Fragments

They used to refer to Ronald Reagan as the Teflon President because nothing bad could stick to him. Presumably this was because of his sunny personality. Donald Trump is a new kind of Teflon President because he is completely in-your-face, but still nothing sticks … with half of the electorate, anyway. This seems to be because of his mastery of how to obtain and use power.              I grudgingly acknowledge his genius in this regard, although I can’t really know how much is due to sheer dumb luck. Is he the new Machiavelli, or just the new Magoo? But whether or not he has employed these tactics intentionally and knowingly, here are two things I’ve learned about power from Trump’s Presidency. I admit to being astonished by both.  1.       The more outrages the better. If you do something utterly beyond the pale, thereby stirring up controversy that could potentially un-do you once for all, simply do something else equally or even more outrageous that people cannot ignore … and so

Most of the COVID deaths in Connecticut have been in, or of residents and staff of, nursing homes and the like. Nationwide the figure is two fifths. This makes sense because of the concentration of older and infirm individuals in extended care facilities. Furthermore, life in these settings has been unutterably grim, since no visitors were allowed for months, and I imagine even the residents could no longer commingle because of the very high risk of contagion of their fellow most vulnerable. Could there be a more stark vision of hell?             It is also now clear that the driving force for these figures is the rate of infection in the surrounding community. The connection is not mysterious: The virus will be introduced into the nursing home environment, already primed for contagion by its demographics, by staff who spend the rest of their lives in the larger community, including with their own families, who also circulate in it.             These two observations lead me to off