The Brandon Game

 

They say fortune favors the prepared, but in some cases merely proximate suffices. Never did I feel that MetLife stadium in the “Meadowlands” of New Jersey was some kind of windfall, especially with the play over the past decade of its residents, the football Jets and Giants. But fortune looked kindly last weekend when Army and Navy pulled in and played their annual battle royale, and my wife and I jumped at the chance to finally attend this great game.

A normally unremarkable train ride to the game was highlighted by, of all things, the marketing folks at the commuter rail line, New Jersey Transit. Hardly the model of military precision, they managed to hand out some seriously high-quality fabric face masks with the game logo for use on the journey. I’m not much of a believer in masks outside of the operating room or on Halloween, but if I had to wear one, it was something I could do with pride. It was, for lack of anything else, a uniform for the day.

The modern spectacle of today’s sports industry requires an entire army (pardon the pun) of entertainment before you even get to your seat. “Fan Festivals” of music, community demonstrations, and quasi-athletic demonstrations are de rigueur for any pro event (or Alabama football), begging the question of why you need to even watch the actual game. Army/Navy is no different, but with a very, very special set of skills. No Chevy dealer here selling a lucky raffle ticket for a used Camaro. Right after the metal detectors you come to an armored Humvee with a .50 caliber mounted gun. Alas, the good Army folks wouldn’t let me take it back to Manhattan to help clear the human detritus of drunken SantaCon revelers. I mean I am a taxpayer, so why can’t I take it for a spin? Befitting the military medical corps, there was a first aid demonstration nearby. But this wasn’t anything with your high school health class CPR dummies. The mannequins had battle injuries; one with a foot missing and another with his liver falling out from a stomach wound. Small patrol boats, helicopters, and plenty of other Defense Department goodies were strategically arranged like stocking stuffers at Macy’s during Christmastime.

By the time we made it to our seats, we were in full patriotic mode. Cadets and midshipmen were scattered across the field and military brass were walking around engaging in prodigious inter-service back slapping. Then again, that is Pentagon signaling that the latest weapons system is now another billion dollar over budget. But heck, everyone was in too good a mood to care.

Even half time wasn’t like any other game I’ve been to. Of course they played Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” Except they had Lee Greenwood on the field singing the song. With a 50-yard-long American flag. And coordinated fireworks. They even had some DOD suit swear in a recruit class that had just finished basic training. It must have been a head trip for some recent high school grads getting cheered by 82,000 people after being called, well whatever they call you in basic training, for the last two months.

But what I was really looking forward to was the President walking in just before the coin toss. You see it every year on the news. Except he wasn’t there. Perhaps Madame VP would take his place—I mean there’s no law the President has to be there, and maybe he was busy jetting around the world making our planet a safer place.

Nothing.

Maybe there would be a video message encouraging a good game and thanking the players and assembled military personnel for their service.

Still nothing.

In the big picture there was nothing wrong until the periodic “U-S-A” chants started. The problem popped up with another chorus that accompanied this cheer, “Let’s Go Brandon.” It was then clear that the administration knew that this was going to be a PR nightmare. The typical video from this event is of the strong Commander-in-Chief (or VP) striding confidently onto the field, waving to the crowd and saluting servicemen. But what was going to happen this time? Joe shuffling along, looking lost and fiddling with his mask? Kamala in heels, pantsuit, and mask, addressing the crowd with that weird, giggling screech of hers? It was a reminder of the recent Afghanistan disaster waiting to happen.

After what was a few hours of spirited, if not somewhat mediocre, football play, we returned home, emerging from the desperate bowels of Penn Station in search of a cab. Unbeknownst to us, there was championship boxing starting in an hour at Madison Square Garden, and the ticket scalpers were circling in force. “Tickets, who has tickets to sell/who needs tickets” was the constant refrain. While attempting to exit the obit this hellish gravitational pull, I still had my mask on, probably subconsciously trying to protect myself from the sidewalk smell of human excrement and even more belligerent SantaCon revelers.

As one scalper passed us, he interrupted his rap to yell at us, “Who won the game?”, as he must have seen the imprint on my mask. “Navy, 17-13” I yelled back, thus fulfilling my civic duty and providing critical information about spread.

