A needed sacrifice

I like Joe Biden. He’s cordial, good-humored, and genuine in his concern for the common good. He reminds me of Robert Young in the old TV show “Father Knows Best.” That was the personality of Ronald Reagan too, but his concern for the common good was a fraud. Biden is authentic.

He’s in the early stages of senility. It’s obvious. Sometimes he’s spatially disoriented. He’ll finish a speech or a handshake and not know where to turn next. Sometimes he’s syntactically disoriented. He’ll get to the end of a phrase and not know what’s on the other side of the comma. Should early senility disqualify someone from running for president? No, not if that person sees the president as the leader of a collaborative group known as an administration.

The Biden Administration has run the executive branch for almost three years. In that time, it’s done a great deal of good, from Covid control to recharging the economy to rebuilding our infrastructure to making prescription medicine more affordable. Despite the strain of a pandemic and the war in Ukraine, the U.S. has the most vigorous economy in the industrialized world, and the NATO alliance has never been more united. What’s more, the U.S. is now serious about its leadership role in the struggle to stabilize the climate. If Joe Biden is on the ballot 13 months from now, I’ll vote for him without hesitation, regardless of who opposes him.

His opponent will likely be Donald Trump, unless the courts decide the 14th Amendment disqualifies him. A Trump victory would be the death knell of American democracy. If any other MAGA candidate were elected, the result would be essentially the same. That’s how thoroughly Trump has reamed out the Republican Party. To quote Mitt Romney, “A very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution. “¹

But back to Trump. Unlike Biden, he collaborates on nothing. He’s an autocrat. Like Biden, he’s senile, but when he loses track of what he’s saying, he simply changes the subject. He’s a master of the malicious non sequitur. The members of his cult are, for the most part, uninformed, paranoid, and frustrated. Malice energizes them. They’re insensible to his senility because their anger blinds them to it, and to much else. So Trump fares better in a senility comparison.²

We’re roughly 13 months away from the next presidential election. The national polls say Biden and Trump are virtually tied. Let’s pause and ponder that astonishing claim. A twice-impeached, four-times-indicted scoundrel is just as appealing (or unappealing) as a man whose record of public service has scarcely a blemish?! Let’s all say “WTF!” in unison. Then let’s take a breath and acknowledge that the polls are probably accurate. They show us what we’ve become. Breathing into a paper bag won’t help.

I try to derive some consolation from recalling that Trump will be on trial for much of those 13 months, with a bright light on his autocratic ambitions. But I’m not consoled. I’ve already seen the preview of coming attractions wherein Trump becomes Christ. “I am suffering for your sake. I’ll take their punishment because I’m your shield.” We’ll see many performances of Trump the Martyr. It’s a strategy that could well give staying power to his poll numbers.

The most powerful weapon in Biden’s arsenal is the warning that Trump’s success will doom democracy in America. But does Biden really believe it? Does the hierarchy in the Democratic Party really believe it? There’s a simple way to tell. In the shadow of this doomsday prophecy, Biden and the Democratic leadership would take, and should take, any extreme measure within the law to reduce Trump’s chances of winning. They do not want to experience the morning-after horror that struck Hillary Clinton and the Democrats in November of 2016. And a morning-after horror in November of 2024 would be even more horrific!

If Chuck Schumer were reading this, he’d be chuckling. “Ken, what ‘extreme measure’ do you have in mind?” he’d ask. “He’s already walking the picket line in the UAW strike.” Well, Chuck, I’ll give you a hint. In a poll of Democratic voters taken last July by The New York Times and Siena College, only 26% said they want to see Biden on the ballot again. Will that percentage rise when the primaries are underway? All I know for sure is the sentiment of the other 74% will turn into resignation. Is that what we want — 74% of Democrats voting for Biden in resignation when the fate of the nation is at stake?

Biden should drop out. He’s on the same shameful path that Dianne Feinstein and Mitch McConnell have been on. They’ve put his will to run into an unflattering context. It’s a “power before service” context, and the electorate rightly despises it. He should exit soon, while there’s still time to launch a spirited campaign for a younger, more energetic candidate. Think how that would light up the coming year!

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¹Romney has the right idea about his party, but he misstates its apostasy. His party actually believes in much of the Constitution, particularly the Second Amendment, the Tenth Amendment, the Electoral College, and the allotment of senators. What they don’t believe in is democracy.

²It’s a national disgrace that two geezers are vying for the top office in the land while the Senate turns into an old age home. We must impose age caps on all federal offices!

Playing softball

I’m immunocompromised. It’s a fancy way of saying that my immune system is weak. There are 1.2 million others in the U.S. like me. Many of them were born that way, or they contracted AIDS, cancer, or diabetes. Not me. I chose to take drugs that would cause the condition. It’s not because I’m a self-destructive madman. I had no choice. It was 2017, and I had just received heart and kidney transplants. I rejoiced that I would have more birthdays, but I was aware of a nasty downside: my immune system would never accept the new organs; it would work ceaselessly to reject them. If I wanted to keep the organs, the only known solution was to make my immune system less efficient. And so the drugs.

