A Plague Death in Arizona

The Political Autopsy

Someone just died of the plague in Arizona. Not metaphor, not clickbait. The medieval, “bring out your dead” kind, only this time with air conditioning and TikTok. Coconino County, July 10th. Pneumonic plague. Modern antibiotics could have saved him, if he’d gotten them soon enough.

He didn’t.

Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: This singular death? On its own, it’s tragic, but not political. Sometimes bad luck just wins. Even George Washington (if he rose from the dead and swapped his wooden teeth for a stethoscope) might not have caught it early enough. The symptoms look like every miserable flu. Hell, most of us would self-medicate with DayQuil and regret. But the real problem isn’t this one death, it’s the gaping holes in our defenses, holes we dug ourselves. And we’re not filling them in. We’re making them bigger. Trump’s “America First” in practice means “America Alone.” Cut the CDC. Slash NIH. Ax Medicaid. Pull out of the World Health Organization. Put public health jobs on the chopping block. This isn’t theoretical. It’s math. Less funding means fewer boots on the ground, fewer labs running tests, and less time to catch the canary in the coal mine (or, more accurately, the prairie dog keeling over in the desert). The whole system gets slow, blind, and noisy. Outbreaks get missed. Critical windows for treatment slam shut. Suddenly, what should have been a contained infection is now a news alert, and a warning.

Prairie dog die-offs used to set off alarms, triggering investigations, stopping outbreaks before they started. Now, with surveillance in freefall and lab resources gutted, those warnings go unheard. Plague, Hantavirus, whooping cough—take your pick. If you want to know what “American exceptionalism” looks like in the age of austerity, it’s the moment you realize you’re not the exception.

You’re just next.

So yeah, one person dying of the plague isn’t the apocalypse. But gutting our ability to detect, treat, and stop outbreaks? That’s how you write the opening scene of “The Stand” and pretend it’s just another Wednesday.

Ring Around the Rosie

Pockets full of budget cuts

Ashes, ashes

Are We all Great Again?