Trump The Virus

There is going to be a political aspect to everything I’m about to say. It is about Donald Trump, vaccines, and immunity. But it is going to take me a while. So bear with me. I will get there. It just make take me a while.

 

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Okay, so, here’s comes some personal stuff first…

A while back, I spent much of a being sick as the proverbial canine. The reason? Because on Tuesday I went and got not one but two vaccinations — for the flu, and more importantly, for Shingles. I had been meaning to get the latter for some time. I’m a prime candidate for that ghastly disease because I had chickenpox as an adult. Apparently, that means there is a strong, strong likelihood that I would get shingles sometime after middle age.

And I wasn’t planning on getting shingles…not if I could help it, anyway. It’s incredibly painful, can be a bit disfiguring (at least in the short term), and there is no known cure. And that’s just if you get garden variety. A friend of mine, a writer I’ve worked with, got it in her eyes. Feel free to shudder at that thought. I certainly did.

So, I got the vaccine. The problem is that I’ve got a strong immune system (apparently) and whenever I get a vaccine the old body swings into overdrive. It interprets the serum (as it should) as an attack and responds accordingly–i.e., it generates the antibodies which will give you immunity later on. The trouble being that can make you may feel sick in the short run. You may get fever, aches, queasy stomach, and all the other things that are designed to make life impossible for viruses…and, sort of by accident, miserable for you.

Ergo, I spent pretty much all day yesterday flat on my back and feeling, to quote the immortal P.G. Wodehouse, like something rejected by the pure food committee. 

It wasn’t fun to say the least…but I knew the alternative was to court something a whole lot worse. Better to suffer a little today that much more next week.

In other words, I was doing something mature.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

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So where’s the politics in all this?

Well, let’s face it, Donald Trump wants to be a dictator. Specifically, he wants to be Fascist despot, coming to power with appeals to the under-educated, the bigoted, and the fearful, and ruling through a combination of force, duplicity, and xenophobia.

But, fortunately for us, Trump isn’t too bright. He has the brains to gain power, but not to keep it or exercise it–as evidenced by the more or less unrelenting stream of domestic and foreign-policy disasters which have attended his administration.

And I’m hoping that we will learn from this. I’m hoping that the Left, and even the more moral members of the Right, will realize that there is, after all, a chance of Fascism in America, and that we will work together to make sure it never happens here again.

In other words, I’m hoping that Trump is like a killed virus, and that even now our body politic is developing the antibodies necessary to defeat the Fascist contagion in future. I’m hoping that Trump is our vaccination.

And yes, it means that we spend some time being horribly sick…

But in the long run, we will be spared something far worse…

An infection from which we might never recover.