Powell, Trump: Paths of honor and paths of dishonor
What bitter irony it is that the anti-vaccine mob of mental Lilliputians—there are too many of them to call a lunatic fringe—are weaponizing the death of an American giant, Colin Powell, to try to cast doubt on the efficacy of the vaccines.
True, Powell was fully vaccinated, and he died of Covid-19. What the anti-vax propagandists fail to mention is that Powell had for some years quietly suffered from multiple myeloma, a treatable but incurable and often deadly form of cancer that lodges in the bone marrow and circulates in the white blood cells. According to the Mayo Clinic, frequent infections are one of the symptoms.
In multiple myeloma, cancerous plasma cells accumulate in the bone marrow and crowd out healthy blood cells. Rather than produce helpful antibodies, the cancer cells produce abnormal proteins that can cause complications.
The five-year survival rate for this cancer has increased to 76.8 percent for those diagnosed at 45 or younger and decreases with age. The disease drastically reduces the effectiveness of vaccines by two pathways. The disease itself suppresses the immune system, as stated above. The standard treatments for the illness also weaken the immune response.
To make matters worse, Powell was at an age, 84, at which vaccines are less effective because the immune system is weaker than in a younger person. In addition, Powell suffered from Parkinson’s, a debilitating condition.
These are inconvenient facts for the anti-vax cult. They have been reported widely. What apparently has not been noted in the flood of coverage is that Powell served two tours in Vietnam, a country that we, the United States, made virtually awash in Agent Orange, a known risk for multiple myeloma.
To argue that Powell’s lamentable death proves that “vaccines don’t work” is the kind of gross distortion that the MAGA crowd and their moral Lilliputian idol, T-Rex, the apex dinosaurian predator, the antihero who tells 1,000 lies with a straight face, Donald J. Trump*.
Trump has shown once again to be the small, vindictive man he is by being the only president of either party to fail to offer a farewell tribute to Powell, a soldier and statesman who embodied some of the best features of America and lived to regret some of its worst mistakes. As a young officer, Powell as most Americans, believed the lies of the generals about Vietnam. Later, he believed the lies of George W. Bush and his neoconservative gang about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and repeated them in a speech at the United Nations. To his credit and unlike Trump, he acknowledged and was ashamed of his mistakes.
Trump’s bitterness toward Powell is understandable because in many ways Powell was the antithesis of Trump. Powell was self-made, not a daddy’s boy. He was the child of Jamaican immigrants, the kind of Black and Brown people from “shithole countries” Trump did not want as immigrants.
Trump went to the prestigious Wharton School, usually a ticket to business success, but he bankrupted just about everything he touched, even his fake university. His hotels imploded. Even when he was in office and many wanted to curry favor with the president, his hotels were losing millions of dollars. His DC hotel alone lost over $70 million despite much money from lobbyists. Trump played a master businessman on TV; in real life he is a lousy and dishonest one.
Powell did not go to West Point, the military pipeline to high rank. Nor did he get a fake health excuse for military service. He worked his way up to four star general and later became the first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and finally Secretary of State. He was a man of dignity, kindness, courage and integrity, the opposite of our last commander-in-chief. Even before he was struck with Covid-19, he knew his days were numbered. Near the end, he told journalist Bob Woodward, who knew him well having interviewed him countless times over the years, that he didn’t want people to feel sorry for him.
Powell was a Republican who broke with the party and endorsed Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He was a loyal soldier with an independent mind and not a robot Republican like so many others today who would agree with Trump if he said the Earth is flat. He abhorred the January 6 insurrection and was a strong critic of the Trump administration.
Tomorrow’s America looks more like Colin Powell than it does Donald Trump despite the tens of millions of white Americans who, sadly, have been trying to force the clock of history to run backward. They will fail and be furious. Let’s not let them sink the Republic with their doomed vessel.
