On Sept. 26, President Trump staged a lavish coming-out party for Amy Coney Barrett, his Supreme Court nominee, in the newly remodeled Rose Garden. I understand that Trump drew inspiration from a video of President Clinton presenting Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his nominee in 1993, full of flags and pageantry.
Perhaps hoping to deflect attention from the pandemic, Trump ordered a similar ceremony. Ironically the White House took such inept precautions that SARS-CoV-2 stalked the reception itself, so far with numerous attendees testing positive, including Trump himself and his wife Melania. Oddly, I found myself thinking of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” also set during a pandemic.
But the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence 1,000 hale and lighthearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys.
On entering the White House, Rose Garden guests reportedly were swabbed in the basement medical office and asked to mask until results came back. But we know the rapid tests for COVID-19, on which the White House has relied, come with high false-negative rates. Thus it was likely that the virus would eventually penetrate the supposedly secure zone.
When the guests tested negative, they could unmask and mingle. Photographs for the indoor reception show Republicans hugging, shaking hands, standing close with their drinks. Outside, their chairs were closely spaced in the ceremony.
The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The Prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were dancers, there were musicians, there was beauty, there was wine. All these and security within.
The nominee herself reportedly had COVID-19 months ago. Right now, this could be her strongest qualification for nomination. By all reports she is brilliant and kind, but carries her Catholic faith into the courtroom. A doctor without faith or ethics would be a bad doctor, so I cannot begrudge her faith or her apparently well reasoned opinions. But the obscene urgency to appoint her in the waning days of Trump’s first term casts a deep shadow over her nomination.
Sadly, our Commander in Chief has now received experimental and unproven treatments at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, while his minions give conflicting and probably fictitious accounts of his progress. Merriam Webster reports a 30,500% spike in searches for the word “schadenfreude” since his diagnosis. Meanwhile, diehard Trump fans circulate various theories, including that he’s preparing to lead a rally that will destroy the “Deep State” forever.
But in spite of all this, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the Prince were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colour and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery and his conceptions glowed with a barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.
Our president will probably survive his own arrogance and ignorance, hopefully without crippling sequelae. Similarly I hope his Rose Garden attendees and others sickened by White House contact will stay in their own Rose Gardens of health and not slip down through the successive colored rooms of the Masque. The fictional Red Death raised bloody welts on its victims. COVID instead is a white death, more often causing clots than hemorrhage. While many COVID victims have been nonwhite, the insular Rose Garden ceremony brought illness, but hopefully not death, to the whitest among us.
And Darkness and Decay and the White Death held illimitable dominion over all.
James Santiago Grisolía, MD, is a general neurologist in San Diego. He is medical director for stroke at Scripps Mercy Hospital Chula Vista campus. He also is the editor-in-chief of the San Diego County Medical Society’s magazine, The San Diego Physician.
Source: MedicalNewsToday.com