And then the one truly sad thought of the day hit me. A sad thought about our country. Did anyone at the White House even know the score? Did they even care?

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

A View On The View

 

The past 20 years has been a golden age for what is known as “reality TV.” Starting off with CBS’s Survivor, the format now has more variants than COVID, with the Real Housewives franchise an inexplicable powerhouse. While not my thing, the market is the ultimate arbiter of what is popular, and I could care less who spends their time viewing these less-than-real lives. But when our highest elected officials are either party to, or victim of, such antics, we need to start asking a lot of questions.

Even if, like me, you don’t watch daytime TV, you probably have heard of, and may have seen some of the histrionics from, ABC’s The View. This otherwise insufferable gabfest, inexplicably aligned under the network’s news division, grabbed headlines on Friday when two of their hosts had to leave the show mid-airing because they tested positive for COVID just before Vice President Harris was to come on the show. The video led the news for the entire day, playing out as if a national crisis had been averted.

Except nothing, absolutely nothing, about what happened was true.

While it turns out that the show’s hosts are regularly tested for COVID, the requirement for a rapid test came from the VP’s office. Why, you might ask? Good question. The hosts are all vaccinated. The VP is vaccinated with the vaccine that she famously said she wouldn’t-trust-because-Donald-Trump’s-administration-developed-it but now everyone must have the jab. So if the vaccine works so well, and everyone has been vaccinated, why does anyone who comes within six feet of the VP need to be tested? Never mind.

And as to that national crisis of potential infection? Oh, it was a false positive. For both tests. If a false positive led to the tirade of some overhyped actor, none of this would matter. A real-world concern would be for international travelers, as a false positive would send you to quarantine in a foreign country because you have to test negative, even if you are citizen and have been vaccinated, to get back into the US. But the greatest concern is that this false positive involves the executive leadership of the government, and its utter failure here reflects a national inability to move forward from COVID.

We see the trickle down of this ineptitude everywhere. In New York City, you have to have proof of vaccination and wear a mask to see a movie. To sit down in a restaurant, you need to show proof of vaccination, but you don’t need to wear a mask, which is odd because when there was no vaccine all you had to do was wear a mask and take it off when you sat down at the table. Of course elsewhere in the state, or other states entirely, none of this applies.

And while the internal policies of one city may not be important, when the President gets it all wrong, then it just adds fuel to the political fire. Imagine a President who gives out off-the-cuff medical advice on vaccination based on no discernable medical research. When it was Donald Trump, everyone pilloried him; when it was Joe Biden telling everyone to get a booster shot, it was merely “a premature suggestion awaiting further confirmation.” When that confirmation was, at best, limited and tepid, there was a White House victory dance affirming that the most seriously immuno-compromised should get a booster. This was hardly the triumph of great science.

To take it a step further, does the White House really want a COVID triumph? With each new variant there seems to be another reason not to move forward, just ominous mentioning of “not wanting to return to lockdowns.” The only reason I can even keep track of the mutations is that I had to memorize the Greek alphabet as a fraternity pledge, but that was nearly 40 years ago, which seems to be as long as the COVID crisis has been going on. But we are at a point where we face a stark choice: how much can the government control the most basic elements of our life, like walking into a restaurant. As only a political scientist can appreciate, you know the world is upside down when free-market Republican governors have to use the most draconian instrument, authoritarian executive orders, just to keep businesses open.

Each side from The View COVID drama seems to be very quiet, just sending out little feelers in the press to cover themselves. Conspiracy theorist might say the whole thing was a setup for ratings; more innocently it may have been a bunch of underlings who screwed up the works. Who knows? But I do know there are hard-core anti-vaxxers who won’t believe a word the government says. I’m not part of that crowd, but when this administration runs our country’s COVID policy as a reality show, do you blame them?

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

This Is Our Responsibility

 

It was described as a humanitarian crisis. Frantic travelers trying to escape on the next available way out. Scores of men, and the occasional woman, lying on the ground—disoriented, unkempt, hopeless. It may have sounded like the evacuation of Kabul airport, but in reality it was how one particular political candidate accurately called New York City’s Pennsylvania Station.