Our current Covid vaccines all do basically the same thing. They cause the immune system to make Covid antibodies, which keep the virus from taking hold. But if you have a compromised immune system, it will make an insufficient number of Covid antibodies, and possibly none at all. Everyone with a transplanted organ is stuck with this Catch-22.

When the vaccines became available last January, medical experts suspected that transplant patients might get little or no benefit from them. In short order, that was confirmed. When vaccinated transplant patients were exposed to Covid, they got sick. For me and others with this problem, the life patterns of 2020 returned — wear a mask outdoors, shun crowds, no hugs or handshakes, keep others at a distance.

Last May, I scheduled a Zoom session with my transplant doctor in San Francisco. I told him I wanted a test for the presence of vaccine-induced antibodies. He tried his best to discourage me and advised that I be patient, that the problem was being studied. He didn’t tell me, as I learned later, that his affiliated lab wouldn’t perform the test, that the FDA had asked all labs not to perform the test, that the FDA didn’t sanction booster shots for the immunocompromised. My doctor and the FDA were playing softball with Covid.

Just lately, the FDA announced its support for a booster shot. What’s notable about this is what they didn’t announce. They said nothing about establishing a regimen of boosting, testing, boosting, testing, etc. Without such a program, it’s certain that a single booster shot will not fully succeed where the initial shots failed. Regular boosters will be needed as tests dictate. It may even be that convalescent plasma therapy, the use of blood from people who’ve recovered from Covid, would work better than boosters. The FDA has been mum on that possibility.

All this has been frustrating for us 1.2 million, but our cries for help are no longer the most urgent on the Covid scene. When the Delta variant began its surge in the U.S. this summer, the landscape changed for everyone. People with healthy immune systems were suddenly in peril. The fully vaccinated were at risk for a nonlethal case of Covid; the unvaccinated gambled with hospitalization and death. The need for everyone to get vaccinated became alarmingly clear. Not only were the unvaccinated a threat to each other, they were a conduit for sickening people who had been sensible. Worse yet, they were unwittingly volunteering to act like agar in a Petri dish, in which newer and deadlier mutations might grow. Worst of all, they were spreading the disease to children under 12, a group that had been little affected by earlier variants. As I understand the law, these ignorant adults may have committed third-degree murder. I like the definition of this felony on Minnesota’s law books: The unintentional killing of another through an eminently dangerous act [e.g., mingling with other unvaccinated people] committed with a depraved mind and without regard for human life. Yes, that is my implication: unvaccinated adults are depraved.

On his first full day in office, Biden took a strong stand against Covid. He announced a “full-scale wartime effort” to fight it. I was thankful for his belligerence. It was a recognition that we had been invaded and were in a state of war. Surely, this was the most sensible stance to take.

For several months, Biden was as good as his word. The manufacture and distribution of Covid vaccines ramped up, and on April 1, the daily vaccination rate had risen to 4.5 million doses per day. This, however, was the peak, and the vaccination rate declined rapidly to half a million per day by early July. Since then, the fear wrought by the Delta variant has driven the rate back up to a million per day, but my sense is that we’re now up against the haredcore anti-vaxxers. There are over 75 million of them, and they’re indifferent to the harm they’re doing. Further progress is going to be a long, hard slog.

Is the Biden administration still at war with Covid? I look for signs of it but see none. What I’ve seen from Biden is pathetic pleading. “Please, please, please get vaccinated!” Bravo, Mr. President. Maybe you can pray on it, if you haven’t already.

After six months in office, Biden asked the Pentagon to develop a plan to vaccinate everyone in the armed forces. Neither bold nor decisive. And two days later, with the vaccination rate plummeting, Rochelle Walensky, Biden’s CDC Director, declared, “There will be no nationwide mandate for Americans to get a COVID-19 vaccine.” An astonishing thing to say to a nation “at war.” She went on to explain that whenever she uses the word “mandate,” she is thinking of “mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government.” I couldn’t have been more disgusted. At this dire time, the federal government was also playing softball. In fact, slow pitch softball!

For years the Republican Party has put political calculation above all else. They never upset their constituency, regardless of the harmful consequences. Now we see the center of the Democratic Party displaying the same lack of principle: never tell unionized voters or blue-collar workers that they can be fined or fired if they lack proof of vaccination. They might turn on you. They might realign with the yahoos who squawk about their freedom being trampled.

If Biden wants to put some credibility behind his pose of political courage, he should speak to the nation about anarchy and freedom. Anarchy is lawlessness; there is no recognized political authority. You can do whatever you choose. You want to set fires? OK. You want to turn in front of oncoming traffic. Fine. You want poison a water supply? Go for it. You want to spread disease? … Freedom is the privilege to do what you want, provided you do no harm to other people. What constitutes harm is determined by consensus and formalized into laws, which are enforced by a democratic government. Biden should conclude by asserting that his administration will always support the growth of freedom but will never tolerate anarchy.