Archives for December 2020

In our tangled world of healthcare, a circuitous, hierarchical realm through which, whether as provider or patient, nearly all of us have at one time passed, there’s to be found a peculiar sensitivity to titles. So far as I can tell, it’s a relatively new development within this salutary industry, this business of well-being about which, much to my own frustration (having spent the early years of my inauspicious adult life working in it), nearly everyone must now be exceedingly conscious.

Indeed, so far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing more than a supreme annoyance by which, from a shift’s beginning till its distant end, a poor wretch like me is endlessly vexed. It’s a phenomenon of which, despite the blunted perception of their idle state, not even the comatose en route to the morgue can fail to take note. One might even hope, if only briefly, to switch places with our moribund friend, a refractory body from whom, despite the best efforts of stimulating pills and energizing injections, all perception has been carried away. I would hope for this fate if only to escape the onslaught of so many burdensome titles, but, alas, none is awarded so strong an immunity to the words of our age. Even as one approaches hell or heaven, the depths or the sky, the encroachment of titles will, at last, prevail.  

There isn’t a single conversation, regardless of its triviality or the heaviness of its weight, upon which titles fail to intrude. Nor, for that matter, is there an introduction from which they’ll tolerate themselves to be absent. They must, at all times and in every situation, make themselves known and demand that they’ll be acknowledged, remembered, revered. Titles are, in this way, imperious, demanding, haughty, and, to be quite honest, rude; they seek to commander respect with the despotic use of their credentials, and hope, with every fiber of their vanity, to drown the poor listener in an ocean of their inflated pomp.

There is, of course, one title to which all workers in the healthcare industry yet aspire, a lofty honorific carried only by a deserving few. It’s a title before which everyone still bows, a name toward which all approach with modesty and respect. This title, if you’ve failed to guess it, is that of doctor, a designation to which, in reality, only the smallest number of healthcare professionals ought to have a genuine claim.

Nowadays, however, this is far from the case. It seems that just about every occupation by which a typical hospital is staffed feels itself worthy of the title, doctor. To what heights have the egos of the workers filling these jobs ascended? Is the air so thin at that exalted altitude that they can’t breathe the humility of the actual station in which they work and live?

In a word, the significance of the word, doctor, has been quite carelessly diluted. So many have added themselves to its once exclusive pool, a brilliant well of academic achievement and technical acumen, that its boundaries have begun to overflow. Its essence, in the process, is lost in the deluge by which it’s overcome. As a result, it’s meaning is well on its way to being completely dissolved and worth little more than the prescription pad on which it’s written.  

Not only is the proud pharmacist a doctor, long removed from the delightfully antique title of apothecary—the name by which his elixir-laden profession once was known—but the physical therapist as well. One is a doctor of medications, the other, apparently, of pandiculations. Is a doctorate really requisite in teaching another to stretch? Is so precious a title required to monitor the rapidity or slowness of one’s gait. I think not, but I digress. The point is, both are doctors and, as such, the real doctor is, in name, debased.  

Joining this upper echelon of the anointed, among whom, we’re told, only legitimate doctors have the privilege to mingle, is the clever chiropractor. He’s the man from whom so many vigorous spinal “adjustments” and manipulations are to be had. Close by his side is the inscrutable psychologist, with whom the medically-trained, pill-prescribing psychiatrist, is all too frequently confused. We’re expected, if only in their eyes, to commit ourselves to calling them both doctor, and to believing them to be such, but we’re hardly encouraged to ponder the propriety of the name. If we were, we’d sooner realize how inapplicable a title it is, and it’d quickly fall into disuse.

Let us not forget, in our review of our pretentious hospital’s staff, a group into whose self-importance we’ve busied ourselves in peaking, the dear speech pathologist. She’s the woman by whom the readiness of one’s alimentary canal is carefully gauged, and the delicacy or heartiness of one’s dinner plate suggested. What about the valiant, omnipresent nurse, upon whose wide experience and nimble versatility, so many ailing people rely? Both, all of a sudden, are to be considered doctors, which seems to me an over-compensation for the modesty of their craft. Perhaps it’s all just a means to deepen a patient’s confusion, or to confound a colleague’s address: is nothing more oxymoronic than a doctor of nursing, or a nurse who’s a doctor, who, while draped in a coat of white, isn’t quite the same thing?

The point is, the name doctor, to which all the aforementioned feel themselves somehow entitled, is used in far too promiscuous a way. Neither the pharmacist nor the physical therapist, widely-learned though they may be, should flatter themselves with the application of the name. Though their studies may amount to many years, and their practice to every situation, they’ll never quite amount to being called “doctor”. Nor should the title doctor be affixed before the quotidian, but much more accurate given first and last names of such fine people as the chiropractor, the psychologist, the speech pathologist, or the devoted nurse. All perform commendable work, but none is a doctor in a recognizable sense. They must, at last, agree to humble themselves with the epithets, Mr., Mrs., or Ms., and the names with which either marriage or birth supplied them. Their demands that we do more ought to be refused.  

In truth, there are only three groups of people upon whom, appropriately, the title doctor should be conferred. The first hardly requires my mention, but, given our current confusion on the subject, perhaps it does. The medical doctor, deeply trained in the ability to diagnosis an illness and treat the ailing body upon which it intrudes, is inarguably deserving of the name, doctor. What else would we call so essential a figure upon whose learning and expertise, we’ve come entirely to rely? Could we think of another title for so highly-trained and laudably-selfless a man or woman by whom, too frequently, our over-indulgent, under-exercised society is healed? This person is a doctor, first and foremost. I don’t think this is a position against which anyone in control of his mental faculties would push back. Should he endeavor to do so, we might all agree that he’s in need of the type of doctoral, medical attention by which he’s so little impressed.

