The West Wing Lost

In the eternal search to find something to watch on TV (why is it so hard?) my wife and I have started watching "The West Wing" again.  I highly recommend it.  It's one of the few things that makes me laugh theses days. I've been surprised by that.  By how much humor is in there.  I mostly remembered the serious policy discussions.  But there's a bunch of humor. And my sense of humor seems to be  stuck in 1999.

Anyway, we were watching an episode last night (Season Two, Episode 13) and in a debate about the 2nd Amendment, Toby Ziegler says;

"...but if you combine the populations of  Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan,  Switzerland , Sweden, Denmark and Australia you get a population roughly the size of the United States. We had 32,000 gun deaths last year. They had 112."

"Hmmm" I says.

Great Britain (Okay, the UK) -- 10
France -- 18
Germany -- 5
Japan -- 18
Switzerland -- 2
Sweden -- 3
Denmark -- 1
Australia -- 11
__________
68

Toby Ziegler rants on;  "You think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or do you think it's because those guys have gun control laws?"

965

That's how many Americans died from COVID-19 yesterday. We had 965 COVID deaths  yesterday.  They had 68.

"You think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature?"  Or do you think it's because those guys don't have Donald J. Trump as President?

I keep telling myself that Josiah Edward Bartlet was never really President.  His Administration is the Administration that never was. It didn't happen.  It's just a fairy tale.  But every time an episode ends I want to cry about what we have lost.  About what America could have been.

Don Brown
September 5, 2020

Note: As always, I rely on the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University for COVID-19 data.