Those who walk through, see, and more importantly, smell Penn Station could only take solace that their commutes don’t include the inner-most circle of Hell, the Port Authority bus station that sits a mile or so away. Absent that lowest level of salvation, any observer could easily confuse Penn Station as some overflow outlet for a homeless shelter. And so last week while Afghanistan was descending into its own conflagration, mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa showed up for a press conference to decry the wretched state of affairs at the busiest train station in America.

As if on cue, a homeless man walked right in front of Sliwa’s podium and interrupted the remarks. In a nod to our surreal times, the man was shirtless yet managed to have a clean-looking mask looped around both of his ears. A cop offered to take the man away, but Sliwa demurred and engaged in conversation. We found out that the man came from Guyana six years ago; had been hospitalized at Bellevue numerous times; was supposed to be on medication—an all-too-familiar litany of despair. Almost casually, Sliwa asked an innocuous, almost obvious, question, “Would you rather be somewhere else but Penn Station?”

It utterly destroyed the man.

The man’s body started to curl inward and his lips lost the battle against quivering. And then the tears started to flow. Crying of a man who was utterly broken; crying at the realization that all his life meant was a few square feet on Penn Station’s filthy floor; crying that he had nothing, absolutely nothing, in life.

Sliwa calmly consoled the man, telling him, “That’s all right, we’ll take care of you. This is our responsibility.” This wasn’t some war cry for government spending on social programs or even a jab at the current the current Mayor (although a crystallization of all his failures). No, it was a declaration of what our leaders should do—that is, take responsibility. Sliwa doesn’t run a homeless shelter, can’t give him medication, and certainly can’t undo this man’s awful circumstances. But here he showed how a vast, taxpayer-funded bureaucracy had abandoned any accountability and how we, as a city, cannot accept the current state.

Sliwa’s display reminded me of the phrase “compassionate conservative” that George W. Bush used to throw around. The left snickered at him for it and I feel it was mostly because he never had the chance to show what it really meant. But in this brief campaign interaction, Sliwa showed exactly what it meant. It means acting on the root Judeo-Christian values of helping our fellow man. It means holding those in power, those who are stewards of tax dollars, accountable for their failures. It means that one man or woman can change not only one other person’s life, but also the lives of many others, if they are willing to stand on their principals.

There are, as they say in the business world, many, many problems to unpack for this unfortunate man from Guyana. I’m not sure medications and a shelter cot are even a start to any kind of a solution, but it’s a start that has to happen. And Sliwa’s winning the mayor’s race is such a long shot that I doubt any Vegas bookie would lay odds on it. But one thing is for sure—for a few seconds on a hot summer’s afternoon, Curtis Sliwa made New York City a better place. For that we should thankful and follow in his footsteps.

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The List Is Not Life

 

On Thursday America suffered collective pain and indignity with the ISIS bombings at Kabul airport. The slaughter that included 13 US service members was bad enough; the response from the White House was even worse. I ask—no really, I am pleading—is anybody running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania?

Times of crisis usually bring out the best of presidents and their speechwriters. From FDR declaring December 7^th, 1941 a “day that will live in infamy” to Reagan mourning the Challenger’s crew “slipping the surly bonds of earth,” the right people at the right time say the right things. George W. Bush managed to improv through a bullhorn on the smoldering ruins of the Twin Towers and channel a nation’s anguish and anger. Even Obama’s highly scripted, pointy-headed professorial declarations were, at their base, well-crafted and professional. And for Donald Trump, the Teleprompter was merely something of a guide, rather than a script, to follow, but his discussions of fallen service members were always respectful.

Then there was Joe Biden’s performance on Thursday.

Besides being late in the day and late for the appointed time, the prepared remarks were, at best, a rambling descent into the incomprehensible. The only good thing was that his speech was short and as it finished I thought the worst was over. And by worst I mean Joe talking, as his usual tactic when his vacation is interrupted is to shuffle away without taking questions before heading back to Camp David.

But no.

And here is the exact moment when the wheels officially came off the Biden bus. I repeat it verbatim, copied directly from the White House’s official transcript:

“Ladies and gentlemen, they gave me a list here. The first person I was instructed to call on was Kelly O’Donnell of NBC.”