The second group of people to whom the title, doctor, is sensibly applied, is that of the doctors, or teachers, of the early Church. The list on which they appear is short, but—irrespective of one’s religious view or lack of faith—widely esteemed. On it, we scan the names of four extraordinary men: Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great. Of the four, the first three lived as contemporaries in a century in which talent was shockingly rife, while Gregory the Great graced a later date. He, the only pope of the bunch, was a spark of brilliance during the Dark Ages, a time upon which genius rested with only the lightest of touch.

Ambrose, above all, is celebrated for his view on the relationship between the Church and the state—one heavenly and spiritual, the other secular and crude. The independence between the two, of which he was a uniquely early advocate, was as revolutionary an idea then, as their entanglement would be for us today. As the bishop of Milan, a position to which he acceded by way of general acclamation, Ambrose was well-versed in dealing with the powerful political leaders and wealthy businessmen with whom his bustling, commercial see was filled. In every situation, he was their equal, if not their superior, and, because of his efforts, the Church found itself on a most secure and dependable footing.  

Perhaps more importantly, he was the man from whom another famous doctor on the list, Augustine, sought advice when he fled the heat of northern Africa and the ardor of his overbearing mother. Augustine, pursuing a career opportunity on the continent of Europe, was not yet ready to relinquish the life of sin to which he’d grown so pleasantly accustomed in the torrid streets of his beloved Algeria. Behind his mother’s back, he travelled to Milan to fill a teaching post in the Italian university’s school of rhetoric. Upon encountering Ambrose, however, he was left utterly speechless. How uncomfortable this must’ve been for a scholar dependent on his tongue for his income? The piety, persuasiveness, and faith of the Milanese bishop provoked Augustine—once he regained his wits—to depart his Manichean flirtation for the splendor of Catholicism. Christian theology was born and, through a revival during the Reformation, remains alive with us today.

The great contribution for which Jerome is responsible is a literary one. Displeased with the obvious shortcomings of the ancient Septuagint, the Greek rendition of the originally Hebrew Bible by which all Christian scholars were perennially vexed, he set himself upon the task of smoothing out its rough edges and refining its ineloquent content. The fruit of his labor was the Vulgate Bible, an immortal work of piety and art of which the Catholic Church still avails herself to this day.  

Fourth among the doctors of the Church is Gregory the Great. He’s best known for his copious writings, his liturgical reforms, his failures at asceticism, his missions to convert English Pagans, and his euphonious contribution to the genre of plainchant. The vocal style that’s come to be called Gregorian chant, of which he was the originator and to which he lends his name, is to be heard, unaccompanied by the usual bells and whistles of instrumental music, in the holiest of atria and the most sanctified of places. These are the venues, after all, in which so great a pope is to be found at home.  

Our list of people deserving of the title, doctor, is all but complete. On it, two people remain: Dr. Samuel Johnson, Britain’s great lexicographer, author, critic, and wit, and Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the first American man to whom the adjective, “Renaissance” might be affixed.

Like the three churchmen, Johnson and Franklin were contemporaries; in birth, Franklin preceded Johnson by a mere three years, and, in death, he survived him by six. While very similar in this regard, their separation was rather geographical than chronological. Split apart by the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, the latter was an eminent Englishman over whom the educated world gushed, while the former was a rising colonist with whom that same world would soon be happily acquainted. Franklin was in the bosom of a revolution against that very mother nation of which Johnson was so proud a son, and their respective impacts during this era can’t be understated.

As just compensation for their scientific, political, and literary efforts, both Franklin and Johnson received honorary doctorate degrees. The former, Franklin, was more promptly recognized and appropriately awarded. In acknowledgement of his contributions to letters and science (his work on the conduction of electricity and the temperate movement of the Gulf Stream had proven milestones in physics and navigation, and his Poor Richard’s Almanac, with all its epigrammatic wisdom, was universally relished), the University of St. Andrews bestowed upon him a doctorate degree. A few years later, Oxford University, that glimmering jewel of English academia, followed suit and did the same.

That school was less willing, however, to elevate her own countryman, Johnson, to that same Franklinian status. Johnson, by far the more accomplished writer of the two, had already finished his famed English Dictionary, his penetrating criticisms of English life, his enlarging annotations of Shakespeare’s plays, his hilarious defense of that divine drink to which he was so sincerely addicted—tea, his didactic History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia from which so many needed morals were derived, and his immortal, satirical poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes. Trinity College Dublin, alma mater of the conservative Edmund Burke, was first to recognize his radical merit. Oxford, as was the case with Franklin, was characteristically late. Ultimately, though, both were made doctors, and so they remain.

In sum, these are the three groups of people, and the only three groups of people, to whom the title doctor ought to be applied: medical doctors, upon whom our physical health hinges; doctors of the Church, by which that of the soul is revived; and Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson, by whom our inner muse is delighted and our scientific spirit restored. All others bearing it, and demanding that they be identified as such, would do well to retire the name and to humble the large vision that they have of themselves. Let us applaud the deserving doctors, or those listed above.

At the conclusion of every speech to which he treated his fellow senators, a rather laconic group of Roman statesmen and grave aristocrats among whom garrulity, no matter the eminence of the speaker from whom it came, nor the melodious tuning of his voice, simply had no quarter, Cato the Elder attached the following three words: Carthago delenda est. Carthage, he proclaimed, must be destroyed.

