Pandemic: on El Papagallo, hot sauce, Clorox and Lysol

When I was still in grade school, we had a fairly popular Mexican restaurant in town called El Papagallo, and one night it burned to the ground. Here's the gist of a conversation I remember having with my mother right around the time it happened:

Me: One of my friends at school said there was a big pot of hot sauce on the back of their stove and it got too hot and burned down the restaurant.
Mom: I don't think so, honey. I read in the newspaper that it was a grease fire.
Me: No, it was too-hot hot sauce!
Mom: I'm pretty sure the newspaper people talked to the owner of the restaurant.
Me: That doesn't make any sense. It had to be the hot sauce!

After several rounds of this my mother just sighed, said, "OK, honey," and allowed my grade-school brain to believe whatever it wanted to believe. And because she'd quit arguing, I was convinced I was right, because after all, my friend had said so and it made the most sense. What did adults know?

That same sense of rock-solid, absolutely misplaced self-confidence was on display during the President's press conference today, when he forwarded the ideas -- which he clearly felt were intelligent, well-founded and in no way insane -- that people should try to kill off a coronavirus infection by introducing bright lights into the body, and clean their lungs by injecting disinfectant. He has exactly the mindset of a stubborn grade-schooler who is convinced of his own brilliance and rightness, and no journalist, no epidemiologist, no scientist is going to tell him otherwise. It amazes me that he's gotten to this stage in life without ever getting clocked in the head by reality, but it seems money really can shield people from the consequences of their own stupidity.

The thing is, no one hung on my every word in grade school. Nobody decided Mexican restaurants were dangerous or started grassroots campaigns to shut them all down because of my personal, absolute belief that a batch of hot sauce had destroyed El Papagallo. My infantile beliefs weren't important to anyone but me, and my mother knew it, which is why she simply stopped arguing with me. But millions of Americans actually listen to, and believe in, this stubborn, unhinged moron's random rantings of the day. Somebody's going to go out and try gargling Clorox tomorrow because Trump was so convinced his homegrown hunches about COVID-19 were better than the lifetime studies of brilliant scientists working to find a cure. Somebody's going to start touting tanning beds as the cure for coronavirus. And somebody's going to die painfully because she injected herself with Lysol.

The only thing scarier than COVID-19 is realizing that the President of the United States is mentally unhinged, yet still convinced of his own competence... and that a sizable number of Americans are willing to follow anywhere he leads, even right off the precipice.