Yes ladies and gentlemen, the President actually announced to the entire world that he had a list of reporters on which to call, and that “they” (whoever “they” are) who gave him this list are somehow running this show. Is there no advisor, aide, or press rep that can tell Joe that this is the one thing you would never, never say? Everyone knows presidents (or anyone facing the press corps) have favorites and they get asked first. It’s not even relevant or important. But why would you even think to mention it? Is there a mind at work? Did you forget that this interaction is about the killing of US military personnel and not how you run a presser? Apparently not, because then Joe thought he could be funny.

Now calling on the press has always been a bit of a game. Sam Donaldson was Reagan’s jester—the wild gesticulations and screaming above Marine One’s rotors contrasting to his never-moving shellacked head of black hair was always funny, especially since Sam didn’t realize the joke was on him. It was all an act of political theatre, and Reagan knew how and when to play the part. Inexplicably Joe thought that humor, a smug joke, was in order to end this affair. Again I quote from the White House transcript:

“I’ll take one more question…

THE PRESIDENT: Whoa. Wait, wait, wait. Let me take the one question from the most interesting guy that I know in the press.”

That’s right. When the world wants to know what the United States will do after a terrorist attack, you should start poking fun at…the Fox News reporter. Instead of treating those who had just sacrificed their lives with the respect they deserve, Joe went for a tone-deaf goof that reduces their deaths to accidental bystanders at an amusement park mishap.

Over this weekend I will give pause and pray for those we lost and their families. I will think of all the good things about this country and how lucky we are to be in it. If I could, I’d even go around the White House and see if there are any adults who can straighten things out and get our citizens home from Afghanistan. One thing is for sure—nobody needed to help me put together this list of things to do.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

One Is The Loneliest Number

 

Central to the Biden image masters' message during the 2020 campaign was Joe’s common touch and five decades of Washington, D.C. experience. And while campaigns aren’t trials seeking the truth, this weekend’s unmitigated disaster in Afghanistan showed how far from reality that campaign image was.

We were sold a story of Joe from Scranton—the everyman American who rose to power but always kept those working-class roots. Fast forward to Joe the President monitoring the world from Camp David. The White House photo showed Joe by himself in an empty situation room. And even though every chair around the table had a pen and pad of paper at the ready, there wasn’t a living person in sight. Everyman Joe is now every Zoom conference Joe—which is no way to run this nation’s foreign policy. Then again, as has been pointed out by any number of observers, the clocks in the Camp David situation had the wrong time for both London and Moscow. I don’t expect any President to grasp the numerical nuance of every international time zone and the permutations of daylight savings time. I do expect, however, somebody working under the President to know how to set the clocks.

But it was the utter emptiness of the situation room that really, really disturbed me. There’s a famous photo of the White House situation room during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. There were cabinet secretaries, military brass, and all manner of advisors jammed together like the back of Spirit airlines plane. In fairness, it could have been the front of a Spirit airlines plane as well. But the image conveyed the importance of the moment—the most important people were together as a hugely daring and dangerous military action was taking place. Choose your crisis—Cuban missile, various Middle East wars, terrorist attacks—the world expects to see the President’s closest advisers contorting themselves to whisper advice into his ear. Even during the height of the Covid news conferences, President Trump had a bevy of advisors surrounding him. Yes, Trump mostly wanted to talk, and had an unnerving habit of hovering over those who were speaking, but it showed that there was a team in place working on this problem.

Not for this administration.

I’m not sure what the image masters are trying to tell us about Joe. Is this issue just not worth his time and the time of his cabinet? Is it that Joe knows this so well that all he needs is a video screen to work this all out? Or is it just that he was awake and out of his pajamas? Whatever the picture was supposed to tell us, the ensuing official statements showed how little Joe has learned during his 50 years in D.C. mixed with the subtlety of a Taliban delegation at a women’s rights conference.