This was, for him, more than a simple mantra of militancy by which, if only to enflame the excitable passions of his warlike comrades, and to loosen from their scabbards a fleet of restless swords, each one of his hair-raising utterances was capped. More than that, it was a deeply-held commitment from which, having resisted every argument in favor of peace, and ignored every whisper of the benefits of conciliation, he simply couldn’t sway. In time, it became a goal of which he hoped first to remind, and finally to convince his many burly colleagues, a pugnacious group of Italians by whom the power of Rome was held, and the fate of Carthage decided.   

Cato’s exhortation, so he thought, wasn’t just a time-bound imperative to which, given the immediacy of the moment, his fledgling empire’s attention should briefly turn, but a constant, self-evident truth upon which, beyond three words, he really need not further dilate. Carthage, though twice defeated by Rome in the First and Second Punic Wars, desisted not from being a threat to the claims of greatness with which, in the afterglow of its recent victories, and the enjoyment of its hard-won spoils, Rome had begun to flatter herself. Control of the Mediterranean, at least in the opinion of our anxious Cato, persisted in being a rather ambitious goal to which that doughty Phoenician colony still aspired. Burdened by this knowledge, old Cato couldn’t rest easy until the complete disappearance of this threat, and the destruction of that detested African city by which he was so unyieldingly menaced.

To date, Carthage had proven itself capable of mustering an unusually effective mercenary army, a trans-national, ragtag group of soldiers-for-pay by which, despite every advantage of numerical supremacy and territorial acquaintance, the purebred Romans were repeatedly trounced. The unconquerable Hannibal, before whose tactical brilliance, every wrinkled military historian still sits in childlike awe, succeeded, as none previously had, in devastating Rome. After leaping over the inhospitable, snow-laden Alps, behind whose every corner, nettlesome mountaineers waited with foul intent, the young general led his wearied men down the spine of the Roman state. Each vertebrae, cap-a-pie, was a victory as he descended from the top of the peninsula toward its tail. First at Trebia, next at Lake Trasimene, and, most famously, at Cannae, he surprised, engulfed, and finally decimated an ever-growing number of perplexed Roman troops.

This continued for some time, until the aged soldier and former counsel, Quintus Fabius Maximus, was chosen to right the ship. The eponymous techniques by which we remember his name, while unpopular, proved successful, but they didn’t last long. They were as ephemeral as Rome’s patience for their employment was thin. The old delayer (Fabius’ agnomen, a kind of army man’s nickname, was, after all, the Cunctator, a word that survives as a synonym for one who fails decisively to act) was relieved of his appointment as dictator after the completion of the Roman constitution’s prescribed six months. Humbled by a history of loss, and made wise by his life’s six decades of experience, Fabius realized that a war of attrition, as opposed to one of annihilation, was his country’s best and possibly final hope. He was ignored, however, and the Romans were ravaged.

Fortunately for that land that would soon be home to all but a few popes, Hannibal knew how to win battles, but lacked the necessary genius to put his victories to good use. For reasons into which scholars of antiquity continue to probe, out of which, frustratingly, they’ve not yet extracted much profit, Hannibal decided against continuing his march on Rome and taking into possession that storied city atop the Palatine Hill. To this day, Hannibal’s refusal to secure his victory causes one to scratch his head. Had he done so, the empire might’ve been his, and the modern world as we know it, quite different. Indeed, the language in which this lengthy article is written, to which, obligingly, the dear reader has thus far committed her precious time, might’ve been derived rather from a Semitic, than a Latin tongue. We might extol the character of Dido over that of Aeneas, and supplicate ourselves before Baal in a rejection of Christ.

Either way, Hannibal’s mission to conquer Rome, an aim to which, from the time of his bustling, precocious youth, he was unreservedly devoted, was incomplete, and his opportunity to achieve that grand design passed him by. Flustered, he returned to Africa where the ruthless Scipio Africanus, himself an incomparably brilliant general with whom, much to their misfortune, centuries of great Romans must try to compete, waited. The Battle of Zama, over which Scipio claimed a massive victory, sealed Hannibal’s fate. Vanquished, he fled the land of his royal birth for the obscurity of the Middle East, where he was pursued by a band of Romans intent on ensuring his demise. Eventually, their objective was achieved. Hannibal, whose name continues to inspire fear, died of the mixture of Oriental poison in his Punic blood.

But Rome, intoxicated by the dizzying fumes of its glorious triumph and its arch-nemesis’ death, a sweet aroma to which her senses, clogged by a recent string of mortifying defeats, had become strangely unaccustomed, was not yet done. So long as Carthage lived, if only as a feeble shell of its previous self, a statesman like Cato the Elder couldn’t rest. He wanted that terrible city, that rogue southern neighbor by which his beloved Italy was invaded and his countrymen killed, destroyed—trunk, roots, and all. Defeat wouldn’t suffice: Carthago delenda est, Carthage must be destroyed. Nothing of its former grandeur would remain. This, he repeated to his colleagues, and his message wasn’t ignored.

He proved as compelling an orator as he was inveterate a war hawk. The senate of Rome took his advice and, under his direction, thought up a scheme to provoke another war. Ultimately, it would be the third in which the two states were to be engaged. As a means by which their fighting spirit might be renewed, the Romans began to impose increasingly onerous demands on the poor Carthaginians, a people upon whom they now leaned with the bulk of a victor’s weight. Not only did they change the terms of the indemnities by which they were burdened, but they demanded that they abandon their city and re-locate farther inland, to a place less accessible to their cherished maritime trade. From Tyre to Tunisia, the Carthaginians were, throughout the long course of their collective life, a sea-faring people, a civilization of adventurers and navigators never far removed from the sea. Now, by order of some peremptory Roman statesmen, for whom they hadn’t even an ounce of respect, they were forbidden to live within ten miles of the sea.  

