Bad chemicals and bad ideas
April 25, 2020
U.S. UNPRESIDENT Donald J. Trump is backpedalling from the claims he made live on national television that injecting disinfectant directly into your veins would kill the coronavirus. He insists he was being sarcastic.
In any case, it is worth revisiting Trump’s actual words the other day. We can only marvel at the sort of mind that can generate this kind of syntax:
And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.
Meanwhile, bleach manufacturers around the world are warning their customers not to drink their products.
Trump, the apotheosis of capitalist insanity, wouldn’t seem out of place in a Kurt Vonnegut novel. In Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, car dealer Dwayne Hoover’s wife Celia killed herself by drinking bleach. Dwayne was already insane, and his wife “was as crazy as a bedbug.” As Vonnegut famously notes: “Bad chemicals and bad ideas were the Yin and Yang of madness.”
It has long been evident that the United States has gone completely doolally: bewildered by its free markets in narcotics, analgesics and ideologies, every variety of which is available off the shelf and at bargain prices. When bad ideas compete with one another, they get worse not better. They climb further to the extremes. And in the preposterously fertile Internet ecosystem, there are now profitable niches for any shade or permutation of batshit.
Meanwhile, Trump is the epitome, the embodiment, the instantiation and the reification of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Guardian says he may have been listening to a configuration of extremist evangelist groups peddling something they call the Miracle Mineral Solution, which is chlorine dioxide bleach and supposedly capable of curing cancer, AIDS and autism.
In The Intercept, columnist James Risen accuses Trump of “spouting quackery and hatred straight out of the 14th century, when panicked Europeans confronting the Black Death strapped live chickens to their bodies, drank potions tinged with mercury and arsenic, and blamed the Mongols and the Jews when none of it worked.”
Major catastrophes lay bare the truth about our leaders. Trump’s criminally negligent, chaotic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed, once and for all, that he is a corrupt, narcissistic psychopath.
Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On, his classic account of the AIDS pandemic, writes about the holistic healers peddling amino acid and dimethyl sulfoxide as a miracle cure. Naturally, they said the “medical establishment” were discrediting these treatments because they “would go out of business if they let people get about the business of really curing disease.”
Where there is contagious disease, there is conspiracy theory, and where there is conspiracy theory, there is quack therapy.
