Calling Dr. Feelgood, Or This is Our Final Warning, Part II

   

There is this video going around that sums up Trumpism in a nutshell. It is of a chiropractor telling people to eat zinc and drink tonic water to fend off Covid-19 (I won't link to it, because I refuse to move traffic to his page- please Google around if you want to see for yourself). Now, there is nothing wrong with drinking tonic water (according to the chiropractor the quinine in it will have the same salubrious effects as the hydroxychloroquine Dr. Trump keeps prescribing) and little wrong with taking zinc (actually, too much zinc can really do you harm- PLEASE consult your doctor if you are going to take zinc supplements). But anyone who imagines that zinc and tonic water can IN ANY WAY replace washing your hands, disinfecting the commonly used surfaces in your home, and maintaining social distancing as protection against Covid-19 IS OUT OF THEIR COTTON-PICKING MINDS.

      But to watch this "doctor," you would believe that all of this talk of a pandemic is just hooey. He rants on and on about how people are being lied to. The dead are filling hospitals in NYC? Why, in his part of Florida (!) doctors are being laid off! How does he know that quinine and zinc will help PREVENT the virus? Because some doctor in Louisiana has had good results giving it to patients WHO ARE ALREADY IN THE ICU! You can't make this shit up.

       But those noxious leaps of ill logic are not what encapsulate Trumpism in its essence. That effect is achieved by two properties of the video. The first is the whole rhetorical frame. The guy is wearing a kind of medical uniform and sitting in a recognizable medical office (there is a chart of the human musculature behind him). He is thus trading upon the credibility of his profession, without accepting any of the responsibility that such a move would entail (Trump's credo- all the credit, none of the responsibility). As a "doctor" he should stick to what is PROVEN, and the only proven prevention for Covid-19 at this point is hygiene, disinfection, social distancing. For anyone speaking as a medical professional to say ANYTHING different is malpractice. Might zinc and quinine help? Yeah, maybe. MAYBE. The fact that one doctor in Louisiana has had good results giving them to ICU patients is cause for hope, not certainty.

     And suppose, just for shits and giggles, we speculate that what the doctor in Louisiana has shown (we can't know now for sure, after all) is that zinc and quinine will cure you after you develop severe symptoms, but won't do shit for you before that. What would the chiropractor have done then? He will have fucked us all, won't he? He will have sent millions of people out to get zinc and quinine, so that everything in stores and warehouses is bought up, and nothing is available to the hospitals where it might do some good.

     That is the kind of thing you would think about before taping a viral video, if you took your hippocratic oath seriously, in the same way much of what Trump says or tweets would never be uttered or written if he took his oath of office seriously. But taking your oath of office seriously is for losers. Trumpkins have no patience for that kind of thing. And who am I? I am just some libtard who suffers from TDS, so I must just be saying this because I hate Trump 🤣.

     The other way in which Dr. Feelgood perfectly channels the Trumpist message is in his persistent use of a particular logical fallacy. He points to several instances of what he calls "fake news," for example, a news story that misleadingly says that a baby died of Covid-19, when in fact it was born prematurely to a woman suffering from the disease. His criticism of such reporting is plausible, but he keeps comparing these instances to "shouting fire in a crowded movie theater," noting that to do so is a felony.

     This is the scariest aspect of Trumpism. When Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. first articulated the "yelling fire" thought experiment, he was trying to outline the UNIQUE and EXTREME circumstances in which the state might bar free speech- if what you say has the potential to kill or harm hundreds of people IN A MATTER OF SECONDS, the state has a right to punish you for saying it. But now Dr. Feelgood is implying that people should be jailed if what they write in their newspaper or on their website upsets enough young mothers.
 
      This is the true Trump Derangement Syndrome. Trumpkins seem ready to suspend any and all critical thinking about the principles of our democracy in defense of their Dear Leader. Watching them sort through the facts of this pandemic is like watching a medieval astrologer try to explain what is going on in the sky. Trying to explain things like "retrograde motion" is very hard if you are committed to the idea that the sun revolves around the earth. In the same way, trying to deal with the plain facts of our situation on a day-to-day basis is very difficult if you are committed to the idea that Trump is a great leader (hell, if you are committed to the proposition that he merits being called a real "president").

     For example- how does it look that Trump said we would have zero cases by April so we shouldn't worry, then he said we might have as many as 200,000 deaths so we should start taking it seriously, then he said we should all start thinking about getting back to work, because we should stop worrying again? Does that look like the blatherings of a weak, indecisive, and irresponsible "leader"? If so, someone must be to blame! Someone other than Trump, of course. The media! The liberal elites! Round up the usual suspects!

      This cult of personality around Trump is frighteningly toxic and corrosive. As long as Trump is in office we will simply not be capable of having a meaningful discourse about public affairs that engages a critical mass of the citizenry. Now is Dr. Feelgood's time. I would say that I hope he is enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, but it is coming at the cost of endangering many gullible people's lives. Hopefully the fall will bring some amelioration of this pandemic of bullshit, and we will have effective treatments and preventative medicine for Covid-19 soon after.