In essence, the Carthaginians were made exiles in their own home, a region, mind you, over which they enjoyed an uninterrupted claim of legitimate ownership for nearly six hundred years. Unsurprisingly, these were conditions to which they bravely refused to submit. The Third Punic War ensued, and, at its end, Cato the Elder’s sanguinary goal was realized. Carthage was indeed destroyed, fully and unsparingly, and its power was never rekindled again. The fertile ground atop which its ancient pillars once stood was salted, the stones by which its lofty edifices were built were removed one by one, and the best of her citizens were unmercifully killed. Not even virile Rome, so inclined to conquer and to kill, could’ve hoped for an annihilation so utterly complete. Carthage, in every sense of the word, was totally destroyed.

In some ways, in our own time, this desire for the total annihilation of a party against which we’re ideologically set, this destructive instinct to which Cato the Elder gave so unflagging a voice, persists.

I’m reminded of it when I hear the unfriendly remarks issued by some Democrats and supporters of Joe Biden against their fellow Republicans and the beleaguered incumbent behind whom, through the challenges of the past four years, they’ve loyally stood. Carthago delenda est, converted from Latin to English, and implanted on our own age, now reads, Trump, and everything for which he stands, and everyone by whom he’s been supported, must be destroyed.

The earth upon which his platform once stood must be salted, and every monument to his agenda, dismembered and erased. Those by whom he was so feverishly championed—be it out of calculated expediency or sincere belief—should be made, for all intents and purposes, exiles in the country of their birth. They should be removed from the broad expanse of America’s polite society, a welcoming world through which, without impediment, all are given an equal opportunity to move. They should be sent away into the darkness of the night, as were the Carthaginians from their urban centers and their beloved sea. There, displaced from the “new order” of the state, and under the thumb of an illiberal regime, their careers and their future prospects of work should be symbolically killed. No remnant of Trump’s administration will be allowed to survive, and those responsible for the advancement of his political career must be punished as if murderers or thieves.  

I’ll leave it to the Latinist for this sentence’s proper translation, but I think the point is clear.

Leftist opinion-makers, and the progressive legislatures to whom they preach, have pushed forward the idea of making “enemy lists” to which they might occasionally refer. As disconcerting as they sound, these “lists” would be rosters on which, with the nodding agreement of the bien pensant, Trump-supporting individuals or businesses might find themselves placed. Once there, they might be attacked by the censoriousness of the Left until, like Hannibal and the Punic people, they vanish from sight.

I leave you with this. There was, so it appears, another name by which Cato the Elder, that hoary, warmongering statesman by whom so many Romans were roused, was sometimes known: Cato the Censor. The epithet is fitting for a man whose intention it was to erase a political opponent, and a neighboring city, from the memory of the world. The modern political Left is perhaps even more censorious than was he. While it was Cato’s wish to destroy a city, merely, it’s the Left’s hope to obliterate an ideology. One is material, the other less so. The dynamite needed for so large a task is immeasurable, as, I fear, it soon will learn. The means for its execution will be developed in time, but the end is something about which they’re sure:  Carthago delenda est, Trump et al. must be destroyed.

Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”award has become, in the absence of the publication’s effort to produce anything like the incisive articles and thoughtful opinions for which, originally, it was widely loved, or to craft those elegant columns and delicious exposes by which, on a monthly basis, the intellect of its readership was completely dazzled, the one feature by which its fading relevance is still preserved.

To the great disappointment of those few, devout readers for whom the prestige of Time’s lofty name still retains some nostalgic meaning, and that frustrated audience to whom, despite the surfeit of other news outlets and media alternatives, its borrowed esteem continues to be catered, the magazine is no longer widely respected. In recent years, most noticeably in the past few months, the quality of its writing has diminished, as has the breadth of the views to which it permits expression. Its unwavering fixation on the vices of forty-fifth American President, and its unveiled contempt for those by whom he’s supported, has made it, and so many like it, petty, monomaniacal, redundant, captious, and stale. It’s predictable and unedifying, and, as such, undeserving of one’s time.

Its only source of freshness, the only place to which it can repair for an invigoration of life, is its “Person of the Year” award, to which we now turn.

This venerable prize, bestowed on an annual basis since its inauguration nearly a century ago, recognizes not the best person to whom, with innocent adulation, a team of editors—bound by the constraints of the calendar’s twelve months—can point, but merely the most influential. That influence might be benign, or it might not. To highlight this important point, Time twice “honored” Josef Stalin, architect of the Soviet Union’s murderous regime, and once Adolf Hitler, the very symbol of evil by whom six million Jews, and six million “others”, were systematically gathered and killed. More recently, it welcomed into its amoral pantheon our very own President Donald J. Trump, who’s often listed among the aforementioned two. Such a grouping together, astonishingly frequently heard, is the result rather of histrionics than of history, and of personal enmity than of reason.

But Time’s excuse for choosing the recently-defeated incumbent, upon whom, every month of its publication for the past four years, it’s unloaded nothing but its most heartfelt vituperation, acrimony, and scorn, was that he was, inarguably, the year’s most influential person—though doubtless not its best. Some would agree with its conclusion. Others, vociferously, would protest.

This year, upon Trump’s departure and the accession of a new regime, Time has chosen for its award the two people by whom, henceforth, the federal government will be headed: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Without belittling the massive success of their electoral performance, by which, in a surprisingly close contest, President Trump’s bid to retain his seat atop the Executive Branch has been frustrated and his ambitions slowed, it is a bewildering choice.

