…what movie would you think it might be? If I chose I might switch the perspective of that movie to what started the crisis. Make it talk to us; as if it were human…
You know who I am. You should hear me: I am knocking on your doors. Some of you must have heard me: I am banging on your doors. Some have foolishly already let 
me in thinking I was a minor concern: nothing more than like having the common cold. Some let me in only because they were out and about, in the wrong place at the wrong time. No matter how I get in you get sick. Some mildly so. Many more get far sicker than you might imagine. So sick someone would listen to a president’s lies and take Chtake Chloroquine as a ‘cure’ and die. Because presidents wouldn’t lie about something like a cure, would they?
I don’t care about claims of a few weeks and it will safe to go back to work.
I don’t care about 15 cases to zero claims, but thanks for helping.
I don’t care about claims that it’s all a hoax perpetrated by one party.
I don’t care if your president thinks the cure is worse than me. So far I have proved again and again I am far worse than his ignorance, his lies. This pleases me.
I like it that your president is losing patience: it can only feed my hunger for more souls.
What I can do is still being underestimated…
I can exist on surfaces for a long time, as they just found out after a cruise ship was vacated.
I am getting bigger, bad-er, more dangerous. Just one day’s statistics…
1 in 700 in New York City.
21,000 cases.
I AM KILLING MORE AND MORE OF YOU.
You may come to a time where you won’t be able to stop me, since I can re-infect someone. Especially without a cure, a vaccine, any treatment specific to me.
All this was obvious just a tiny handful of weeks after your president’s followers were calling Americans fools for panicking.
Your…
…president
… has been helping me.
Especially since he sucks at EVERYTHING.
I really like that.
Even when he calls it “war” he still wants us to walk off the battlefield in just a few days, walk to jobs with supplies of appropriate masks still limited, ventilators limited. I can’t wait to meet you.
Meanwhile your president’s words have been feeding me, and if you get me bad you will know it. You will feel like a refrigerator is pressing down on your lungs. Like Amy’s husband you may start spewing blood. I am the viral semi that runs you over and, once it’s almost over, I can run you over again. You might be so desperate you’re willing to do what the man did who listened to his president: swallow Chloroquine that was meant for fish in a fish bowl. With Donald Trump in charge I will be unstoppable because all his evading of questions he calls “nasty,” all the lies, all his bad showmanship.
Thank you. Mr. Trump.
Hi, this is Ken.
The preceding was a revision of a movie I’ve seen several times that haunts me from the perspective, in this case, of COVID-19. There were two of these movies: original and a remake.
Perhaps you have a movie this crisis reminds you of? My movie is the most depressing movie I have ever seen. Yet this movie pulls me back to the screen because it is so impelling, humanity’s desperation so familiar: especially now. Crew members of a sub surface to find the world heading towards human extinction, and as cases explode across the globe soon they will have no place left to go. Some go home and do something like what the man did, only intentionally kill themselves. He ate what Trump said was a cure: Chloroquine. In the movie the family intentionally swallows poison: they simply couldn’t take it anymore. The family ends up cuddled up to each other, in bed, dead. Humanity chooses to self exterminate rather than go through the horrors they’d have to face.
That’s not where we are at. But we are at a point we have a president so dangerous he certainly is lead us down a dark path.
Hopefully not anywhere near where we are headed, though maybe for many of our elderly of which I am one.
Increasingly the COVID-19 crisis reminds me of On the Beach, and Donald Trump could make that nightmare closer to true than we ever might have imagined. COVID doesn’t care what Trump says or thinks. COVID is able to use his horrible leadership, his massive ego, his politicizing of everything, his hatred for experts who don’t parrot his every talking point, to help itself spread across America.
Donald Trump: the worst president at the worst time.
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Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 40 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks, and into the unseen cracks and crevasses, that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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