Cheering Muslims in New
Jersey; Cures For Cancer; Big Lies
By
Leonard Zwelling
It should no longer be a surprise to anyone that men like
Hitler and Stalin could rise to power while lying to their people. Donald Trump
and Ben Carson are giving it a try here in the USA.
Dr. Carson’s thinking is so bizarre, he should be discounted
as a candidate for high office due to permanent insanity. His ideas about
homosexuality, religious tests for elected office in America, and world history
when it comes to the Pyramids preclude his being taken seriously. It goes to
prove that the Harvard syndrome is alive and well. This was described to me
early in my academic career by a Harvard grad who noticed that once people
found out he went to Harvard, they also thought he knew who was going to win
the World Series. Or, as Tevye said, “If you’re rich they think you really
know.” Success in one field is no guarantee for success or expertise in
another. I am sure that Dr. Carson was a great surgeon. But we in academia who
have had to withstand a host of administrative leaders who achieved their
clinical chairs on the basis of their biochemistry or molecular biology prowess,
understand that an expert in one thing is an expert in one thing only.
Mr. Trump has taken this to a new level. He is shrill, rude
and often uninformed. No one can back up his recollection of cheering Muslims
in New Jersey on 9/11 as the Trade Center Towers collapsed. Those cheering
Muslims he saw on television were in the Middle East, as far as I can remember,
not on American soil. Mr. Trump’s willingness to vilify a segment of the
American people simply because of their religious beliefs (or his discomfort
with those beliefs) also should be a disqualifier for high office.
I
no longer care about the whys behind the popularity of these two. That there
are bigoted, Islamophobic members of the American electorate is of no surprise
to me. That many Americans vote on single issues like xenophobia and fear of
immigrants is also no surprise. That the putative reasonable members of the GOP
running for the Presidency tolerate these nonsensical statements and leave them
unchallenged is horrific. If Mr. Bush, Mr. Rubio, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich
represent the mainstream of 2016 Republicanism, the country is in for a really
hard time and Ronald Reagan would be running in the Democratic primary this
time.
And just to prove that the Big Lie is not limited to
politics, we have Dr. DePinho continuing to tout the success of the Moon Shots
and his inexplicable ability to separate rich people from their money based on
his ludicrous vision of cancer research and progress against the disease. This
proves that rich people can be as foolish as poor ones and likely do more
damage.
I suggest a really full accounting of the Moon Shots at the
5 year mark of Dr. DePinho’s Presidency. Here are some questions I would like
answered:
Shots?
from the Moon Shots?
I
would just like to have the President held to the same standards as he seems
more than willing to hold the rest of the faculty.
The
Big Lie is a time-honored way to control independent thinking and several of
the GOP leaders have demonstrated it still works. So has Dr. DePinho. But
please remember. The Big Lie only works when most people believe it or act like
they do.
It
is not the possession of guns that might have prevented the anti-Semitic
slaughter in Nazi Germany as suggested by Dr. Carson. If the German people had
not bought in to Hitler’s Big Lie, perhaps another story might have been
written.