In examining the strangeness of the magazine’s decision, a scratch of the head is first provoked by its selection of Harris. As the successor to the role of the Vice President, a position from which, with the first sign of Biden’s senility or ineptitude, she’ll be only too eager to leap, Kamala Harris’ year has been uniquely underwhelming. She captured, if only briefly, the country’s attention when she declared her aim to run for the Democrat Party’s presidential nomination. Her efforts proved vain, her attraction ephemeral, and her enthusiasm sorely inadequate, as she was one of the first figures of any real prominence, in a staggeringly cluttered field, to exit the very race over which she was presumed to be the definitive leader. So desultory was her campaign, and unpalatable her person, that she abandoned the race before her own state of California could cast its vote.

It was only with the victory of her current boss, Joe Biden, that her political fortunes were revived. He chose her, not with some fidelity to the grand concept of merit, by which any serious job in this land ought to be conferred, but with a pliant fealty to the dictates of wokeness, to be his running mate. The qualifications overtly listed for the role of vice president were but two: that she be non-white, and that she be a female. By a mere accident of birth, and a cosmic convenience for which she mustn’t accept any credit, Harris just so happened to be both. That she was unabashedly rejected by her own party, from whose diversity of constituents, she succeeded in acquiring exiguous support, and that her wider appeal to the public-at-large, to whom, in a tight election season, she’d have to ingratiate herself, mattered little.

All that mattered, really was her sex and her skin, a combination of factors by which every American, regardless his color or her genitalia, should be deeply offended. This, after all, is supposed to be a land founded on the sturdy pillars of a meritocratic base, not a caste system atop which biology sits supreme, and our lordly “intersectionality” presides.

Almost as though an afterthought, Time thought it prudent that its prestigious award be shared. The “other-half” of the duo upon whom its award was conferred was the former vice president and longtime senator, Joe Biden. His candidacy for that same office for which Harris so feebly vied, into which he was ultimately elevated, was, at its outset, similarly inauspicious. He conducted himself poorly in debates, responded inarticulately to simple questions, raised paltry sums from spendthrift donors, and failed repeatedly to state with any degree of accuracy just where he was, at the moment, in this wide expanse of earth we call America.

His prospects seemed, at this early stage, to be as rachitic as his posture, a body valiantly fighting against the gravity of neigh eight decades. His likelihood of securing the nomination looked, at least from afar, as slight as his control over his temper and his tongue. In the initial states in which the primaries were held, he was roundly defeated. Bernie Sanders, bête noire of the neo-liberal establishment class, as well as the conservative right, demonstrated a popularity with which old, ideologically dusty candidates like Biden simply couldn’t compete. Sanders, for all intents and purposes, was the rousing frontrunner, the harbinger of the progress to come, while Biden, with a passive yawn, was the idle second-thought.

It wasn’t until the merciful arrival of South Carolina’s primary that his trajectory changed. There, as it’s known, the esteemed, octogenarian representative James Clyburn is to be observed exercising his divine power of nominating kings. If it’s political success that these heads of state want, Clyburn’s the one before whom they must prostrate themselves in the chill of the snow. To borrow an image from the pages of history, by which the lagging confidence of every pious Christian is still enflamed, he’s like Pope Gregory VII to a groveling Henry IV. He, and he alone, was responsible for mobilizing a hesitant South to support Joe Biden, an occasionally racist old white man by whom only few Black Americans were genuinely excited. Could they be blamed?

Biden then proceeded to run the least interesting campaign in recent American history. From the basement of a Delaware mansion in which he was confined, he communicated to the public little of lasting import. Every day, he read from the illuminated script of a tireless teleprompter, a blurred but blatant screen into whose hazy reflection we all gazed, but weren’t intended to see. He fielded no meaningful questions by which the propriety of his positions, and the acuity of his mind, might be more thoroughly gauged. He simply uttered platitudes, misidentified the person (hint: his wife) by whom he was occasionally joined, mumbled through his pre-chewed messages, all while directing a wearied nation to fix its gaze and maintain its scrutiny on the tweets and tirades of a less-than-palatable President Trump.

If this were a year, unique in the annals of time, during which nothing especially remarkable happened, it might be understandable that the victor an American presidential election would win Time’s award for the “Person of the Year”. As it stands, however, this has been no such year. It hardly needs my telling, but this year has borne witness to two of modern science’s, and recent history’s, most noteworthy events: first, the escape of a deadly, novel virus born of a Wuhan Chinese lab, and, second, the Occidental remedy by which it’ll soon be quelled. We’ve seen, in less than one complete turn of the calendar, the triumph of Western science over an unknown, Asiatic pathogen by which so many innocents have been killed.  

The fact that so complex a vaccine was not only conceived, but tested, refined, and distributed as quickly as it was, is an achievement before which every hat should be removed, and every gratitude placed. Every award, including that issued by Time, should be heaped upon it. Marveling at the speed with which it’s come into being, I can’t help but reflect on the original, doubtful efforts of the father of immunology and vaccination, the great Englishman, Edward Jenner.

There was one distressingly urgent question with which the ceaseless toils of Jenner’s professional life in medicine were consumed: how might a man alleviate his fellow creature of the scourge of smallpox, that terribly disfiguring blight by which so many youthful visages were scarred, to which so many of his poor countrymen so painfully succumbed? How might those nasty excrescences be softened, and those bursting pustules calmed? How might he tame a disease responsible for, by some estimates, nearly twenty-percent of his nation’s deaths?

It was a question by which, prior to the advent of Jenner’s ingenuity and daring, every other prominent scientist of his age was baffled. Only some of the afflicted peasants, among whom he set himself to live, intimated the remedy to an illness to which the best science still lacked a satisfying answer. Innocent of the scientific jargon in which Jenner’s colleagues were so eloquently versed, and without an ability to describe with sophistication the strange phenomenon to which they played audience, they recognized an incommunicable truth: those who came into contact with cowpox were often protected against the deadly human variant to which it was so similar: smallpox. 

