My mom broke her hip. She was 93 years old. When she was admitted to Mesa View Hospital in Mesquite, NV the attending physician asked his most important question, “you want to be DNR. Right?” Not hello, not I’m here to take care of you, not you will be okay, but, you choose to die rather than be on life support. Right? 93. I cannot say when the value of a human being diminishes to zero, but I guess the depreciation starts around 60. Let’s be clear. There has always been natural selection in the healthcare industry. It’s all based on bottom line estimates and geared directly toward ability to pay. And not just pay, but pay well. Patients have long been triaged based on the insurance plan. The better the plan (a history of paying quickly and paying well) the better the care. If you find this appalling, find comfort in knowing that we have the best medical care in the world that money can buy. Capitalism. Our healthcare has never been care centric. Money talks. And in this case, money saves you a spot at the front of the line.

We have long known that patients receive better care when a family member acts as sentinel. Left to its own devices, medical care in our country is like a kid with ADD. Short on focus. But it is increasingly being drawn into focus as we realize that capitalism and compassion may be mutually exclusive. Trump, the consummate capitalist, reduces the pandemic to dollars. We gotta get the economy going. America isn’t built to be out of work. It’s all about business. From a president who social isolates as a way of life, it is a cold, bloodless philosophy.

My mom died because the rehabilitation facility tasked with providing the care to allow her to recover and return to normalcy, sent her home alone when the Medicare payments ran out. Cold. So it’s kind of like that for the nation now. And if you think that Trump will grow a brain and begin to act like a caring human being, you have only to look at what he has done so far. Nothing.

It’s mostly a failure of leadership. A failure to grasp reality, make a plan of action, and then follow through. An inability to look beyond one’s own petty priorities and look outward to a greater good. Yeah…all of that. But also, an unwillingness to steer people with a tendency toward laissez faire to a people willing to succumb to a stricter government involvement in their lives.

The last and only time I got a flu shot was when I was in the military. I found it to be such an incredible infringement on my personal freedom to be forced to succumb to a vaccination that I chose to resist all future offers. And that is some of the difficulty we see now. We still view ourselves as a romanticized Wild West, free bird character who tells “the man” to go screw himself while collecting social security.

We are such adolescents. Totally invested in immediate gratification, we do not plan, and even worse, we refuse to admit that we are not the center of the universe. We act like entitled, selfish assholes with no regard for anyone but ourselves. And we think we’re smarter than the other guy, whoever that guy is standing in the way of something we want or keeping us from going someplace we want to go.

Vegas can be the epicenter of Wild West thinking. Equal parts hedonism and greed with a healthy dose of screw you, I’ll do what I want and anything goes. But always a sense of hope and an over exaggerated sense of wit and talent. Vegas welcomes you. Yet Vegas is attractive for all the reasons that now threaten to be our undoing. It’s not our fault.

Trump reminds us daily that we are where we are for reasons that are not our fault. Like an addict being steered toward rehab, it’s a disease and it’s not your fault. But the goal of rehab is to get the addict free of their drug of choice. Trump, however, doesn’t seem to have a Twelve Step program and seems disinclined to steer us away from our addictions. What have you got to lose?

In the history of the world, and we know Trump is a scholar of history, nobody has done more or done it better than he has. He is the embodiment of us and until we hit rock bottom, take a cold hard look inward, and make the decision to get clean and sober, we will continue to listen to the adolescent in chief and buy his shit weed.

What have you got to lose

It used to be an annual tradition. “The Wizard of Oz”. First aired in the original black and white format, it was magically transformed into living color. The important elements of the film, however, were quite dark. The wicked witch. The destructive tornado which uprooted the house that led to Dorothy’s quest to get back to Kansas. The great and powerful Oz who orchestrated smoke and mirrored spectacles from behind a curtain ostensibly to keep the citizens of Oz appropriately in awe. And controlled.

A fanciful tale of fear and loathing and finally redemption when Dorothy awakens to find it was all a dream. Like the movie that takes us down the yellow brick road, we have picked up some characters along the way. In the beginning, Trump was the wizard all smoke and mirrors. He was constantly doing his standup routine where he did all the heckling in front of his adoring fans. He has gradually morphed into the wicked witch, pissed off because Dorothy dropped the house on her sister. We are not sure who Trump is pissed off at, we just know he constantly wallows in anger. But he plays all the characters really: the cowardly lion, in need of courage; the scarecrow, in need of a brain; the tin man, in need of a heart. There’s a lot going on in that stable genius brain.

The virus is his field of poison poppies sprouted to stop those he hates at the border. Who needs a wall. Gerrymandering is so passé. Death will accomplish the task without all the legal scrutiny that is such an inconvenience. “I’ll get you my pretty…and your little dog, too.”

