More Than We Can Stand

Admiral Bull Halsey was hit with physical manifestations of stress from time to time, so I'm not the only one. He got such a bad case of eczema right before the battle of Midway that he was hospitalized and missed the show. They hated to lose him, but he was in no shape to fight a major sea battle. So they lathered him up with creams, wrapped him in bandages like a mummy, and put him to bed until he recovered. He was a pretty tough egg, but between Pearl Harbor, the battle of the Coral Sea, watching the Japanese rampaging around everywhere, and personally crossing the Pacific Ocean with two or our very rare aircraft carriers to launch a near suicidal bombing raid on Japan, poor old Halsey's body said, “enough!” He had found the limits of his endurance. It was more than he could stand.

I'm getting a bit jumpy myself these days. No, “jumpy” doesn't begin to cover it. “Jumpy” is baseline for me. I'm becoming hysterical. My own “non-specific dermatitis” has returned with a vengeance. That manifests itself as an an irresistible itch. It first appeared about four years ago, when my father died in the act of lobbing his hand-grenade of a will into my lap, the bastard. Then, and off and on for years, it was limited to my forelegs. A dermatologist gave it that generic name and said, “I don't know, put some cream on it or something.” The recent assault has hit me from my neck to my insteps, and by this week my skin is in shreds. No light colored shirts, and wear long sleeves please, we don't want to frighten the children. Having coffee with a friend this week, I complained about it and pushed up a sleeve. “Oh, shit,” he said, “I had this two years ago. You have scabies!” He explained in horrifying detail how tiny insects were consuming my body as I sat there. I went to the doctor, and, as frequently happens, the doctor made it worse.

She correctly told me that no, I did not have scabies. Then she did what doctors automatically do. She came up with a best guess about what prescriptions would fit the model of perhaps doing some good and at least putting some money in the hospital's bank account. She agreed with me, surprisingly, about the likely chain of causation: stress; auto-immune system response; histamines; generalized itching.

The medicines were quite expensive. Two creams, and two powerful oral antihistamines. One cream mostly for hydration, and another for knocking down the itching more locally. The next day I faithfully followed her recommended procedure. By ten o'clock in the evening, both of my palms had exploded with dangerous looking blisters that itched like crazy and threw heat like a radiator. After a forty minute consultation with Professor Google, I had a four-corners diagnosis. Dyshidrotic eczema, aka pompholyx. (Thanks, nhs.uk) Mostly on the right palm, so I knew that it was the hydration cream, which I had applied almost entirely with my right hand palm. The other cream was fingertips only, and I deduced that it was not that product since my fingertips were not involved in the new outbreak in the least.

Now, I am fully aware that these things are of little import when compared to the catalog of horrors that people are enduring in countless countries all over the world. The explosions, the migrations, forced and otherwise, the extremely prejudicial imprisonment of innocent people, the forced separation of families, the religious persecution. But I ask you, please allow that my afflictions are annoying, at least to me. These are only the manifestations that are visible. Who knows what all of this stress is doing to my heart. Yes, I also have stress-related coronary-artery disease. I have suffered from numerous stress manifestations all my life. From the small stuff (headaches; spastic colon; nightmares) to the truly impressive and painful (hidradenitis suppuratura; flesh-eating bacteria). I'm ashamed to admit it, but most of that was just from the stress of being myself. We're facing a lot of dangerous, external threats now, on top of just the challenge of keeping an even keel in our own lives.

We, all of us, live today with a combination of existential threats that would give a saint the heebie-jeebies. I have to laugh at the way some politicians and academics dance around these weird goings on and make pronouncements about related events as though there were no connection at all.

I still had some hope for our future up until the very early days of the Trump administration. The team were not all idiots, and it was possible to believe that there were some forces in Washington that could prevent a new, inexperienced, kind of stupid president from burning down the whole house. Even my slim hope was wildly inappropriate. All of the non-idiots have either abandoned ship or been fired by now, and they have been replaced by a new, younger group of “temporary” idiots. All temporary appointments, to spare the American people the spectacle of congress questioning them in the appointment process, where they would totally embarrass themselves, their families, their universities, and El Presidente. Temporary. None of them were destined to last long anyway.