Through the course of many years, and with the examination of many victims, Jenner came to the belief that, once exposed to a strain of cowpox, one could be inoculated to smallpox. Eager to prove his hypothesis in the laboratory of the world, as opposed to the diagrams in his head in which every peculiarity and whim made sense, he applied his theory to a local boy, not yet ten years of age, upon whom all subsequent achievements in immunology hinged. To Jenner’s everlasting credit, he first intuited, and later solved this fundamental puzzle of the vaccine. The boy was protected from contracting smallpox, and Jenner was, forevermore and for all mankind, an absolute hero among his species.

The companies Pfizer and Moderna, upon whom ourown return to normality hinges, solved a variant of the puzzle by which Jenner was so rudely confronted. Offspring of the English Jenner, these proudly American companies shared in his sedulous nature, and adopted his atypical genius, to do something so revolutionary, it was thought inconceivable in its own day. Yet, unlike their father, they achieved their task in less than a year, a timeframe unthinkably swift, if one pauses to consider the complexity of the job against which they were set.

Perhaps then, having reflected on the enormousness of “Big Pharma’s” astonishing feat, Time’s “Person of the Year” award wasn’t wrongly bestowed upon Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. The scientists by whom this great vaccine was made, toward whose salvific promise, a desperate world now turns, are deserving of a grander decoration, still. “Person of the Decade” might be too small. I propose, “Person of the Century”. Their achievement is thus deserving. Time’s inability to see this, I fear, is a disease of ideology for which not even Jenner himself could offer an adequate cure.

So far as I can tell, the average resident of South Florida, whether she be of distant birth or native rearing, autochthonous to this peculiar state or recently arrived, tolerates very poorly, and endures very gracelessly, the slightest downward shift in the weather. Its smallest climatic dip, as brought about by an early December’s chilly surprise, marks a change at which, with cool contempt, those situated in more northerly climes understandably sneer. Having once lived among them, and shivered with them, I can feel their contempt. They direct it southward as we Floridians, bundled in our strange assortment of jackets, yoga pants, sunglasses, and flip-flops, collectively suffer. What those hardy people residing in northern latitudes consider a fresh, invigorating late-spring day’s afternoon, we here in Florida perceive to be nothing short of a frigorific descent into a hell-scape of ice.

So mundane an observation, of course, has no claim to be shocking. The fact that Floridians quite passionately dislike the cold weather isn’t the type of explosive revelation by which the young anthropologist’s career will be launched, nor the kind of remarkable finding by which the anxious environmentalist’s curiosity will be piqued. The eager journalist won’t soon deign to note it in the pad through which he flips, nor will the old historian add it to the countless books by which his shelves are weighed. Indeed, the fact that Floridians regard as completely intolerable any temperature less than seventy-five degrees is as universally-acknowledged a truth as a cat’s violent detestation of water, or an elephant’s crippling fear when confronted with a mouse. If only the two could, in a temporary escape from the ancient chains of their respective maxims, switch places and face the troubles by which the other is vexed: how well would the feline eat, and how exuberantly might the elephant bathe behind the ears. 

It’s during these trying and inhospitable times, when the state is burdened by obstinate clouds and less than sixty degrees, that most Floridians retreat to the warmth of their poorly-insulated houses. Hurricanes and floods, the majority of these buildings can handle, but not the gentle intrusion of an unfamiliar frost. There, behind these walls, as if groundhogs unequal to challenge of a brisk winter’s day, we Floridians await the re-emergence of the sun. From our weather-proof lanais and firmly-clamped windows, we cast longing glances toward that ever-sociable star, that great ball of gas beneath whose constant radiance and undying attention, we hope, in the very near future, to resume our outdoor activities and play. For now, though, we’ll simply sit by an imagined fireside with a steamed beverage in hand, counting the increase of the temperature as we hasten the passage of the days.

This, at least, is the normal conduct of an average Floridian who might find himself caught, as if an animal removed from the element to which he naturally belongs, in the unexpected embrace of the cold. Indeed, it’s the posture I’ve shamefacedly adopted. It’s for this reason that I’m so utterly shocked, night after night and irrespective of the recent decline of the weather, to see a group of a dozen or more people, massed on a very busy street corner in a very busy town, dancing to the blast of music and singing in support of their favorite politician, the fallen incumbent, the Republican standard-bearer, Donald J. Trump.

These people, bundled in jackets but simmering with verve, wrapped in scarves but bursting with heat, display an enthusiasm that not only hasn’t abated since the results of the election were announced, but actually seems to have grown. Flanked by two roads down which, at their most cautious, motorists speed at a minimum of fifty miles per hour, these people play loud music, dance in half-studied coordination, and brandish spectacularly hand-made signs. As for the music, the YMCA has recently yielded to Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town, and the Rocky theme to the snowman Frosty. This, as the vivacity of the disco prepares for the arrival of Noel, and people surfeit themselves with holiday cheer. Either way, be the tune secular or religious, festive or fun, everyone’s hips are shaking.

The signs beneath which they gyrate and groove, of which their mitten-clad hands are full, by which a curious drivers’ eyes are involuntarily allured, are fantastically diverse. On them, while waiting with no great hurry the changing of the light, or the divine opportunity to execute a right-turn “on red”, one might read such messages as “Women for Trump”; “Latinos for Trump”; “Cuban-Americans for Trump”; “Hispanics for Trump”; “CNN Sucks”; “Four More Years”; “Don’t Trust the Fake News”, etc. Above them, “Trump-Pence” and “Make America Great Again” flags are whipped into action by the constant stimulus of this beach town’s wind.

