Len Zwelling

I am not sure that there has ever been a figure on the U.S. political scene who has both embodied a cause and exemplified it at the same time more than Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If there is someone else, it is Thurgood Marshall. This may be one of those times worth going back to Hollywood to grasp exactly what the people who stood for the cause actually went through to accomplish what they did. In both the films Marshall and On the Basis of Sex, Hollywoodization allows some degree of comprehension of what it must have been like to…

I remember the moment well. In the fall of 1992 upstart “Third Way” Democrat Bill Clinton had managed to get by all the bimbo accusations one candidate could muster (at least until Donald Trump) and was debating the incumbent President of the United States, George H. W. Bush.

The first is a lie. It’s the appearance or perception of something that is not. The second is a disappointment. You had expected one thing and got another, usually producing lesser joy. You were disillusioned. I have been thinking about both of these words a lot of late particularly as it applies to how I try to get at the truth.

Donald Trump is not the cause of the current state of American misery. Had Hillary Clinton won in 2016, we would still have the virus and that’s problem number one. We would still have the fires and climate change. That’s problem number two. The virus would still have caused the economic downturn, but I really doubt Hillary would have done any better although she might have been more honest about it.

In 1995, when I became the Associate VP for Clinical and Translational Research at MD Anderson, I was thoroughly unqualified for such a title. I was a bench scientist who had done very little translational research and no clinical research beyond being a fellow in the Medicine Branch of the National Cancer Institute doing the scut work associated with the clinical research of others. I knew how a clinical study was supposed to be run, but little else. I had a lot to learn and many patient faculty members who were kind enough to teach me.

Both of these opinion pieces from The Wall Street Journal on September 9 make the same point. President Trump is clearly behind in the polls and is behind due to his own behavior. Rather than recognize that he barely eked out a win in 2016 and thus needed to expand his support, he has chosen over the past four years to consolidate that support and alienate the many in the middle who may have voted for him reluctantly in 2016 and now would never do so. So what’s going on?

Both of my sons get incessant joy teasing me about my addiction to Law and Order, the NBC TV show now in syndication on Sundance, Ion, and BBC America. Neither of my kids can understand how I watch the same episodes over and over again. It’s the predictable rhythm of great dialogue and great actors in a police procedural that never strays far from the station house or the courtroom. Like any addiction it satisfies an urge. The urge is for resolution even if not for justice because the good guys don’t always win. I think an addiction to Law and Order is a function of age. I believe it is those who watched it originally who watch it now and those people would be my age, over 70.

I don’t hear well. I haven’t for a number of years. Many faculty members during my days as a vice president probably attributed this to my not understanding what they were saying, but I understand when I can hear. It got so bad that several years ago the BW had me go to MD Anderson and get my hearing tested. Anderson has a rather advanced Audiology Department with great personnel. Sure enough, it was not a lack of understanding that was my problem, but too many Jefferson Airplane concerts at the Fillmore East in my younger days. I had high frequency hearing loss and needed bilateral hearing aids. They are most helpful. I wished I had gotten them earlier. So do many faculty members, I suspect.

If there is one thing in short supply in America today, it is trust in our major institutions. This surely includes the government. Who can tell when the man in the White House is telling the truth or one of his 20,000 and counting lies? Not I. In the political arena, the Big Lie has a long history and has been used to control populations for centuries. Therefore, we should not be surprised by the use of lies by the president (Biden is not for defunding the police, for example) to get himself re-elected. I’m not talking about that trust at all. That’s politics. I am talking about whether or not the American people have trust in those agencies of government whose main role is to keep them safe—the police, health departments and most importantly, one federal regulatory agency currently in the spotlight—the FDA.

The most important job of the President of the United States is to keep the people of America safe. Until the last few weeks, a compelling argument could have been made that Mr. Trump had failed to do that. The coronavirus was credited with over 180,000 deaths, 6 million cases and untold numbers of business failures with the attendant stress on small business owners, many displaced workers, and their families. The economy, once thriving a mere six months ago, was going into the tank (although the stock market was still on the rise). Things for average Americans were looking bleak and the Democrats were doing a pretty good job hanging that on Mr. Trump.