Culture matters. It’s an expression of our soul. And as the estimable California philosopher Tracy Chapman reminds us, all that you have is your soul.
Before you have your soul, you have your heart. I don’t mean the metaphorical or spiritual heart. I mean the beating organ that keeps you alive in order to play a part in your culture in the first place.
So, while it’s important to call out the quite literally evil presidential administration of Donald Trump, as I have in recent weeks in this space, for its inexcusable havoc-wreaking with our culture in its body blows to the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, among other places, it’s even more important for the possibility of an American future to call it out when it’s trying to kill us.
Not metaphorically, by striking at the heart of the art that sustains us when we are healthy enough as a people to indulge in it.
Literally killing us.
Such is the apparent aim of the president’s choice for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Since he campaigned for president himself on supposedly making America healthy again, and often says that his aim is to eradicate what he calls a chronic disease epidemic in our country, you’d think on the face of it that RFK Jr. was a good choice for the job.
Of course it’s weird he took the job from a guy he had only recently called a “terrible human being,” a “discredit to democracy” and “probably a sociopath,” but in these days of Trump, weird stuff happens.
So no, I’m not talking about what he says. I’m talking about what he does. Does every day. These are the RFK Jr. headlines from just the last 23 hours of when I am writing this late Thursday afternoon: “Kennedy Guts Teams That Share Health Information With the Public”; “FDA layoffs could raise drug costs and erode food safety”; “Kennedy Remains Quiet on 10,000 Jobs Lost at Nation’s Top Health Agency.”
Who’s the sociopath, now?
Just as his boss took a wrecking ball to our retirement funds — and to the nation’s and the entire world’s economies — with a stroke of a pen Wednesday because of his vapid and dangerous misunderstanding of how international trade works, so Kennedy has been let loose on the American public health because of his vapid and dangerous misunderstanding of medical science.
Failing to understand economics and medicine, in topsy-turvy Trump world, is a good thing.
More than 17,000 physicians signed a letter to the United States Senate opposing his confirmation. A Yale epidemiologist said that confirming Kennedy would be like “putting a flat earther in charge of NASA.” You can’t have a longtime junkie and promoter of conspiracy theories who says fluoride is dangerous in water (it’s safe) and that cellular phones cause cancer (they do not) touting the supposed dangers of vaccines in charge of the nation’s health. Until you do.
Kennedy and his Children’s Health Defense have claimed that vaccines cause autism. They do not.
And now, push comes to shove. I come from a time when measles killed lots of children in America, and sickened hundreds of thousands every year. When I was 8, the brilliant vaccine against the measles was released, and we had licked the deadly disease. Then, this winter, when there was an outbreak of measles among Mennonites and other unvaccinated rural children in the Texas Panhandle, RFK Jr., newly confirmed, claimed “we have measles outbreaks every year.” We do not. The disease had been in the category called “domestically eliminated.” While claiming to not be against getting vaccinated for measles, he actually promoted cod liver oil and vitamin A for the outbreak. They don’t work.
The head of the nation’s vaccine program resigned late last month, saying “It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.” RFK Jr.’s head of communications for the department said after his own resignation days prior to that: “Kennedy and his team are working to bend science to fit their own narratives, rather than allowing facts to guide policy.”
A contrarian is a fun guy to have around in a dorm-room bull session. Not so much when he’s killing us in real life.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.