These intersection revelries, these roadside parties of which even the most unwaveringly focused driver can’t fail to take note, began as soon as the results of the presidential election appeared to be moving away from the conclusion for which they’d hoped. The temperature was then warm, much like their ebullient spirits, but, since that time, as the former’s waned, the latter has grown.

As the cold weather descended, I expected these people to pull down their flags, pack up their signs, turn off their music, and desist from further exhausting themselves with fruitless limb-thrusting and desultory dance. I thought they’d instantly reveal themselves to be what a true sportsman most dislikes: “fair-weather” fans, summer soldiers, a group of bandwagon riders from whom loyalty is never assured. I expected them, the moment the discomfort of the weather urged them otherwise, to abandon a candidate by whom, as a consequence of his many indiscretions and painful shortcomings, they were so deeply disappointed, and an electoral system in which they no longer had faith.

By all evidence, they’ve opted to proceed in doing one of these two things. As is clear from their continued and increasingly animated presence, they’ve lost none of their infatuation for and worship of the president whose term is promptly set to expire. What they’ve done, rather, is reject the system by which that man, their champion, was so unmistakably cheated. They’ve retained their love, and likely forever will, of that ever-peculiar President Trump, the man against whom, in their mind, the whole game was rigged.

Like us, they’ve undoubtedly heard the allegations by which the aforementioned idea, that the election was stolen, has been enflamed. Unlike us, I fear, they’ve blinded themselves to the paucity of evidence with which, thus far, they have to work.

In each of this year’s most contentious states, those in the Midwest and South, those by whose incredibly thin vote margins, the forty-sixth president was ultimately decided, accusations have been levied of chicanery, deception, and every variety of fraud. The machines by which the ballots were processed are said to have been rigged, and the people by whom said computers are operated are accused of the highest treasons and the most underhanded crimes. Guile, untrustworthiness, disdain for our suffrage, and disregard for our laws don’t even begin to exhaust the charges to which those looking with suspicion expect an answer.

Such is the case in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia, in which litigation is, at the time of this writing, yet ongoing. Proof of the improprieties of which these states and their workers are said to be guilty hasn’t yet been revealed. If it exists, we must admit that it’s terribly shy. All the while, Democrat leaders and the sycophantic media by whom they’re rather disgustingly massaged have given reason for those inclined toward conspiracy theories to view them with an eyebrow raised and a posture of practiced disbelief.

And so, they’ve taken this disbelief to the streets. It’s difficult to see, however, the thin line by which delusion, on the one hand, and enthusiasm on the other, are separated. In one sense, that this diverse coalition of Republican voters (young, old, Latino, female, and Caucasian) is demonstrating so high, so genuine, and so indomitable an amount of energy is encouraging. It shows, if only through the window of a small subset along a busy street, the kind of excitement on which a renewed, Trumpified Republican Party can depend. This, of course, is itself dependent on the Party’s ability further to cultivate this zeal and make contagious that which was never previously felt.

Alternatively, it might show a quixotic group of people misguided by their political fantasies (with President Trump playing the role of the homely Dulcinea). It might be a growing population upon whom the weight of reality simply can’t be impressed, by whom all references to rationality will be, save those with which their opinions already accord, rejected. Beneath the levity of their spirits, and the slogans on their signs, this could a people uniquely pervious to the wiles of propaganda and susceptible to the hair-raising rhetoric of the demagogue.

Seated at this light, I know not which is the direction down which these entertaining people will go. All I know is that they must be crazy to be out in this weather.

Though I’m struck, nearly to the point of a paralysis induced by shame, in having to admit it, logic is the one field of study with which I’m embarrassingly uncomfortable and only distantly acquainted. It’s that one among many subjects—the enduring fascination of Medieval academics and pedantic Christian scholars—on which I’ve but the feeblest grasp, and I fear, without the forthcoming aid of some divine instruction or, less preferably, the jarring blow of a Damascene fit, it’ll remain one in which I’m destined to be unschooled.

Incriminate not, however, the many valiant professors by whom I was once instructed, or those countless teachers from whom, in so many other ways, I took such practical wisdom and useful guidance. The party responsible for the gaps in my understanding, for the depth of my deficiency as it pertains to this particular field, is not theirs, but my own. It was not the weakness of their lessons or the incomprehensibility of their chalkboard scribblings that led me to this regrettable state, but the impotence of my own brain. This lump of anatomy, with great frustration I’ve learned, is nothing better than an obstinate mass of white and grey, a bundle of stubborn neurons through which their every effort failed to penetrate, around which a billowing cloud of dust still swirls.

I’ve come to the honest conclusion, so may years removed from the fruitless efforts of their craft, that I’m more poetical than logical, more aesthete than Schoolman, more beauty than science. In this regard, and perhaps in many others, I’m a follower, if I might be so bold as to reveal the nature of my allegiance, of Plato rather than Aristotle. Of course, I voice this proud affinity with the fragile, and perhaps misplaced assumption that either man would warmly embrace me into the ranks of his respective school. Into the olive-strewn grove of the Academy, or the musty den of the Lyceum, I might as easily by stopped at the door and brusquely removed. Should so devastating an event befall me, I might become, at least in the modern sense, a road-weary, unaccompanied peripatetic—not the type who bears with honor a capitalized “P” in acknowledgement of the pacing Aristotle as his leader, but an unwelcomed wanderer to whom every house of genius is closed.

And though Plato, student of Socrates, sought to ban from his imagined republic every poet of whom an infallible and sage-like group of censors disapproved, he couldn’t himself avoid being that for which he professed to have no tolerance. In his bones, as in his youth, Plato was a poet, forever crafting dialogues with Homer as his muse. And though he might openly profess a desire for his utopia to be cleansed of this particular class of artists, a class, mind you, into whose elegant and lofty membership, he—in the creative vigor and blossoming spring of his adolescence—tried so strenuously to gain admittance, he’s hardly to be believed. Plato, the poet, is only thinly-veiled by Plato the puritan. The latter was a mask, the former, his true self.

