Foobaw and more

Let me start with Damar Hamlin. His physicians haven't said anything publicly about what happened to him, but there are basically two possibilities. First, it is obviously uncommon but not unheard of for apparently healthy athletes to suffer cardiac arrest during exertion. This happened to Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis. I happened to be in Boston Garden watching the first round playoff game against the Charlotte Hornets on April 29, 1993 when Lewis collapsed. All of the spectators were baffled about what  had happened. 

 

Doctors at New England Baptist Hospital later diagnosed him with a heart abnormality called focal cardiomyopathy, and advised him not to play basketball any more. He got a second opinion from cardiologist Gilbert "Punky" Mudge at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Punky told him that essentially, he had just fainted. (I call him Punky because I did in fact make his acquaintance on two occasions regarding and unrelated matter, when I was working as a consultant.) Lewis then went to shoot hoops at the Celtic's practice facility at Brandeis, where as it happens I was a graduate student, and he dropped dead. He had not had a Covid-19 vaccine.

The other possibility is called commotio cordis. This is just really bad luck. A blow to the chest, timed precisely to a point in the heartbeat cycle, can send the heart into ventricular fibrillation, a disorganized beat that doesn't pump blood. This is actually more common in baseball than it is in football, when players are hit in the chest with the ball. A few deaths occur in the U.S. from this cause each year.

Note that neither of these possibilities really has anything in particular to do with football. But Damar Hamlin has attracted so much sober reflection is that football is in fact a particularly dangerous game for other reasons -- head injuries and spinal cord injuries being the foremost concern. Whatever the outcome for Hamlin -- which as of now is looking more hopeful -- the viability of North American football is in question, as parents are  increasingly reluctant to let their sons play.

That said, the incident has also attracted a murderous flock of ghoulish liars, who are claiming it has something to do with the mRNA Covid-19 vaccine. I expect the reason I had commenters who believed that the incidence of cardiac arrest among young athletes has increased is because they were deceived by Florida's Quack Surgeon General Joseph Lapado. (I'm linking to Digby to avoid the WaPo paywall.)

 

Joseph A. Ladapo, a professor of medicine at the University of Florida and the state’s surgeon general, relied upon a flawed analysis and may have violated university research integrity rules when he issued guidancelast fall discouraging young men from receiving common coronavirus vaccines, according to a report from a medical school faculty task force. But the university says it has no plans to investigate the matter.

Ladapo recommended in October that men younger than 40 not take mRNA vaccinations for covid, pointing to an “abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death.” Doctors and public health officials swiftly pounced, dismissing the underlying research for its small sample size, lack of detail and shaky methodology.

In its new report, a task force of the University of Florida College of Medicine’s Faculty Council cites numerous deficiencies in the analysis Ladapo used to justify his vaccine recommendation. A summary said the work was “seriously flawed.” The report’s authors say Ladapo engaged in “careless, irregular, or contentious research practices.”

 

But Lapado is just a normal Republican. What they do is lie.  Its essentially the defining characteristic of the party. I'll turn it over to former Republican Timothy Snyder.

One of the more interesting sections of the January 6th report is a graph that demonstrates that Trump, time after time, lied about specific claims of fraud right after being informed that they were false.  His big lie about the election, once believed, summoned forth countless smaller lies or fantasies that seemed to support it.  Trump repeated these more specific lies because it was precisely fiction that he wanted.  He couldn't think them all up himself; he needed help.  He waited for the various inventions to reach him, made sure that they were not true, and then repeated them to millions of people.  . . . 

Newly-elected congressman George Santos took Trump's approach to politics to its logical conclusion.  Trump was a failed businessman and successful entertainer, who then used his entertainer skills to pretend to be a successful businessman and run for office.  But no one could deny that he had careers.  In the case of Santos, everything is just made up.  He is not even a failed businessman (though he is a confessed thief).  He is not even an entertainer (unless you count customer service).  He is just a man who understands that lying for its own sake is a way to do politics, attract money and gain power.  It will not take years to take apart his story; it will take weeks.  (One thing that has emerged is a connection to Russia).  And then the question arises: is alternative reality the future of America, or at least of its Republican Party? 

Trump's Big Lie opened the way for Santos, who repeats it, and who attended the rally to, in his own words, “overturn the election for Donald Trump.” Trump was a model of a man who came to power and gained money on little beyond mendacious schtick.  Santos is following that lead.  But it is also important to understand the new context in which Santos functions.  By lying constantly during the first campaign and during the presidency, Trump set an example, one that is most relevant to members of his party.  For two years now, Trump's Big Lie has functioned the way that the Stalinist line used to function in the communist party.  What Stalin said had to be treated as true, even if party members knew at some level that it was not.  They had to engage constantly in what George Orwell called double-think, living in one lie, and preparing themselves for the next one, all the while imagining that somehow the process served some greater good. 

Trump has trained Republicans, and a large part of the American people, in just these mental habits.  Elected officials can say that elections don't work, and no one really even notices the doublethink.  Republicans claim that Democrats can alter electoral results, even as Republicans win control of the House of Representatives by a tiny margin. We ask ourselves: how can Russians continue to support the war in Ukraine?  How do they handle obvious contradictions, like saying they are fighting a war against Nazis when the country they invade has an elected Jewish president?  This is the answer: they have been trained that there is no truth, only the leader's sheltering fiction, the comforting big lie, the line that comes down from above.  We can all be trained like that, and too many Americans have been.