A Real Nowhere Man
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
I read the news today that the former leaders of a veterans’ home were indicted on charges of criminal neglect after seventy-six residents died of the coronavirus.
As I write this, two hundred seven thousand, eight hundred twelve residents of the United States have died of the virus, and the leader of our home has yet to be indicted.
Criminally negligent homicide is the killing of a human being that results from the careless performance of a legal or illegal act in which the danger of death is apparent.
Donald Trump’s best and brightest medical advisors have been telling him for more than half a year about the danger of death from Covid-19, yet he continues to lie about it, being sure to protect himself while luring supporters to risk all at super-spreader campaign rallies where he is pleased best when they are masked least.
There is another term in the law for what he demonstrates: depraved indifference, which is an act so reckless and careless of the safety of others that it shows a complete lack of regard for human life.
In the President’s defense is his own assertion that human lives — at least human lives of value to him — have not been taken at all.
“It affects virtually nobody,” Trump said the other day, mere hours before the United States death toll had reached two hundred thousand nobodies. “It’s an amazing thing.” It takes only the old who are already sick, he virtually crowed; those people don’t count.
The New York Times has been documenting these nobodies since March, with “Those We’ve Lost.” At the same time the series began, Trump was urging churches to pack their pews for Easter Sunday.
They start with Vittorio Gregotti, who died in Milan a month of Sundays earlier. The Italian modernist architect rebuilt the stadium that hosted the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics. But he was ninety-two, so he was nobody.
The first six of the more than three hundred lost lives already illuminated by the Times were older than sixty-five, the age group the Centers for Disease Control says are at highest risk.
The seventh on the list, Nashom Wooden, was only fifty. But a Manhattan drag performer in Trumpland? Still a nobody.
Dez-Ann Romain was thirty-six, described as an innovative high school principal with grit and heart, the first New York City school employee to die of coronavirus. Another but: she was black; a nobody.
I love rock ’n’ roll as much as the next fellow, but the guy who actually wrote that song, Alan Merrill, was one of these nobodies.
Kious Kelly, the Times reports, may have been the first nurse in New York to die of Covid-19. His death highlighted the shortage of personal protective equipment for American doctors at the same time the Trump Administration was boasting of having sent nearly eighteen tons of the stuff to China. Kelly, forty-eight, worked in a blue state where he was a nobody, but could have been somebody had he worked instead in the red state where they sent all the PPE.
A thirty-three-year-old advocate for disability rights, a fifty-nine-year-old jazz trumpet virtuoso, a twenty-two-year-old new dad, a forty-eight-year-old police detective — two hundred seven thousand more and growing a thousand more a day — all of them nobodies in Donald Trump’s sparsely populated mind.
But here’s the thing about these nobodies: they are survived by millions of friends and family who will remember exactly which somebody let these people die while perfecting his three-foot putt.