The Sunday morning news shows had Joe’s cabinet blaming Trump and the Afghans. Nuance and thoughtfulness, something you should learn from 50 years in politics and government, were out, and absolution of responsibility was in. This might have been a spin game until Monday afternoon when Joe teetered into the White House and delivered remarks in person. He didn’t just repeat the blame, he doubled down, and not-so-subtly threw Obama under the bus as well. And in case there was any confusion, he adamantly claimed that this result was inevitable, it was just faster than we expected. In other words, nothing here to see.

There will be inquiries about what US intelligence knew and how they briefed the President concerning Afghanistan. There will be hearings about how the President’s cabinet and advisors helped form this current “policy.” But the last 48 hours have been about images, starting with Joe Biden staring at a video screen and ending with him shuffling from a rostrum, all by himself. And while it may be lonely at the top, it doesn’t seem that anyone wants to be around this President.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

The Oxy Dilemma

On an otherwise unremarkable grey and cold January afternoon two years ago in the Washington, DC area, my mother and I were returning to her apartment in time for lunch. Excitedly, my mom offered a variety of dining options, focused mostly on her proud inventory of fresh breads, cold cuts, and cheeses. She wanted to put the meal together, but I assured her that I was fully capable of assembling my own sandwich, especially in her present condition. You see just 24 hours earlier, almost exactly to the minute, a surgeon had tied off the final stiches to my mother’s hip replacement. That wild look in my mom’s eyes and frantic speech was the Oxy taking over her body.

This all came to mind last week with the news that a group of pharmaceutical companies, distributers, and litigating states had reached a settlement concerning abusive selling and distributing tactics of Oxy. By now we are familiar with the story of Oxy, the miracle drug that, unlike other powerful medicines, would save patients from excruciating pain with barely a chance of addiction. Society (and a fair chunk of the medical industry) all took a bite from this apple of pharma Eden and, just like Adam and Eve, were cast out from paradise. While nobody will publicly take any of the blame, now there’s $26 billion to start repairing some of the damage.

I would be more hopeful if some of the money would do some good, but the signs are not promising. While not allowed to fill state budget gaps, the money can go treatment centers (nice, but kind of after the fact), pill and needle disposal education (which doesn’t address using too many pills or shooting up drugs), or providing funds for first responders (and while paying for more NarCon sticks is great, it would be better if folks didn’t need it in the first place). So while the landmark tobacco settlement at least tried to promote better behavior from the tobacco companies (no more billboards, super-slick marketing, or Joe Camel cartoons), after the Oxy agreement we are still left with an extremely powerful narcotic, legally manufactured and distributed, and freely prescribed by medical professionals. Isn’t this how we got here in the first place?

After getting my mom comfortable in her bed and dulling her mind with daytime TV, I went about a week’s worth of playing a combination of loving son (OK, I am a loving son) and Nurse Ratched (I couldn’t let her fall because she forgot to use her walker or accidently let her start in on her 6:00 PM wine). One important role was to keep track of her medications, and part of that meant a bottle of 40 Oxy pills—one every six hours. The first few days required full Oxy dosage, but after that we had a good rapport of me offering pills at the allotted time and she would figure out if she needed them. Once in a while she would ask for one unprompted, and I was happy to oblige. It may have been amateur pain management, but I think we made a good team and kept her from suffering unnecessarily. In the end she went through about half of the bottle, with 20 or so pills still left. Had mom wanted, she could have shilled those extras on the street for $20 a pop, and traded up her Two Buck Chuck for some excellent Trader Joe’s Reserve wines.

And while some states now have requirements for electronic prescription submission and ID requirements to pick up meds such as Oxy, is it right to prescribe that many pills in the first place? I’m sure the medical literature from all the studies indicate that ten days of four Oxy pills may be safe and, technically, not addictive, but would you want to wake up from no pain or responsibility? No doctor, or their office, wants to have patients ask for more pain killers, much less having them go through the hassle of traveling to the drug store and picking them up while still hurting. But shouldn’t we start with the bare minimum prescription and then work our way up? While medicine is so advanced that you can replace a hip and send the patient home the next day, has the medical community abdicated their responsibility to monitor care, especially from powerful pills, in the name of convenience?