For me, Aristotle’s logic is a vast and lonesome desert, a land inhospitable to creativity, intrigue, art, and mirth. If, alongside the Stagirite, it’s a landscape that need be traversed, I’d nominate for the task someone unsusceptible to fun. It is, maybe purposefully, dreadfully academic and fatally dry. As Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said of his famous son’s pursuit of the law as his chosen field, logic, for my taste, is like eating cardboard for breakfast without the redeeming accompaniment of milk. On so dense and bland a substance, one can literally chew all day, though never, sadly, with the distant guarantee of satiation. Despite the heavy totalitarianism of Plato’s frightful Republic, one’s at least assured that the circulation of certain poetic samizdat would not only be available in his streets, but quietly encouraged in home and forum alike. While undemocratic, the town wouldn’t be so insufferably dry as to fully replace Ovid with the Organon, or Aeschylus with Aquinas, as Aristotle’s logicians might press him to do.

Syllogisms, fallacies, corollaries, scholia–all these things, and quite a few more, escape the humble capacity of my mind. As I said, I’m highly unaccomplished when it comes to grasping logic and understanding all it tries to convey. It’s for this reason, then, that I haven’t a clue as to what to make of the actress Ellen Page’s recent announcement that she is, henceforth, to be considered a man. Her metamorphosis, we’re told, is complete. In a flash, she’s shed one sex for another, as a snake would his skin, opting instead to continue her marvelous flight not as a female, but as a newly-established man.

It’s my enduring hope that, in the days ahead, or the first months of an enlightened political administration to come, someone better schooled in the subtleties of logic, or a distinguished reader of the tracts of Aristotle, will come to my aid and relieve me of this terrible ignorance by which I’m presently burdened. I read this account of Page and think it illogical, but I know I must be wrong.

Last week, the Oscar-nominated actress, to whose earlier work in such films as Juno and Inception, every theater-goer’s plaudit is due, announced to a curious world the amendment to her biological sex. Having lived her young adult life with what appears to have been, at least so far as her announcement might lead one to believe, incomplete sincerity and profound unease, she declared her transition from female to male. With the mere utterance of this claim, despite the quiet protestation of her many startled genes, she exchanged her membership to the gentler sex, for that which is barbarous and bearded.

No longer would she be known as “Ellen” Page, that celebrated name upon which so many cinematic accolades once were poured. Now, she’s to be called “Elliot” Page, and the failure to observe this change is to be considered a damnable sin upon which all enlightened members of society will frown. If one’s so incautious as to lapse and err in calling her by a name now deemed dead, she’s to risk excommunication from the church of the woke. Her talk of science, among these congregants, is to be shouted down and labeled “heresy”. She’s to become persona non grata in this oddly-religious worldview in which, frankly, so very many things have lately become non grata.

Innocent of logic, in my attempt to understand this situation, I admit to being in need of help. Ellen Page, if all the empirical evidence with which I’ve come into contact hasn’t wholly betrayed me, was, for almost all of her life, a homosexual white woman. She currently has a wife, a professional dancer and choreographer, to whom she’s faithfully wed, and a career that’s likely profited by their shared progressive credentials. She’s now declared herself a man and said wife, admirably, has nodded in agreement and stood by her side. It seems, though, that some of Page’s attributes have undergone an unlikely transmutation beyond which the ever-logical woke crowd continue to look.

The attribute of being white, much to her misfortune and intersectional-Hollywood’s scorn, persists. This, unfortunately, has proven itself an attribute of which even the most unscrupulous racial-chameleons (i.e., Rachel Dolezal) can’t so easily disrobe oneself. Despite the culture’s rather offensive disdain for a color by which, if I’m made to confess, my own skin is so copiously suffused, white she shall remain.

But what are we to make of her characterization as a homosexual woman? Assuming there’s no forthcoming breach in her marital relations, by which, should so undesirable an outcome come to pass, I’d be terribly saddened, we’re led to the conclusion that Page is now, what, a heterosexual white man? Does this mean, contrary to what we’ve been repeatedly told, one’s sexual orientation is not at all fixed, but perfectly mutable with the changing of the wind? Is it now prone, under the influence of the vagaries of life, to so drastic and permanent a change as this? Might we then be inclined to say that one’s sexual orientation has the markings less of an ineffaceable biologic truth, by which the very marrow of one’s bones is marked, but of a fleeting preference?

Were we not recently scolded for our use of the word preference, as it pertained to the individual to whom one’s love is directed?

It seems to me that either sexual orientation is biologically predetermined, or gender is. There isn’t yet a world, so far as one can be imagined, in which both can make that claim. One can’t simultaneously state that Page, consistent with her recently professed identity, was since the time of her birth, always a male, however masterfully concealed, and that she was able to change her sexual orientation from homosexual to heterosexual. We’re told you’re either one or the other, and, despite the pious efforts of the conversion therapist, this simply cannot change. Likewise, it can’t be maintained that she was always truly a homosexual, if there was no time that she wasn’t a male. Boring though it may be, a predetermined male in love with and married to a female is just about as traditional a relationship as there can be.

Obviously, I’m ill-equipped to confront the intricacies of so delicate and entangled a web of logic. Aristotle, on this point, is unavailing, and I’ve already passed too much time with Plato. If I might recruit one further teacher to my cause, one to whom my meandering thoughts aren’t utterly repugnant, I might yet acquire the trophy of logic. Until then, I’ll trudge along this desert of gender incomprehensibility.