I submitted a piece to the Editorial Board a couple days ago. It was a little caustic about the systems under which we now live. The mirthful part seemed to have been overwhelmed, and it caused a bit of a stir. It provoked Legal to object about material that could be interpreted as critical of the Government. She noted people as diverse as The Department of Justice, Defense and the Postal Service are now examining the writings and social media conduct of Domestic Insurgents, who constitute about 74 million Americans.
“These are treacherous times for liability judgements,” she said firmly. “Time to keep our heads down and see who is actually running the government and where we might inadvertently come to attract focused attention by people who used to not bother us under First Amendment protections.”
When she sat down, the pause brought up the made-for-TV arrests of some prominent opponents of those in government, like Roger Stone and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Both were aging former insiders, men of perhaps tangential relation to how Washington currently operates, but with great symbolic appeal. They were presented as a threat so deep it took SWAT teams at dawn to bring Stone to Justice in his bathrobe, and seizure of attorney Rudy’s client privilege communications. After a quick huddle, our legal beagles recommended we not venture too far into the new operating regime until some of the emerging roles and rules are clearer. They also announced they would like to review “mirthful” articles for genuine objective humor not subject to government approval.
That served only to forestall the discussion, and worse, highlight the recent events surrounding our National Health Czar, Dr. Tony Fauci.
There was some minor discussion about that, but then Dr. Fauci’s old emails- some of them “private,” were disclosed under a FOIA request by the always forthright BuzzFeed and Washington Post, formerly Washington’s newspaper before it became Jeff Bezo’s newsletter. The Socotra enterprise has deliberately kept a low profile on the pandemic response. We have an older member, retired, who was added to the little Public Health Department section in HR because he had accidentally served with Dr. Fauci on the SARS-1 task force nearly twenty years ago. In the interest of perspective on mirth, he was one of the only people who had any experience on how the national health system worked in crisis at a price we could afford.
His view caused two interns to announce that the extra $300 a week in unemployment- $1,200 a month for an annual extra payment of about $15 grand a year had caused them to reassess the idea of dragging themselves from the bunk-room next to the disused tack-shack to the Green Table so early in the morning. Instead, they could hang out and bitch without old people telling them what to do. They thought it was a sort of independence movement. Chairman Socotra shrugged at the news and stepped out for a Marlboro. He can smoke next to the office complex and has a butt-kit for his convenience. He considers personnel turmoil to be one of the business costs of an epidemic.
But temporarily relieved of supervision at the table, the old guy talked about the SARS-1 outbreak, and what the Task Force and Dr. Fauci thought about the origin of it at the time. He liked and respected the man, and called him “The Good Doctor” without rancor. There was no lab working on the virus then, at least one that anyone knew about. The working assumption was that the virus jumped from an animal species to our human one. His ancient notes indicated it was thought to be either bats or civets.
There were nods at the table from some. We all knew about bats, creepy beautiful things flying in the night, but not so much about civets. The old guy cleared his throat- something controversial in these times- and said “the civets are a small mammal common in Asia and Africa. The origin, based on known reported SARS cases, was China. And from there it leapt into a world threat in short order.”
There was nothing more about that part of an old epidemic, suspicious or otherwise. That virus ran its brief course and dropped out of public view, though he knew the public health community was still curious about it and said so at the time.
In fact, he said “inside the government it had been a real panic. It had included possible transmission at Disneyland, and you can imagine how that would have gone. At home, the parallel campaign against biological warfare was rising. Awful thing, most of us agreed, and some of the answers to the medical questions were suddenly not permitted in the US.” he scowled and then muttered “And so they were outsourced with taxpayer cash.”
Socotra House takes no policy position on any of that. Although lacking some context, it is apparent that Dr. Fauci knew his questions could be answered somehow, and supported a move to do so. Of course there was potentially some risk, since the people doing the research where it was still permitted were not quite up to world standard of Level 4 Lab protocols. Chairman Socotra returned from his hasty break and said he was reluctant to go public on the matter, since in addition to the original can of worms there appeared to be other cans of unidentified things all mixed up with it.
So, a Saturday issue of the Daily is intended to be a little thoughtful and mirth-provoking for a couple days of independent unsupervised weekend activity. All media does it. But this one is sort of different. The media complex is spinning all sorts of things out of cycle about the original can of worms, apparently hoping the weekend reassessment of Dr. Fauci from The National Expert and actually (maybe) part of the problem didn’t appear mirthful at all.
About a third of the people at the Green Table are teetering on the edge of oblivion. So are some of our readers. We remember things that happened before the stuff people are trying to ignore today, while the younger ones think everything under the sun is new. One codger- Security Department, who works from a desk in the tack shop due to arthritic complaints- claimed that his high school class this year shares chronologic age with the year he graduated- ‘69. He claims the Sixties were a pretty interesting time to be alive. In his ancient context, there had been a fairly significant land war in Asia in progress, slavering Communists around the world acting out and wild social change in progress at home. As Security, he mentioned only two of the trinity of that time: Sex and Rock ‘N Roll, though our Governor has announced we will be able to talk about the third part on the first day of July.
He went on to talk about being swept up in those times, including the 1968 massive national rioting that followed the murder of Dr. King. He seemed to think the events of last summer had happened before, and really were not as big a deal except the government seemed opposed to it back then. But in those times, inconvenient people also sometimes abruptly departed the national discussion by gunfire.
One of the interns who elected to be paid to stay home is still working after a fashion as we all are. She is smart and does her numbers. But in reviewing the torrent of disturbing reports, she did one of those “reply to all” emails that sometimes cause trouble. In it, she quoted Dr. Fauci as saying anyone who misinterpreted his professional remarks on the plague and its origins was attacking Science itself. Or himself.
The Chairman laughed, on a non-attribution basis, and said the government now obeys only the rules it likes. Taking the inspiration, the rest of the table carefully laughed, too.
Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com