I had a unique opportunity last week to set up a meeting between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Governor Tate Reeves. How that came about is a story for another day. For the sake of secrecy, the three of us met Sunday, shortly after nightfall, on The Balcony. The following is an excerpt from our t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: Tate, for a long time you were saying that you were going to take a surgical approach to wearing masks in Mississippi rather than to declare a statewide mandate. What do you know about surgery?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: Well, Tony, I watched a lot of E.R. and MASH back in the day. I learned that sometimes surgery is messy and that doctors and nurses don\u2019t always get along. But they keep on slicing and splicing and suturing and suctioning until their job is done. Sometimes the patient dies, but most of the time they live. I also recently watched my personal physician sew my butt back on after the Legislature handed it to me on a platter over my education budget. I think I\u2019m a little less anal now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: Do you mind telling me how you applied that to the Coronavirus pandemic?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: Not at all, Tony. When the rates of infection got high in a county I\u2019d get my gubernatorial scalpel\u2014a pen, of course\u2014and declare mandatory mask measures. Then when another county got bad I\u2019d do the same thing there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: That sounds kind of like playing Whack-A-Mole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: Bingo! Whack COVID in Hinds County. Whack COVID in Harrison County. Whack COVID in DeSoto County. Whack COVID in Jackson County. Hell, Tony. I absolutely love being a whacker!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: No doubt. Weren\u2019t you concerned about the infection spreading to adjoining counties?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: Not until I learned that the Coronavirus doesn\u2019t play by the rules. You see, Tony, we have this thing in Mississippi called \u201ccounty lines.\u201d These lines separate the counties. You can clearly see them on a map. The Coronavirus ignored the county lines and crossed over without permission\u2014not unlike the Duke boys crossing the Hazzard County line to get away from Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane. Love me some Dukes of Hazzard! Off the record, I wanted to get me a big ole Confederate flag like theirs on my official state vehicle but the damn ACLU stopped me. Freakin\u2019 outside agitators!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: You really expected the Coronavirus to remain within your county lines?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: Tony, respectfully, you\u2019re up there in that Washington D.C. swamp that\u2019s teeming with corruption and backstabbing. Down here we\u2019re law abiding citizens. We\u2019ve got that southern hospitality thing going for us. The virus turned out not to be very hospitable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony (chuckling): Actually, the hospitality rates on the pandemic are quite high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: Huh?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: Never mind. Let\u2019s talk college football. You just said it was essential in Mississippi. What about the players and the fans getting infected?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: I have come up with a solution to a problem that has yet to exist. The players already wear face masks on their helmets, so we\u2019re ahead of the game there. In addition, they\u2019ll all wear full-body latex suits. I came up with that one myself. I\u2019m pretty damn proud of it, if I may say so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: Body condoms. Interesting. Tate, you and our president think so much alike it\u2019s downright frightening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate (blushing): Aw, shucks, Tony. I \u2018preciate that. As for the fans, unfortunately we\u2019re going to have to limit the crowd size, and that grieves me greatly since football is the national pastime in Mississippi. But having crowds could move us closer to that herd immunity thing and a pruning of the weaker parts of our population. Mississippi could come out of this pandemic a winner, all because of football and my great leadership!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: Tate, I can see my time is wasted here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tate: It is, Tony, but I \u2018preciate you coming down. You couldn\u2019t have known we were so on top of things. Now you can go help some of those backward states. Tony, you\u2019re a go-getter\u2014a real tiger. Tony the Tiger! You might want to use that someday. Put it on your mask!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tony: I\u2019ll get right on that, Tater\u2014er, Tate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u2026and that\u2019s the View from The Balcony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Randy Weeks is a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Life Coach. He can be reached at randallsweeks@gmail.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a unique opportunity last week to set up a meeting between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Governor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":39753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11902],"tags":[16948,10286,6883,10878],"class_list":["post-100873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-randy-weeks","tag-anthony-fauci","tag-randy-weeks","tag-tate-reeves","tag-the-view-from-the-balcony"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/2017-5-11-View-from-the-Balcony.jpg?fit=600%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}