A profile in dishwashing courage

The President I'm sad to say is a choker, he chokes and then he chokes again and again. "The cure must not be worse than the crisis."  What's that mean? It would mean something if Samuel Beckett had written it, and he might have, he was quite capable, it sounds like something Beckett might have said somewhere in The Unnameable or Malone Dies, if I remember the sound correctly.

I reach for  Beckett, he's right next to the Dawn dish soap. It's The Unnameable I'm looking for all right, I knew it, I had the courage of my conviction--

At the centre of this enclosure stood a small rotunda, windowless, but well furnished with loopholes.

Of all the sentences to have latched on to me, to have attached itself if you will, why this one? I'll need the scrubber or the steel wool to get it off.

The small rotunda? The President's mouth.

Windowless? Where the President addresses the media.

Well furnished with loopholes? Self-explanatory.

I am not a political man, per se. I am a man made political by events that affect me but are beyond my control. There are so many of us, and more and more, simple men washing the dishes, doing the laundry, sweeping the floors. We've learned through the years how to keep things going, having acheived some sort of baseline competency, how to tell the difference between a dish rag and a paper towel.

Who knew Samuel Beckett could be so consoling? And that a book written three years after my birth some 70 years ago so prophetic?

Consoling in what way you might ask?

I'm not sure. That I remembered Beckett's little sentence for so many years, and had the courage of my foresight to fight through the greasy suds of so many pots and pans to get to the source of problem.

Hygiene in the time of Trump--you wash your teeth and brush your hands.