Talking Black and Sleeping White

              Christine Nix is a criminal justice professor but in another life she was the first black female Texas Ranger. In that position as a member of Company F stationed in Waco—she did a variety of investigations. From old-fashioned murder to political corruption to God-knows-what-else. She also served the State of Texas as a de facto Uncle Tom, not to be judgmental of her or her record. Yet. Accommodation in some way or shape or form—to the white power structure in Texas and elsewhere in these United States—aka, The Man—is a given of everyday life for black people. The question is not if, but how much? No matter how you slice it, Ranger Nix stepped over a proverbial line and became a “Tom”—although Uncle Tom is not actually the proper term for a black woman who allies herself with The Man. Males are Toms—not to be politically correct or anything, but officially and in precise terms of black liberation dogma, not to be dogmatic either. Ranger Nix was a badge-and-gun carrying Aunt Jemima, for the State, up in God’s country, Waco, McLennan County, Texas. 

             During a radio interview with In Black America a few years ago, for example, Ranger Nix claimed that she was never treated with anything but respect by her peers. Please. There are two things to know about that. The Associated Press reported, years before the radio interview, that two white male Rangers were disciplined for calling her a bitch and a nigger and for criticizing her marriage to a white man. If Ranger Nix didn’t know about any of that, she was the worst detective in the world. Second, the two white men in question continued in the Ranger Service, no problema, that's the kind of people the Rangers are. Not to be judgmental again. Ranger Nix said the highest praise another officer had given her was his willingness to go through a door, to serve a warrant, with her because he would know Christine Nix had his back. You can say that again.

           There were also her own efforts to brand herself as a traitor to the race and the overall goal of black liberation, however. She spoke to In Black America about her pride in having attempted, back, years before in Company F, to get a black male suspect sentenced to death, not because he was black but because he was guilty. His color in a racially-challenged Southern court system being, apparently, immaterial to her consideration of his crime. She recalled in the interview that she was unsuccessful in “getting him the needle,” as Ranger Nix so quaintly put it. 

             It was in Ranger Nix's best interests after her service to the State of Texas to protect the institution of the Texas Rangers, who have traditionally been the Lone Star race police, not just hunters and killers of Bonnie and Clyde but also of niggers and Mexicans. 

            The Rangers were the ones who did the State of Texas’s killing, especially of Native Americans, not that that’s an issue here. The Rangers are, actually, the North American continent’s oldest and most racially-challenged police agency, Christine Nix served 10 years among the same group of almost exclusively white men that used to shoot across the border at Mexican civilians just for the hell of it and has, rhetorically-speaking, killed almost as many black people as fried food. Nix’s identity as a Texas Ranger—the first black female, lest we forget—became more important to who she is today than her identity as a black woman in the South. Ditto the first black male Ranger who also claimed that he never experienced any racial animus in the agency and who, critically, later worked as a private investigator in Dallas, in his post-Ranger career, trading heavily on his identity as an elite detective and cowboy, not no ordinary nigger. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

           

             More recently there is David Armstrong—with Company B, outside Dallas. Company D is the most sketchy of the Ranger units, by the way. Each Ranger Company stationed across the state has its own personality, its own profile so to speak, its own rap sheet also. Company B in Garland, these were the guys—operating out of Garland then as today—running Jack Ruby, as a snitch, before the Kennedy assassination, and are considered more diabolical even than the guys in Headquarters Company of the Texas Rangers that covers Austin and keeps a protective eye on the Legislature and Governor. Anyway, Sergeant Armstrong of Company B is called in after controversial shootings of black people by police agencies, across the state, as an internal affairs service the Rangers provide to local law enforcement. As if David Armstrong’s presence at the scene assures a fair investigation from the State of Texas which it most certainly does not. 

            “I don’t believe that [the shooting] was reckless or criminally negligent,” Ranger Armstrong, following in Christine Nix's footsteps as the Rangers's house nigger, famously testified last year at the trial of white Dallas Police Officer Amber Guyger. Who shot dead an African-American man in his own home after she entered the wrong apartment and was surprised to find a Negro living there. Remember now? “Based on the totality of the investigation and the circumstances and facts,” Ranger Armstrong explained to the court, hoping to get Amber Guyger a walk. In other words, not to be rude but to be descriptive, he’s a Tom—because the State of Texas keeps Toms on the payroll, often wearing Ranger’s stars—in case of emergency. In the historical perspective, then, who is an Uncle Tom and who is not is particularly pertinent today, in these times of open revolt, after the murder of George Floyd. There is the officially designated other team, in this case The White Man and his mate, the recently-identified Karen, who has roamed amongst us unidentified lo these many years. But most to be feared are our own nominal allies, the race traitors who may look exactly like us but are pushing The Man's Agenda. Not to go all Critical Theory on you.

           These Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas undermine positive change because it’s in their best personal interests to do so, not because it's the right thing to do. As one might explain as part of a critical race dialectic. As a practical matter these Uncle Toms can be just as dangerous as the damn Klan. Race traitors—Fifth Columnists, as they were called in the Spanish Civil War, are the Tio Tacos and Jemimas today. You can also say banana, if you are of a mind to, yellow on the outside & white on the inside, don’t forget the damn bananas, that's my view. In this most recent conflict, terminology is as important as ideology. 

         Uncle Tom has been known by a number of names throughout post-Civil War history, including the unisex handkerchief head which is not much used today but is unusually descriptive. One assumes that the first Toms were descended from house niggers during actual slavery but there's no need to go there. House nigger technically—in contemporary revolutionary usage, in my modest view as a liberated black man—describes a different dynamic altogether. The term Tom arose after Emancipation and can be used by the uninitiated for a unisex handkerchief head-like condemnation. We are not picky as a race. There’s also oreo—like the cookie but not capitalized, please. Whose usage relates to the popular cookie’s famous structure—black on the outside and white on the inside? But you already knew that.

        Minority police officers like Ranger Nix and Ranger Armstrong are particularly prone to becoming Toms, that seems clear. That’s a premise of mine actually, that black cops easily rationalize their betrayal—because they don’t think they’re sleeping with the enemy, “sleeping white” in the vernacular, they think they’re sleeping blue, you feel me? We digress. Some of these pigs have transformed their primary identity as black men and black women into primarily being cops, you know? One also hears the more colloquial “pig,” a term that it is my thesis is not really pejorative or not nearly pejorative enough. With ideology and terminology accounted for, we can now turn to what, it also seems clear, is actually the most salient factor in race betrayal today—sex—love and marriage. First, we must dispose of perhaps the oldest and most racist trope in American history, that of the “pussyhound” black male, obsessed with bedding white women. We are occupied with bedding white women, that's true, but only for revolutionary reasons, clearly. Not merely to bust the proverbial nut, so to speak, but instead in aid of genuine revolutionary purpose. 

        

           The truth can now be told. Through this more accurate lens, heroic African-American men have risked their lives to take down white chicks as well as white men. As part of a critical race dialectic. 

   

           These brothers can now be celebrated for their willingness to attack The Man—who controls the police, the army and the political process, who has most of the money and all of the Ivy League and American academia at his command. To attack the man on the only front where white guys have been vulnerable, for the longest time—in the boudoir. Instead of being Uncle Toms, bowing before the superiority of white pussy—these so-called Sixty Minute Men have been called “unfaithful” or faithless by their own fine black women. Really?

           Only now can the African-American player be recognized by history for what he has done to white women in bed—endowed with a big dick and revolutionary purpose. 60 Minute Men have managed successfully to alienate white female affections from white men, denying The Man a chance to spread his seed. This heightened sexual response to white women, much maligned even by our own sisters—has never been about mere sexual gratification. Perish the fucking thought, you know? Instead it can now be revealed to be part of a larger effort to bind white DNA and deny procreative resources to Caucasian men. That is the ideological rationale in the mind of the liberated black male during a booty call with a white chick, married or unmarried, it’s like a reverse boycott and basically involves thrusting hips. Far from being Uncle Toms—talking black and sleeping white in the revolutionary vernacular—African-American men have actually used BBC to strike a blow for equality. 

              

            This leads, however, in terms of revolutionary orthodoxy and in the interests of gender equality, to an examination of what appears to be a growing tendency of black women to partner with white men. Like the aforementioned Ranger Nix of Company F. Are these sisters merely Aunt Jemimas? Are they race traitors too, just as so many faithless brothers have been accused?

        In the case of mixed couples in which the woman is black a revolutionary lens can be applied that allows us to identify the unfaithful, such as they are, just as women have said of black men, not to repeat myself. Not to say the word hypocrisy. Those who are more interested in achieving success by marrying it than in the progress of the black peeps, through The Struggle, you feel me? Not to lay a guilt trip on anyone but Toms and Jemimas must be identified and opprobrium heaped. What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose. The best example is taken from today’s headlines. Of the three black women who were seen as primary candidates for Vice President Joe Biden’s running mate, to be elected the next Vice President of the United States, none of the three chose in her personal life to pair with a black man. Which requires an examination of ideology, in the black liberation context, just as African-American men have undergone examination in the past for hitting all that white booty. 

           Would Barack Obama have been the Barack Obama we know if his wife was not Michelle Obama and instead a white chick? My premise is no. But Barack Obama belongs to a prior generation, though he is still a young man he’s kind of Old School, really, in this respect, what worked with him may not work now. Senator Kamala Harris and former National Security Advisor Susan Rice both married white men. Nothing in the professional history of the good Dr. Rice, whose ancestry is Caribbean, like Harris's—not North American slave descendants like Dr. King or Malcolm X. Yet no evidence leads to an accusation of race betrayal. 

