Recently a patient volunteered their anger and frustration about Dr. Anthony Fauci being dragged before a senate hearing and badgered with aggressive questions. “That man is a national hero. It’s a disgrace that they are treating him like this.” What I found so striking about this comment is that it came not long after another patient told me that “Dr. Fauci should be in prison for what he did.”
While I try to stay apolitical both in my office and on this blog, it’s not possible to completely disentangle medicine from politics. Besides, what I wish in this post is not to take one side or the other, but rather to use the case of Dr. Fauci as a prism by which to look at our current political dysfunction. The fact is that, increasingly, Democrats and Republicans live in alternative epistemic universes, which helps to explain much of our national polarization. It’s not just a question of which side is right or wrong on a particular issue, but that each side is consuming media that conveys a highly curated set of facts which cater only to their own view of the world, carefully neglecting to mention those facts which bolster the other sides’ points.
I’ve recently returned from two weeks’ vacation in Italy, arriving home just in time to celebrate America’s 250th birthday. As of this week, the office will be back open and running as usual. Thank you to all of our patients for their understanding while we took our annual vacation.
While nobody really cares (nor should they) what a small town doctor thinks about the world at large, I’m going to use this post to just make a few brief comments about the United States on this momentous date.
One of my favorite movies is the very underrated Avalon, from 1990. The film tells the story of an immigrant family in Baltimore, from their arrival around the time of the first world war up through several generations, until around the late 1960s. The family is fictional and from somewhere in eastern europe (I got the sense watching the film that they were probably a Jewish family from Poland, though I don’t recall that their background was ever definitively specified), but their experience could easily stand in for millions of Americans, no matter the ethnic or religious background.
At first the family are poor and work menial jobs as they struggle to acclimate to life in America. But as the years pass and successive generations take over, they climb the ladder, achieving the American Dream of middle class affluence: better jobs, a big home in the suburbs, automobiles and televisions. However, there is a price to pay for this success, as the close family cohesion that they share at the start of the film begins to dissolve. By the film’s end, the members of the family are well assimilated into American life and much more prosperous, but also lonelier and less happy.
It’s a very beautiful film and if you take nothing from this blog post other than that you should see Avalon, then I’ve done something good for the world today. But of course, I didn’t create today’s post just to share my taste in cinema with you.
For context, the carnivore diet is an extreme version of the keto diet that shuns all plant-based foods. Followers of this diet eat only meat, fish, and maybe eggs and dairy, without any fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, nuts, or other plant-based matter. In effect, the carnivore diet is the precise opposite of a vegan diet.
