A Cure for Alzheimer’s

NOTE: As many of you know, I am currently in Milan, Italy teaching a course in change management as part of the international MBA program at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart. Even though I did not have time to acknowledge it last month, October 28 was the 10th anniversary of my first post on this site. I just want to take a moment to thank all you readers who have hung around for the past ten years and those who joined the caravan later in the journey.

Last Wednesday, my Change Management class in Milan included a Harvard Business School case analysis titled, “Starbucks Customer Service. It explores the options the coffee megacompany had when its original vision of being a “third place” (after home and work), where people could congregate and have a quality cup of any number of customized coffee drinks, was challenged by younger customers who were best characterized as “grab and go.”

Whenever I teach this case, I begin with a video of Lewis Black ranting about Starbucks in a monologue he calls, “The End of the Universe.” He relates how he experienced the end of the universe in Houston, Texas when he saw a Starbucks, turned around, and right across the street there was another Starbucks. He claims, if you stand equidistant between the two, time stands still. “And that my friends, is the end of the universe.” But then he asks who could possibly be the target market for this phenomenon. After apologizing if he offends anyone, he reveals the joke only works for people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. “Who else, after finishing their coffee at the first Starbucks, would point across the street and say, ‘Look, a Starbucks. What do you say we get a cup of joe’.”

I often thought about Black’s routine immediately after the 2024 presidential election. Who were these voters, who having watched Donald Trump lie to them over 30,000 times in four years, botch the response to a pandemic and then incite an insurrection to overturn an election, thought Americans needed another cup of Donald Trump? This “joke on democracy” only works if Trump’s target audience was Alzheimer’s patients.

For once, however, Trump’s Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll (yes, I know that’s backwards, but it’s the only way the joke works) habit of being both the arsonist and fireman may be America’s saving grace. In what I hope will become known as Project Warp Speed II, Donald J. Trump, in less than one year, may have discovered the cure for the Alzheimer’s outbreak which infected the MAGAverse.

Think of last Tuesday’s off-term election as the first clinical trial. The preliminary results are quite promising. What remains to be seen is whether the return of one’s memory in permanent or whether it is temporary, much like Charlie Gordan’s intelligence enhancement in Daniel Keyes’ novel Flowers for Algernon (and the 1968 film “Charly” starring Cliff Robertson and Claire Bloom). Or Leonard Lowe (Robert DeNiro) in “The Awakenings.” Data on the long-term prognosis is likely to emerge from the second-stage clinical trial next November.

So let’s give credit where credit is due. This breakthrough would not be possible without Trump’s constant intervention. Equally ironic is the fact this potential cure contradicts everything experts have posited about treating dementia-related disorders. Study after study about psychosocial care for people with dementia heralds the use of family photos or images of pleasant past events in one’s life.

In this case, the exact opposite is true. The cavalcade of reminders during Trump 2.0–the disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law, the incompetence, the corruption, the lies, the hypocrisy, the lack of empathy, the embarrassments on the international stage–have refired the cranial synapses which five years ago convinced voters an extension of Trump 1.0 made no sense. Equally important, the cure requires no costly medication. Every day Trump delivers another dose whether it is demolishing the East Wing of the White House, holding garish and ostentatious parties at Mar-a-Lago while 40 million Americans wonder where their next meal will come from, pardoning criminals who have contributed to his personal wealth, deploying masked thugs to harass immigrants who have done nothing wrong but put in a hard day’s work, et cetera.

The cure was always right there under our noses. “Let Trump be Trump.”

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP