TRUE STORY: About two weeks ago, someone broke into my house and slipped a couple cartons of cherry-red Jell-O in my refrigerator. Who could I have pissed off that bad? The Jell-O was that impossibly deep bright red, courtesy of all the “Red Dye No. 3.” I thought of calling RFK Jr., now our Secretary of Health and Human Services. Before he sold his soul and was still running for president, Red Dye No. 3 was one of the windmills he liked tilting against.
If I called Kennedy, I thought, he’d have to tell Donald Trump, and Trump would then call out the National Guard. Clearly, there’s a crime wave going on in my neighborhood and city police are powerless to stop it.
I thought of that Jell-O — which was quite delicious — when listening to Kennedy bravely blame Tylenol for causing autism, a disorder first researched in the 1920s by the Soviet child psychiatrist Grunya Sukhareva. I say bravely because Kennedy offered no facts, no studies, no evidence, and no science for a word he was saying. Not one. That’s some serious game. And have you heard the guy? His voice sounds like a cement mixer in overdrive. I talk funny myself, so I can say things like that.
One can only hope Tylenol sues him — and Trump — for slander. The real reason not to take Tylenol is your liver. Everyone already knows this: men, women, and children. Friends don’t let friends drink and take Tylenol.
Personally, I was disappointed Kennedy didn’t also point out that 88 percent of all divorced women claim their ex-husbands were experiencing late-onset autism. I know this for a fact because I have been personally informed by no less than 88 percent of the divorced women I have met in the past five years. (Another true fact.) And in this town, that’s a lot. (Also a true fact.)
But given the strong family values embraced by our administration of serial gropers, one can see that if autism is linked to divorce — however causally or coincidentally — the institution of marriage might suffer.
As statistics go, I admit, it’s sketchy. But at least it’s a statistic.
My real beef with Kennedy goes way deeper. On July 10, he issued an edict decreeing that any and all healthcare centers receiving a penny in federal dollars had to verify the citizenship of all their patients. Effective immediately. Like many fatwahs issued by the mullahs now running the show, this one was challenged by 21 states and the District of Columbia and, thanks to a federal judge in Rhode Island who was appointed by Trump, it has been placed on indefinite hold while the appeals process plays out.
Here in Santa Barbara, however, our county public health officials — ever alert to possible icebergs on the horizon — are busy clearing the deck chairs of this particular Titanic. They are planning to divest their five public health clinics of 7,500 patients said to have unsatisfactory immigration status. The plan is to reassign these patients to other health care providers. If that sounds like a major undertaking, that’s because it is. And it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Should the injunction fall, thousands more will be shit out of luck. And far more than public health clinics will be affected.
Don’t take my word for it. Just listen to the federal judge who imposed the injunction. If citizenship verification is required according to the terms of Kennedy’s edict, Judge Mary McElroy concluded, it would also apply to domestic violence centers, homeless shelters, mental health programs, food banks, soup kitchens, and victim assistance programs. Individuals in such crisis situations, the judge noted, rarely have at hand documents showing proof of citizenship.
“The government’s new policy, across the board, seems to be this: ‘Show me your papers,’ ” Judge McElroy concluded. The cruel irony, she also noted, is that many full-blooded American citizens would get caught in the regulatory crossfire designed by Kennedy and co. to take out undocumented immigrants.
The judge did not base her ruling, however, on any of these bleeding-heart consequences; instead, she focused on all the manifold ways Kennedy violated something called the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs — in mind-numbing detail — just what steps federal agencies must take before changing rules embraced by five presidents — of both parties — over a span of 30 years.
I was struck how this week, the Agriculture Department announced it would no longer conduct surveys or maintain any statistics on food insecurity and hunger. Again, after 30 years. A departmental spokesperson explained the data obtained from such surveys was “redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous.”
What’s the line? What you don’t measure, you can pretend doesn’t exist.
A small detail: The Agriculture Department is in charge of the Food Stamps program. That program got chopped to the tune of $200 million, meaning many of the 2.4 million people who relied on it before won’t be getting any — or as much — as before. In Santa Barbara, the number of people affected is 60,000.
How many of them will have the necessary paperwork when they show up at the food bank?
In the same day, I also read how the Securities and Exchange Commission had absolved three convicted white-collar hoodlums of having to pay back restitution. Trump had already either pardoned them or given them clemency. They had been convicted in American courts of law of having swindled their victims, collectively, of nearly $900 million.
A person could easily get bitter.
Thank God someone broke in and gave me that Jell-O. Red dye or not, it sure was sweet.
And a true story.
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