I ask these uncomfortable questions because nine months after mom’s hip surgery she had a knee replaced (she couldn’t do both at the same time because they were on opposite legs). In a déjà vu moment, the kind orderly wheeled my mom to the hospital pharmacy where she would pick up her discharge medications. Befitting the fact Halloween was only weeks away, we trick ‘o treated a grab bag of post-surgery meds and headed to her apartment for another week of recovery. There were 40 more Oxy pills.

 

© 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.

Would You Buy A Car From This Government?

Whether on late night TV or blaring from a radio, you’ve probably heard the pitch countless times: “Come on down to the lot and have your kids enter for a chance to win free in-state college tuition; lease your dream vehicle and qualify for a million-dollar lottery card; finance with us and we’ll give you Mets tickets; buy a car and we’ll even pay your outstanding parking tickets.” We’ve heard this schtick so often and for so long we probably don’t even register it anymore. The last new marketing campaign to come from Detroit was “employee discount” rates, and that was what, fifteen years ago? The problem here isn’t that car buying is still a weird universe of its own, it’s that local politicians are using the same techniques to encourage people to get the Covid vaccination. The four examples above are all true offers from state and local officials this past month—whether Mets tickets can be considered an “incentive” is a discussion for another day.

No matter your age, income, or neighborhood, it is impossible not to know that the Covid vaccine is around, available, and free (well you don’t get charged—our grandchildren are screwed when the financing for this hits their tax bills). And while initial lines to get the vaccine resembled refugees trying to gain entry into a friendly country, for the past few weeks the numbers have slowed down considerably. We are at the point where, for various reasons, millions of J&J shots may go unused by the end of the month and will no longer have approved viability. While I happily rolled up my sleeve this April, it seems that there is, in a Jimmy Carter kind of way, a national malaise about Covid and the vaccine. Sure there are petulant anti-vaxxers, but their total numbers are a rounding error against the general population. Perhaps we are now at a national boy-who-cried-wolf inflection point when it comes to believing anything the government says.

The populace has always been leery of boasting politicians, but they have never believed every word from them anyway. Where new wounds have been opened is from the permanent bureaucracy, and it has only itself to blame. At the beginning of Covid, Dr. Fauci’s words were as close to Moses’s tablets as we could come. A year later he’s become a caricature of himself, wearing two masks to a hearing with the national infection falling like a dead Wuhan bat and millions of people getting vaccinated. While it’s easy to whack at the Fauci piṅata, none of the political or bureaucratic institutions have gotten anything right about Covid. We can’t even figure out if the virus came from a lab or wet market. We can’t even get the Chinese to admit it came from China.

We now live in a circular firing squad of distrust. The passenger who is taken off a plane for not wearing a mask points to BLM rioters who ravaged cities for the sole purpose of stealing and destruction. The otherwise law-abiding citizen loses faith in the police when the cops did nothing about the stealing and destruction. And everyone looks at governors who arbitrarily called their jobs “non essential” and threw otherwise law-abiding and police-respecting citizens into unemployment for no discernible reason.

Traditionally, Americans in times of true crisis are willing to inconvenience themselves and temporarily subordinate their rights for the greater good because we trust a terrestrial authority. The past year has given every doubter and naysayer a lifetime of ammunition to simply ignore authority. Why trust authority when, if it comes to maintaining law and order or merely distributing a vaccine, life is just a lottery ticket? Should we care? Absolutely. Because the last thing anyone takes seriously now is the people to whom we should have at least some deferential respect and obedience. Sometimes your life, or the lives of many, depend on it. But it seems that all these leaders do is fumble around and bemoan their missing masks, from the President on down.

If there is a happy tale to tell, a friend of mine got his J&J shot earlier this year and reported unusual efficiency at the vaccine site. He also noted the National Guard was running the operation, so at least one governmental organ could show how to make things work. Perhaps we could commandeer a few car salesmen to work the airwaves, asking us how they can get a needle into our arms instead of how to get us into their cars. Sure some screamer may slap down a C-note and proclaim that for a hundred bucks you can drive away with a new car, but somehow it works. Nobody likes buying a car, and nobody really trusts the car salesmen. But they know how to make a sale, and for our collective health we can’t do any worse.

 © 2021 Alexander W. Stephens, All Rights Reserved.