Spanish views from a small town

Is anybody at the wheel? Is it just spinning wildly as the bus plies the road, leaving the marks of rubber on the road as its driver swerves under the effects of only God knows what? The latest headline makes one think the bus is about to plow into a stone wall. "Trump's new Covid-19 doctor believes in alien DNA." As I was perusing Facebook yesterday evening, my eyes were arrested by that link. I thought that surely it was something from The Onion, or some other satirical outlet (really, with the way things are going, the normal news sounds satirical enough). I saw that it was from The Daily Beast, not exactly Pulitzer journalism, but I decided to look it up. Sure enough, different news outlets of different stripes carried news of a Stella Immanuel, who pushes hydroxychloroquine. She also pushes demons, alien DNA, the Illuminati, and claims of vaccines to stop people from believing in religion.  Seeing what Trump is like, one can understand how he can fall for somethi...

I vaguely remember the Jonestown massacre being talked about when I was a little girl. There are images in my head of an airfield and a man with dark sunglasses, a white suit, and a name that sounded like something out of a book, Jim Jones. What I remember most was that my mother wouldn't buy me Kool-Aid after that. That, along with Patty Hearst, were the stories in my childhood that made my parents worry about who I listened to. Those incidents also seemed strange to me. If the people knew they were being told to drink poison, why do it? If Patty knew robbing banks was wrong, why do it? Gradually, I learned about brainwashing, though it still seemed very strange that a person would give up all sense of reality to believe a charlatan. Brainwashing isn't a thing of the seventies. It's alive and well. Today's charlatan is in the White House, and is giving advice during a pandemic in which doctors are still hitting out blindly to cure patients.   Before the end of th...