George Foreman, the two-time, world heavy-weight, boxing champion was asked if he believed boxing caused brain damage. George replied that you had to have brain damage to become a boxer. Some would consider that an appropriate response in connection with a variety of other professions, including politics.
If you are an effective politician, you may succeed in filling a few potholes, real and figurative, after applying considerable time and effort to the task. If you are ineffective, you will spend much of your life sitting in meetings and listening to men and women bloviating or merely congratulating themselves for work done by others. If you are somewhat corrupt, you will be obliged to surround yourself with sycophants who will serve as interference between you and the justice system. If you are steadfastly corrupt, you will pass laws that enrich and protect you and your friends, while stacking the courts with men and women who will rule in your favor, regardless how convoluted the logic they must adopt to defend you.
Such has been the nature of politics in America for more than two centuries. Despite this, our country has emerged as one of the most free and productive nations in the world. Literally millions of people want to migrate to the United States, and tens of millions have relocated here over the past two centuries, despite their often being treated as undesirables or criminals. As we approach a Presidential election, one must realistically wonder if this system we live with and the rules we assume are fundamental to this system will survive.
In 1797, George Washington finished his second term as President and went home to Mount Vernon. His Vice President, John Adams, took over the Presidency, and for the next 219 years there were peaceful transfers of power in the Executive branch of government. Regardless of the vitriol spewed during the campaign for the Presidency, no candidate for this office prior to 2020 ever suggested or condoned his supporters staging an insurrection to violently interfere with Congress’ certifying the election. Many citizens have apparently forgotten how Americans have traditionally behaved when they lost an election: they simply worked to get different people elected the next time.
Some have argued that it was the rise of international media empires that fueled this very unamerican reaction to a lost election. Some have attributed this violence to a growing concern amongst ‘white Christian’ Americans that they were losing their pre-eminence to new and diverse ethnic groups or to long-entrenched and sinister minorities. Whatever the reason for this novel disregard for the rule of law, what is apparent is that much of it was fueled by a widespread belief that we Americans were being denied a highly effective and benevolent Executive branch of government.
There is no value in reiterating the numerous claims made of malfeasance, corruption, and nepotism associated with the Trump Presidency. It has been documented in nearly a dozen books written by disillusioned members of that administration and by interviews with and testimony by these ‘insiders,’ and none of that has tarnished the prevailing view that we Americans were “better off” during that Presidency than we are now. What is remarkable is the pervasive and certifiably false memory that the former President’s four years in office were a ‘good time’ for America.
During that ‘good time’ for America, over one million Americans died from a Covid pandemic that was dismissed initially and mismanaged throughout. During that good time, the ‘solution’ to the influx of migrants from Latin America was to separate them from their children and store their children in cages. The administration managed an ever-expanding deficit by borrowing trillions of dollars and thereby fueling inflation. School, church, and mall shootings became daily events. The flow of arms and ammunition to Latin American drug cartels from the United States went from being a trickle to being a flood. Oil and natural gas drilling rights were handed out like party favors. Classified documents were sent to storage rooms and bathrooms at a Florida country club and displayed to visiting foreign leaders who were certainly not our allies. Supreme court justices, who insisted that the reproductive rights enshrined in the Roe v. Wade decision were “established law,” discovered that women really did not have the rights they had been given decades ago. Need I go on?
Those designated to erase or at least revise the national memory of these events in those ‘golden years’ have pointed out that we had peace and prosperity during that prior Presidency. Again, we have been told to forget that the economy crashed with the mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. The official delusion is that we are ‘at war’ now because Israel and Hamas are trying to destroy each other, and most Americans want them to stop this death spiral before all of the Middle East becomes a wasteland. We are advised to overlook the billions of dollars spent during the prior Presidency supporting or opposing military operations all over the world. Never has ‘peace’ involved so many international and regional conflicts. We are expected to forget that we emboldened Russia, North Korea, and China to flex their military strength by treating them as dear, old friends only to discover these ‘friends’ decided to menace or unapologetically invade our true allies.
Short term memory is managed in a small part of the brain called the hippocampus. Longer term memory appears to be less localized. Memory loss is currently often caused by degenerative diseases of the brain, including Alzheimer’s. Before the development of penicillin and similar antibiotics, memory problems were most often a consequence of general paresis, a condition usually developing late in life in men who had unprotected intercourse with sex workers years earlier. It was caused by syphilis, a bacterial infection that could go undetected in the brain for years or decades. The affected individual was unable to recall real events and often filled the memory gaps with grandiose delusions or with events that never happened. Perhaps we are witnessing a resurgence of that pesky germ.
Dr. Lechtenberg is an Easton resident who graduated from Tufts University and Tufts Medical School in Massachusetts and subsequently trained at The Mount Sinai Hospital and Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in Manhattan. He worked as a neurologist at several New York Hospitals, including Kings County and The Long Island College Hospital, while maintaining a private practice, teaching at SUNY Downstate Medical School, and publishing 15 books on a variety of medical topics. He worked in drug development in the U.S., as well as in England, Germany, and France.