So where do we go from here. We can’t expect he will ride off in his hot air balloon. Nor can we expect Dorothy to throw a pail of water on him…“Ohhhhh, what a world, what a world. Who would have thought that a little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness“. The best we can hope for is to wake up and find it was all a terrible dream. Except there really was a tornado and the world will never be the same.

#VegasStrong

With all the technological marvels at our disposal…instant, constant communication, omnipresent Google, and 3D printers (which to me is like a miracle: you see it but can only think it’s not possible). And then we have dear leader. He does it low tech. His ideas intersect sharpie with paper. He would be better served to have the sharpie do the talking. We would be better served. Fiddling while Rome burns. In his case, twittering.

Curious how we hear nothing about Russia these days. Have they found the antidote or are they just twisting and hiding numbers. It is hard to imagine how the lust for money and power so corrupts that those elected to lead and uphold the constitution would choose a path of destruction. Fauci for all his knowledge and wisdom knows what he will not say…that Trump does not care.

There is a muted and weak call amongst some journalists to stop airing Trump’s “press briefings.” At the very least, do not air them live. That allows time for fact checking and debunking. Remember, the only fake news now and always has emanated from the Oval Office. To this point, it has been a matter of political parsing. Now it is life and death. But dear leader cannot pivot. And now we are all as crazy as he is by definition…doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

It could be that the believers think they will be shielded. That like a rapture, they will be lifted up and saved from the apocalypse. But Trump is not Jesus…he just thinks he is. Crazy.

In Vegas, we’re pretty good at math, at calculating odds. We’re also game for risk. That, after all, is what we call gambling. As we sit and ponder the worldwide risk to us of corona virus, we notice that the risk is not evenly spread. Why?

I have a theory that is both unkind and provocative. Consider for a moment genetics. Think of how genetic weaknesses run in families. For example, a predisposition for addictive personality. Or a familial tendency toward pulmonary disease, or heart disease that may persist through generations. The point being, the genetics is baked in.

Now with all this baking, suppose that this virus has a certain attraction for a specific genetic tendency. And when you consider how genetically similar the Italian population must surely be, perhaps the virus is availing itself of a genetic buffet found most prevalently amongst Italians.

This of course is exclusive of efforts to combat the spread which has been inconsistent between the various countries. There has been no evidence that any country has figured out how to fight it and it is a cynical game of Russian roulette waiting to see what happens next.

It may be advantageous to focus attention on those Italians who have survived the virus as a means of discovering both a cure and a key to immunity. Just a thought. Or we can continue what we’re doing…shutting down everything for who knows how long until Anthony Fauci decides it’s safe to come up from the basement. I say get em in the air, dummy up and deal, follow the Vegas tradition of trying to beat the odds.

Today dear leader declared himself a wartime president. And this turn of phrase will serve to further endear him to the believers. But, history tells us that at time of war, incumbent presidents remain in office. Vegas oddsmakers might call this a sure bet. And I’m betting dear leader has already done the math. We delayed in testing due to a Speccoli like attitude of cool Buds and tasty waves, baked in by dear leader’s insistence of a hoax, a plot by Democrats to run him out of office. Rumor has it Washington insiders were apparently on to the threat from this pandemic a month before the general population. Time to do some baking? Place your bets please.

#VegasStrong

All the hand wringing over Trump destroying democracy seems trivial now when you consider that he may be intent on killing us. It has been evident from his presidential beginnings that dear leader has no capacity for human compassion. He sees the corona virus pandemic as an obstacle to his goals. Such an inconvenience. What’s a beleaguered despot to do. Lie of course. And admittedly he is not just a prolific liar but exceedingly convincing to his believers. Every so often one of the foot soldiers slips up and emits a truth. This happened with Mulvaney. The only thing more despicable to Trump than a Hispanic judge, is a lackey with a lacking for lying. Loose lips.

I sympathize with Anthony Fauci. He just goes about doing his pandemic disease fighting trying to walk the fence between nuts and bolts. But he’s trying a bit too hard not to ruffle the rooster’s feathers. People are dying in ever increasing numbers and these nuts are posturing and preening for a misogynist.

So we look to the presidential election and wonder, who will beat up the bully. I suggest that the greatest boost to Biden is the corona virus. Like it or not, he can hit the ground running and will bring order to the chaos we now endure. Trump has been exposed in the sharpest of terms to be incapable of leading let alone managing anything. He likes the idea of power but doesn’t know what to do with it. Like he liked the idea of owning a casino. It takes a special kind of stupid to bankrupt a casino. The prosecution rests.