Society of Assassins

 

Rife throughout internet sites like Twitter are posts suggesting that Vladimir Putin's days are numbered and few, as an assassin's bullet is, as only internet seers can know, already loaded and aimed at his head.

It is a curious thing, this Twitter syndrome of Wishful Assertion Syndrome: some people seem to be comforted by simply saying something will happen with great assurance, and when it does not, never mind. It was pretty to think it.

But it has made The Phantom wonder about the role of assassination in the control of events. The Phantom became fully sentient during that time of assassinations: JFK in 1963, Martin Luther King in 1968 followed by Robert Kennedy, that same year. 

It was always the liberals, the progressives, the men who looked like they might just want to change things, who got shot. People asked, "Why is it always the liberals, never the fascist thugs?"

Of course, in one sense, the answer was obvious: The guys who wanted to keep on lynching Negroes were the guys with the guns. They were, at core, murderous thugs whose idea of how to get what they wanted was violence. Blood is their argument.

And the men who live by violence take great pains to be sure they do not die by violence because they are living in the mindset of violence. You didn't see Joseph Stalin riding around in an open car like Kennedy in Dallas.

On the other hand, Hitler did just that, and never got shot. 

And people did try to assassinate Hitler. The numbers vary, but at least 42 attempts on his life made the Google list and there were likely others. The most famous was the July, 1944 plot at Wolf's Lair in Prussia where an briefcase with a bomb was placed at Hitler's foot, exploded killing 4 and wounding 20, but Hitler suffered nothing more than a perforated eardrum and his trousers were shredded.

If ever there seemed to be divine intervention...this would seem to demand an explanation from Christopher Hitchens. How could a man standing right next to a powerful bomb survive so unscathed? Of course, at the time, this miracle seemed to confirm the belief of true Nazis everywhere that in Hitler's case that widely used motto "Got Mitt Uns" which Wehrmacht soldiers carried engraved on belt buckles, was clearly true. 

God, or the physics of explosives, saved Hitler.

Of course, if Hitler had been killed, and the German army sued for peace in 1944, then the truth about the concentration camps might never have been known. The Nazis might have continued to rule Germany after an armistice but as it played out, Hitler would not allow for anything but utter  annihilation and the complete destruction of the Third Reich and nobody could argue about a stab in the back causing Germany's defeat. 

No such explanation seems to apply to Vladimir Putin. He simply is the only man who seems to matter in this war on Ukraine, and there do not seem to be any hidden concentration camps in Russia, only a society where there is no real dissent allowed and a population as duped as the Germans were.

And it's not that violent, murderous men never get assassinated: Reinhard Heydrich, as murderous a Nazi as ever emerged did get killed, but again he was so arrogant, he rode around in an open car. George Wallace, the ardent segregationist was shot, but not killed, and he remains the sole exception to the rule that right wing zealots do not meet with violence. 

Stalin was never touched. 

Hitler was never assassinated--he simply lost the war and knew his head would be on the block. He had seen what happened to Mussolini, who was strung up in a public square when his army lost.

It's pretty clear the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers have no plans to assassinate Trump or DeSantis or Rand Paul or Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or the gun toting Lauren Boebert.

Violent parties do violent things.  During the Weimar Republic, as democracy was stirring in its cradle after the First World War in Germany, somewhere around 400 assassinations of liberal or left wing politicians ripped through the government. Less than 10 right wingers died by assassination.

So, if history is any guide, the Democratic Party and democracy in general will not gain advantage by any assassin's bullet. 

The Good News from TWiV

I started listening to This Week in Virology (TWiV) in March, 2020 and the cast of characters have become my long distance friends, as they came at the problem from their various perspectives as virologists, immunologist and lab folks. 

Back then, Rich Condit, who was on the faculty of a Florida university after knocking around academia for years, said we all ought to understand that anything this learned panel said should be taken the spirit of "current knowledge" will likely be wrong 6 months, a year later, because this is a new virus, at least to science, (although it may have knocked around in some form in bats for years).  But as they speculated about how the pandemic would end, one possibility was it would mutate into new, more benign variants and, like other coronaviruses, it would devolve into a virus we all get, but after the runny noses, the sore throats and headaches and aches, we get past what feels like "the common cold."

They cautioned, at the time, that would be the rosiest scenario and the disease could follow  a course more like influenza, which kill millions worldwide for years.

Now TWiV has interviewed Jake Scott, MD, from Stanford who says that in his infectious disease practice he has seen only 2 cases of serious COVID this year.  While he laughed about Joe Biden's "The pandemic is over," he conveyed much the same feeling, as he walked through the numbers and the stories of hospitalized patients and how things have changed.

Basically, people over 60 have to worry, but young, vaccinated people--and there is some reason to believe even UNvaccinated people--may do just fine with the new Omicron variants.

I had listened less often to TWiV over the past few months, as they drifted away from talking about COVID and I find their clinical guy, Daniel Griffin, insufferable. Griffin was so good early on, but the more exposure he got the more excrutiating it became listening to his self promotion and supercilious riffs on why he is the only physician in America who practices evidence based medicine. 

But Dr. Scott now says we have come to the Promised Land, or, not really the promised land because TWiV did not promise anything, but, more accurately, we have maybe arrived at the ardently desired land, where the COVID variant which has become dominant is not killing many people and making people miserable with "a cold" for a week, but otherwise not burdening hospitals with admission and ICU illnesses.

He said some new things--like the idea that instead of under-using Paxlovid, he thinks we may be over using it. It might be okay, even for an 80 year old with a positive test, otherwise healthy beyond old age, to just "ride it out."

Makes me feel better about what I saw in New York City, where young people crowding into bars and people eating at restaurants and going out wore no masks and looked blissfully indifferent to the risk of COVID.

Of course, the winter season awaits us, and SARS COV-2 is a winter virus, but the news looks hopeful.

And the gorilla chest pounders among the political Right will claim they were right all along and we should have never closed schools or worn masks or insisted soldiers be vaccinated. But, of course, it's all about timing. Those things likely saved lives then although they may not be necessary now.

And, what the Right is now trying to co-opt or ignore is the fact that actual scientists, who used the scientific method, which depends on evaluating evidence rather than just proclaiming stuff, these scientists with their wondrous vaccines saved more lives than all those Right Wing Rand Paul, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Roger Stone will, in aggregate, ever save.