Who Do You Trust?
A story about Johnny Carson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Don Draper...
Before he hosted The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson hosted a gameshow called Who Do You Trust? which featured three competing couples and after Johnny got done screwing around with them – which was the best part of the show by far – Johnny would tell the male contestant the category of the question and then the male would have to decide whether he trusted himself or his female companion to answer the question.
It aired at 4:30 PM and was immediately followed in the NBC lineup by “What Chauvinistic Horse’s Ass Are You Divorcing?”
A fact I just made up, but let’s face it, if I’d been allowed to make an elevator pitch to NBC executives back in the Early Sixties my gameshow idea would have been picked up immediately because it appealed to all the women frustrated by pretending to be Donna Reed, who as far as I remember, didn’t get shitfaced drunk every afternoon in order to face the arrival of the guy she married under the mistaken impression that he was “going to be somebody” slightly better than an insurance salesman who comes home every evening and has three martinis and then slurs his way through a story involving his Oldsmobile Rocket 88 and gas mileage before passing out face first into a plate of beef stroganoff.
OK…now that I write that down, the Early Sixties sound awesome.
Every male was a smoking, drinking, half-assed version of Don Draper, perhaps without the good looks and charm, but even chinless bores could have three-martini lunches and chain smoke Lucky Strikes.
Men: Picture yourself leaning up against the fender of this Rocket 88, wearing your Ray Bans, holding a highball in one hand while using the other to light up a Viceroy with a Zippo. Richard Goddamn Simmons would look cool…or at least somewhat cooler…doing that.
Moving on.
Somewhat-related story alert
Apparently the “Who Do You Trust?” title outraged English teachers who preferred “Whom Do You Trust?” which is a pretty good example of why they don’t let English Teachers come up with titles or we might be stuck with “Whom’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Whom’s Line Is It Anyway?” and the English rock band “The Whom” performing their big hit, “Whom Are You?”
English teachers responded to NBC’s grammatical outrage by getting hammered in the afternoon after school while trying to grade papers and telling their spouses long pointless stories about gas mileage before yelling, “Just whom do they think they are?” and passing out into their plate of beef stroganoff which was a meal every American family was required to eat at least once a week, followed by a serving of Jell-O which is made of gelatin, a protein extracted from the skin and bones from certain animals, a fact I didn’t make up, but considering all the Jell-O I ate as a kid, really wish I had.
Moving on once again.
Who Do You Trust? Vaccination Edition!
So now everybody in America has to play “Who Do You Trust?” when it comes to the coronavirus pandemic and I’ll play the role of Johnny Carson and the question category is “COVID-19 and Kids” and you can trust the answer of one of these two contestants:
Our first contestant, Dr. Kristin Sohl!
According to the internet:
Kristin has a medical degree, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a Professor of Clinical Child Health at the University of Missouri, Executive Director of ECHO Autism (designed to increase community capacity to care for children with autism), Scientific Advisor for the National Institutes of Neurological Disorder and Stroke and Medical Director for MU Telehealth Network and the MU Office of Continuing Medical Education.
Dr. Sohl is a pediatrician and is currently president of the Missouri chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and here’s what she had to say to the Kansas City Star about COVID and kids:
“It is true that kids are affected by COVID at a smaller percentage than adults. But they are getting very sick. It’s really difficult for physicians to be able to talk about their patients because we have privacy protections. And yet, we have lots of children here in mid-Missouri who are hospitalized right now and some are intubated, on a breathing tube, and some are 9 and 10.”
And now our second contestant, Marjorie Taylor Greene!
According to the internet:
Marjorie graduated from the University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Business Administration degree, took over her father’s contracting business, then stepped down to start CrossFit training and worked part-time as a coach at a gym before starting her own gym and then left that business to get involved in politics.
Marjorie wrote articles for American Truth Seekers, a conspiracy news website and Law Enforcement Today, a pro-police fake news website, also falsely claimed Muslim Representatives were not official because they were sworn in on the Quran, falsely claimed Donald Trump won the election, falsely claimed the January 6th Capitol rioters were members of Antifa dressed as Trump supporters, questioned the authenticity of school shootings, falsely accused Black Lives Matter protestors of being terrorists, falsely claimed that the Plan B contraceptive kills babies in the womb, said she does not believe in evolution and has suggested California wildfires are caused by Jewish space lasers.
And Marjorie has said, COVID-19: "is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65."
So now that you’ve met our contestants and learned a little something about them…
Who Do You Trust?
A preponderance of evidence
Multi-bajillionaire Jeff Bezos shot himself into space about the same time Twitter decided to put Marjorie Taylor Greene in the penalty box for spreading false information about COVID and those two news events led to the cartoon you see at the top of this post.
Then the Kansas City Star ran a story about unvaccinated kids going back to schools that won’t require masks and quoted Dr. Sohl and cited her credentials and that made me think of the critics on the other side and their credentials.
Whether we like to think about it or not (and we usually don’t) at times we’re all forced to trust somebody and if you don’t agree with that, ask yourself the last time you rode in an elevator, crossed a bridge or flew in an airplane.
So when you get to an area where you have no expertise of your own, who do you trust?
(BTW: My laptop just agreed with the disgruntled English teachers and alerted me what “who” is the wrong word in that last sentence, but my laptop suggested “which do you trust?” as an alternative “which” seems to indicate my laptop is an idiot.)
I would never suggest that you trust me because I’m just one more guy with an axe to grind and a grammatically-impaired laptop, but after four decades of commenting on the news, I can tell you the method I used to decide what to believe and it goes like this:
In the news business, a he-said-she-said story is one in which a man and a woman give different accounts of an event and there’s no way to verify which account is accurate.
So when Bill Cosby gets accused of sexual misconduct by one woman you might have a hard time deciding whether America’s Dad was guilty of rape. But when approximately 60 women tell similar stories, it’s now a he-said-she-said x 60 story and the preponderance of evidence indicates Cliff Huxtable was a sleaze ball.
So now let’s use that standard of evidence on our current situation:
Clearly, doctors sometimes make mistakes or we wouldn’t have malpractice suits and they don’t always agree or we wouldn’t have medical dramas like ER, but a preponderance of doctors, scientists and health officials are on one side of the COVID issue and a preponderance of whack jobs, fruit bats and ignoramuses are on the other.
So let’s finish where we started:
Who do you trust?
Most people I know have gotten the vaccine when it became available... If people are stupid enough not to get one.. we won't have to worry about them for long..