Would you rather be eaten by a lion or a tiger? Swallowed by a python or squeezed to death by a boa constrictor? These are the sort of hypothetical questions that bugged the crap out of me even as a kid. But now, there’s nothing remotely hypothetical about them. These are the choices that confront us even as we shut our eyes or reach for another drink. For Santa Barbara’s county supervisors — and pretty much all elected officials — it has become the only question. How much can we open up our economy without putting ourselves in grave peril?
There are no good answers, only bad and worse. That was the takeaway from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony in front of the Senate yesterday even as doubters and skeptics like Kentucky’s Rand Paul — the floridly contrarian libertarian — sought to pin the nation’s most trusted health advisor’s ears back. It would take a lot more than Rand and his curly locks to flush Fauci, who squarely contradicted his boss, Donald Trump, making it very clear that, no, we absolutely do not have a handle on this thing, and we risk a massively lethal backlash if we move too quickly to the turn the lights back on. To the extent there’s anyone left in Las Vegas, the only action now is how long will it take for Trump to fire Fauci.
In Santa Barbara, we have no Fauci. We have instead Dr. Henning Ansorg, a relatively recent arrival to Santa Barbara now just a year into his new gig as public health officer, a weirdly obscure but exceptionally powerful position akin to being both doctor and sheriff. Where Fauci radiates both twinkle and gravitas, Ansorg is solid and stolid. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t ingratiate. He speaks haltingly and carefully with a slight but pronounced German accent. His bedside manner isn’t so much bad as it is nonexistent. To the extent Ansorg radiates anything, it’s a combination of duty and doom.