Could you believe it when Mick Mulvanney said that what America really needed was more immigrants! I'm pretty sure a coconut fell on that guy's head or something. Or Mnuchin, saying that this is a great time to buy stock! Him and his trophy wife. I am loathe to disparage anyone's marriage, but if she's the trophy, what did the loser get? Betsy DeVos! The joke that writes itself! This week it looks like Trump has found the bottom of the barrel, hiring people right out of university for White House hatchet jobs. They are being tasked with finding and firing the disloyal White House employees that you know Trump would deny even existed. Must be the Deep State!

Trump himself, I think it's time for me to stop bothering him. The way the Democrats are throwing this election, it looks like we'll be dealing with Trump being the president until January, 2025. Yeah, I think that I should lay off, because Trump is beginning to frighten me. The only thing that has protected me all these years is the fact that I am such a nobody, such a nonentity. As an unknown blogger, the ants walk along their tunnels well over my head. I'm further down with the worms. But if he gets another term, and since word searches are as easy as they are, even I might get on a dangerous enemies list. The worst part is that he might actually have some money now. I'm sure that when he took office, if you looked at his entire balance sheet, he had more debt than money. For the rest of us, that makes us bankrupt, but for those in the know, they're rich either way. Whether it's debt or money, it's under their control, and they're rich. Don't ask me how it works. But by now I'd say his true net worth has skyrocketed. Don't forget, he can release a Tweet any time he wants, and he controls the content. His Tweets often affect the stock market, or the stocks of individual companies. He can then Tweet again, and send the market, or the stock, back up. I'm sure he's got about a thousand straw-men out there trading on those Trump induced stock movements. My guess is that he makes a couple of billion dollars doing this every year that he remains in office. It makes him a lot more dangerous if he's cash-rich all of a sudden. He can pay for more law suits.

Poor Melania, I'm sure that she has long had a plan to divorce his fat ass about six months after he leaves office, which she has probably computed will be about July, 2021. I'm sure that she's longing for it. Would Trump even care? She's past her expiration date anyway. Let her go, and move some new young honey into the White House. I bet Trump misses Jeffrey Epstein.

We've got a lot to worry about. That's a list I make all the time, so I'll spare you today. Where's your bet on who gets the blame for the COVID-19 virus? Who, or what, is Trump going to blame it on? The Chinese are always a good choice. There may not be any evidence pointing to any intent on their part, but the rumors are hot. This week I heard that Chinese scientists at some bio-war laboratory IN WUHAN were selling lab animals to restaurants. That will make some people's blood boil. Just the fact that Chinese people love to eat weird animals that you've never heard of, and use internal organs of other weird animals as medicine, will sound suspicious to lots of people. What the hell are civets and pangolins anyway? I feel bad for the people in Wuhan, and working people in China in general. I'm afraid a lot of poor people are not being paid until this thing blows over. That'll make people angry.

This latest corona virus is just a wake-up call. This virus has a fatality rate of around 2%, so it's safe to say that this is not “the big one.” Two percent puts it right around the death rate for the Spanish Flu in 1918. Two percent of the people who got hit with that thing came to a total of almost twenty-million people dead, but that was for the whole world, so any individual's chances were still very good. When an even stronger virus hits, and it presents in fifty countries simultaneously, and the death rate is north of 30% or so, what the hell will we do then? Even this little breeze is shaking the foundations of world commerce. What happens when the hurricane of viruses shows up?

How about this: throw a nice, strong virus on top of worldwide failures in the production of wheat or rice. Mix and match, you know? Pick your poisons, one from column A and one from column B. Like a perfect storm, with both A and B being caused by global warming. Governments would struggle to keep up with the catastrophe, but due to limited resources they would only be helping rich people! That's our new motto, “The rich first!” Already this week one of Trump's new temps announced that most Americans won't be able to afford the COVID-19 vaccine. It's all about the rich, baby! They're the “makers!” They're the “job-creators!” For most of the rest of us, it might be no food, no water, no Netflix, no nothing. “Nothing but this pointed stick and my hand around your neck.”

When that day comes, and the odds are pretty good that it will, it'll be official. We will all have found the limits of our endurance. It will all be more than we can stand.