Literary Corner: An Incredible Phenomenon

Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, on President Donald Trump:

"[Trump is] so attentive to the scientific literature & the details & the data. I think his ability to analyze & integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit” -- this is shocking, hackish stuff from Dr. Birx. pic.twitter.com/c2phsRYaJs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 27, 2020

President Trump, on how he found out from President Xi Jinping (rather than, say, members of the White House coronavirus task force) that the rumors are true—younger patients don't generally get as sick from Covid-19 as older ones do (text via RealClearPolitics):

The Other Thing That's Nice

by Donald J. Trump

The other thing that's nice and
the one thing that has come out,
and I learned this, again,
it was reaffirmed by President Xi
last night in my conversation,
the young people are really,
this is an incredible phenomenon,
but they are attacked, successfully
attacked to a much lesser extent
by this pandemic, by this disease.
This whatever they want to call it.
You call it a germ, you can call it a flu,
you can call it a virus. You know,
you can call it many different names.
I'm not sure anybody even knows
what it is, but the children do very well.

He's so attentive to the scientific literature, analyzing and integrating away, that it's exhausting.

It occurred to me Birx may believe it's necessary to do this, soothe the mad beast's wounded sensibilities to stop him from lashing out and doing something crazier—that she and Fauci working together are saving thousands and possibly hundreds of thousands of lives and she has to surrender her natural pride and abase herself in this grotesque way to keep that going. Does anybody know of a good scientist or, say, a high officer in the Red Army, who flattered Stalin out of this kind of patriotism, in order to save the nation?

Is it the way Zhou Enlai spoke to Mao?

Papers published after his death show Zhou reporting rural starvation to the chairman—though without identifying the famine’s cause, namely Mao’s own policies. Documents show Zhou working to rehabilitate purged scientists and officials, if only because China’s economy needed competent managers. To this day, locals across China will point to a beloved temple and thank the former prime minister, often without hard evidence, for issuing orders that shielded the site from Red Guards...

Is it worth it? I can't say it's not! But it's deeply humiliating.