By Sid Schwab / Herald Columnist
When I was a surgical intern, we had a patient, a young girl, maybe eight years old, who’d had a severe infection in her leg, necessitating removing much of the skin of her thigh. Her bandages required regular changing; because of the pain and her young age, it was being done in the OR, under general anesthesia.
A new drug had just been approved, considered safe to use outside the OR, because it provided analgesia and anesthesia without suppressing breathing. We tried it, in her room. The dressing change proceeded without evident awareness or pain by the girl.
That was half a century ago, and I still can hear her fearful howl as she awoke, an unearthly wail, as if she’d been forced to look through open gates of Hell. It was horrifying. If she didn’t remember, it had to remain in her somewhere.
The drug was ketamine.
Elon Musk admits — brags of — using ketamine recreationally, frequently. The man supervising a post-adolescent team of tech nerds is canceling people and programs without applying anything close to cost-benefit analysis, firing thousands of government workers via boilerplate emails. The man claiming he’s uncovered massive fraud, without producing a single example, shows all the signs of ketamine abuse.
Quoting (Atlantic: tinyurl.com/keta4u): “Frequent, heavy recreational use — say, several times a week — has been linked to cognitive effects that last beyond the high, including impaired memory, delusional thinking, superstitious beliefs, and a sense of specialness and importance. …” Like barging into world politics, planning to colonize Mars, taking a chainsaw to U.S. government. And calling Sen. Mark Kelly, R-Az., a traitor for supporting Ukraine. If, in his chemically-addled brain, Musk thinks he’s finding “waste, fraud and abuse,” he’s not. It’s irrational, wholesale firings followed by serial re-hirings when the essential nature of the employees is realized.
Waste, fraud, and abuse exist in the federal government. In Donald Trump’s administration, it’s everywhere. His golfing weekends waste millions of tax payer dollars each time he takes one.
DOGE itself is a fraud; so is his bitcoin scam. Abuse is the operating premise of Trump’s and Bondi’s Department of Justice. No one except Trump, who’s dismantling the means to investigate his own corruption (CNN:tinyurl.com/nolook4u), is against finding and weeding it out. But it wouldn’t be Musk’s version, which lacks meaningful scrutiny of targeted departments or the importance of their work.
Case in point: firing National Park and Forest Service workers. National parks add billions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Maybe Elon doesn’t like trees or bison; but they more than pay for themselve. (tinyurl.com/4parks2u). The daughter of a friend had her dream job as a park ranger, for which her education made her highly qualified. Her performance had received laudatory accolades. Yet she was fired via one of those impersonal, cruel emails, accusing her, without specifics, of poor performance and lack of qualifications. Clearly no one had bothered to look. Like most of the touted firings, it was seemingly only to impress impressionable MAGAs.
If Musk’s narcissistic grandiosity and lack of empathy (he considers it a weakness (DailyKos: tinyurl.com/noempath)) might be drug-induced, Trump came by his honestly. Which is the only context in which that word can be applied to him. Nature or nurture, it’s who he’s always been. But, even notwithstanding his multiple business failures and scams, his current disastrous behavior beggars understanding. Since re-assuming office, his domestic actions seem to have in common only “because I can.” After his empty praise of veterans, gutting the Veterans Administration is an unexpected example. Killing cancer research; censoring science; destroying the EPA and the Department of Education: those were expected, but no less disastrous and irrational. Promises to the contrary, it appears Medicaid is also on the block. (FactCheck.org tinyurl.com/bye2meds). Social Security, too? (CNN: tinyurl.com/no2socsec)
As to his on-again, off-again tariffs, the effects of which he’s never understood, were his “advisers” afraid to contradict him? Vengeful authoritarians have a way of throttling dissent.
Example: The oft-professed holiness of Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House and God, would, you’d think, render him reluctant to lie as blatantly as he does. As the stock market continued its freefall, as prices rise and jobs disappear, Holy Mike shifted blame by saying it will take time to repair the damage caused by President Biden’s terrible economy. As if Trump’s bizarre bungling has nothing to do with it. As if historic job creation, unprecedented corporate profits, taming the pandemic, enormous stock market gains, and rebuilding rotting infrastructure equate to “terrible.” “Envy of the world,” people said. Because it was.
Gaslighting enough for a million hot-air balloons, Fox “news” is referring to the upcoming “Biden recession.” When MAGA voters are convinced by Foxotrumpic disinformation that Trump is playing four-dimensional chess with our economy, when they prefer authoritarianism over democracy (Bulwark: tinyurl.com/love4dictator) and are OK with weakening the U.S. to the benefit of Russia, it’s hard to foresee a way out. If there were an obvious, brilliant plan behind all of this, stock markets would be rising, not tanking. Mismanagement does the opposite (BlueSkytinyurl.com/2tank4u).
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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