—questions that don’t have easy answers.

“Who told you, you could do that?”

“What made you think you could get away with that?”

“What were you thinking?”

“What’s come over you?”

“What have you done?”

“What’s the big idea?”

Pretty much any question adults ask that begin with what is looking for an answer that doesn’t exist.

By the same token, “When are you going to grow up and start acting your age?” practically begs for the answer, “I dunno. Maybe in about a month.”

I’m searching for a good punch line to end this and haven’t come up with one. Given the subject matter, maybe I shouldn’t take any chances. I should just post it while I still can.