Does anyone out there remember Jerry Ford? You know, the only man to occupy the Oval without having been elected, the guy who came stumbling along to replace Spiro Agnew and then found himself making his own english muffins in the galley off the Oval when Richard the Profane packed up and left for California one small step ahead of the posse.
Yeah, that one. The guy who gave Chevy Chase lots of raw material for sight gags on the One, the Only, the Original Saturday Nigh Live. The Geek knew you would remember (assuming you had reached the age of awareness long about 1974.
Jerry the Hapless faced an economic crisis. We called it "stagflation" and responded with buttons reading "Whip Inflation Now" or, in short form, "WIN." We didn't and the economy stagflated on until the severe fiscal medicine of the Reagan Recession seven years and one failed presidency later.
Mr Ford, the Great Strategic Thinker from Grand Rapids, MI, sent the Marines to rescue an American ship pirated by the Khmer Rouge government after it had been released. In what was one of the least glorious passages of arms in the history of the Corps, the Marines not only lost one KIA for every crew member of the liberated ship, the troops reportedly left behind wounded comrades.
Then Mr Ford faced the outbreak of a dreaded epidemic, a wannabe pandemic of--you guessed it--Swine Flu. A handful of cases were reported in the US, actually more than have so far been confirmed in the US in the presently unfolding Health Care Crisis.
In less time than it takes to recount the American media were swamping us with headlines foretelling massive, catastrophic disaster. The talking heads of TV news assured us with solemn faces and portentous tones that soon, very soon, we would all be dead. Or worse.
President Ford went on TV and, just like President Obama, spoke to us in the concerned and paternalistic manner of a school nurse. He advised that we wash our hands, cover our mouths when we coughed and get plenty of sleep. Like Joe Biden, President Ford cautioned against travelling in confined spaces. Then, again presaging the Obama team, Ford and his people let us know that the government was working overtime and sparing no expense to protect us from the looming doom.
President Ford, again giving precedent for President Obama, put the money where his mouth was. At Presidential urging Congress wrote a large check to underwrite the development, manufacture, procurement and distribution of a jilly-poo amount of swine flu vaccine. If Big Pharma had developed a anti-viral agent at that time, Congress and President would have bought that as well--in multi-ton quantities.
As it turned out the Great Swine Flu Pandemic of the Ford years was much ballyhoo and very, very little disease. It had evaporated before most of the vaccine had left the factory. Not that the vaccine would have mattered, it was not notably effective.
Other than more material for the SNL crew, the swine flu scare left nothing in its wake. Not even a bunch of buttons to join the WIN collection in the national attic.
The Geek does not hold President Obama personally responsible for not recalling the Ford paradigm as the Nice Young Man From Chicago was but a wee tyke at the time, barely past his years of memorising passages from the Quran at school in Indonesia. The same forgiveness cannot be extended to the grown-ups surrounding Mr Obama. Presumably some of them can recall the Ford years. At least they were old enough to have watched and read the tales of fear and soothing Washington words.
From the coverage given the current A, H1N1 hysteria, one is hard pressed to read the small print showing that the number of laboratory confirmed cases in the Mexican epicenter constitutes far less than half of those originally suspected or that only sixteen deaths have been attributed to the virus. Even as the World Health Organisation cranks up its Fear Generator to higher levels, the hard numbers show the virus is neither as virulent or as lethal as the shrill cries of the Doom-Is-Here crowd would indicate.
Admittedly evolution has skewed the human brain in favor of giving counsel to fear. The same implacable force has biased the human brain into emphasizing and remembering the bad events of life at the expense of the good. Evolution has given priority to fear because fear is a powerful tool to assure survival in an inherently dangerous ecological niche.
But, as Pandora's Box gave hope to counter the myriad of fears it released, so also has evolution given us the capacity for rational thought. This means that we have the ability (if rarely the will) to use the lessons of history to counter the fears of the moment.
It is deeply regrettable that President Obama and the grown-ups to whom he has regular access failed to take even a cursory look at recent American history. It is even more lamentable that the panjandrums of the MSM are similarly eager to both respond to and pander to fear.
We have a surfeit of genuine reasons for anxiety today. There is no need to gin up another, rather baseless one. Yes, the acts and effects of the microscopic semi-alive critters which can lay us low, even six feet under, in a micro-chemical war within our cells and selves are the stuff of great fears, but that is no reason to sell out rationality in the process.
On the up side of all this overreaction and rhetorical overkill, the responses of governments and private interests alike have given a great boost to those in the Islamist jihadist movements who favor biological terrorism. We have announced just how easily and completely we can panic to the point of self-injury in the face of a threat far more apparent than real.
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