             In the case of Senator Harris her history as a prosecutor combined with her choice for the marriage bed might lead to further scrutiny, come the revolution. Pairing with Caucasians is not a single all-powerful consideration in black revolutionary ideology but must be viewed in a wider context, through various racial lenses. Sometimes it takes a cracker, like the white male Rangers who criticized Ranger Nix, to point it out. Biology also plays a part. 

             While noble black men have been willing to risk the threats of white fathers, and even white husbands, in order to bind DNA from multiple white women—black chicks are often choosing one attractive white male candidate, to marry, and thus deny one or more Karens access to potential breeding stock. As seen through a critical race dialectic. Whether intended or not. Whether this stratagem is in the best interests of civil rights remains to be seen. Which brings us back to the noble black man. Among the top of the ticket candidates, there is Kanye West, who is also married to a Caucasian but has publicly expressed regret for his choice of a white wife. He has admitted ideological error which is the first step towards political rehabilitation, as we learned from Chairman Mao. The assumption that Kanye is ill does not mean he doesn't feel used by the capitalist corporation, Kardashian Inc. Nor can he be accused of talking black and sleeping white, which might be said, wrongly, of Senator Harris. In San Francisco, where she was district attorney, Kamala's rep was that she never met a black man she didn't want to send to prison. But that was before she married a white guy. The conservative Kanye is in fact talking white and sleeping white too. 

            Of the two greatest race traitors in American history, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, neither was talking black and sleeping white that we know. But the enormity of their crimes (General Powell for buying false intelligence and Secretary Rice for selling it) led to the deaths of tens of thousands of colored people and eclipsed anything except slavery that ordinary Toms have done here in the USA. It’s been policing however that has offered some of the most illustrative accusations of exploitation of people of color, by the pigs, like Ranger Nix, in exchange for advancement. But “talking black and sleeping white” is certainly not only a law and order phenomenon, or a recent one, in historical terms. In summary while the revolution must be a school of unfettered thought, as Fidel Castro told us, it cannot be a school of unfettered action. There must be consequences. Cancel culture is a good thing in other words. Because one has to take responsibility for one’s shit and keep one’s shit clean and aboveboard, or one might get cancelled tomorrow, if you’ve behaved as a counter-revolutionary or a racist running dog, to paraphrase Mao, or a Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima or Tio Taco to quote everybody else. Self-criticism is always called for. Why did you sell out and what did you get out of it are legitimate questions, in the correct dialectic. What we’ve seen the last few months on America's streets, aka BLM protest, is just the warmup for what must come, if viewed through a revolutionary lens.

            Come the revolution—if the revolution comes—there must be revolutionary justice. Cancel Culture on steroids, you could say. Trials and sentences, perhaps time to spend in re-education in the countryside a la the Cultural Revolution or in Siberia a la Joe Stalin. You're not cancelling people for what they've done, you're outing them to make sure they don't do it again. Making sure that everyone knows they are responsible for their own shit, not to repeat myself. "Talking black and sleeping white"—should a defendant face such a serious charge before a revolutionary tribunal—we will allow what lawyers call an affirmative defense, a possible out. Those who are suspected of infidelity to the race can still claim radical purpose for sleeping with the enemy. 

               

Auto-Obituary of Lucius X

During a decades-long career, noted black revolutionary Lucius X traveled the world but was proudest of his time as correspondent for the Monitor in a pisspot town down river from McAllen, Texas called Rio Grande City. It was an experience that X later described as frustrating only because the locals thought he was a narc, there to report back to federal pigs in D.C. on the flourishing U.S.-Mexico drug trade. 

“Rio was a major trans-shipment point, money going one way and drugs the other, I was actually trying to score some weed for myself most of the time I was there,” he reminisced years later of his time on Texas' big river. "I asked a trafficker I knew to just let me sweep up the barn after the next load, you know? I knew the mother lode was in reach but no one would sell to me. That has turned out to be a metaphor for my life.”

The only newsworthy event during his stay was a shipment of white powder that arrived on the Mexican side of the river and traffickers paid $100 to every man, woman and child in the village to carry product from trucks to boats, the money intended so that no one could go to the federales later and tell tales. Even old and grey abuelita was a drug mule that day, Lucius X recalled fondly. The intrepid young reporter wrote a human interest story about how people planned to spend the $100 they earned. He was 69 at the time of his passing, in Puerto Angel, Oaxaca. He is survived by daughter China Bates of Salvador da Bahia, and Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. His lone offspring was the result of a brief hook-up in Porto Alegre during the period of X's world travels. 

Genetically-unique from birth Lucius X was tri-testone positive, a rare autosomal-dominant condition in which a Black man-child is born with three large testicles and inordinate courage. Only six in 14 billion male babies have three big ones. Of those six, only two will live to mate. Lucius X was one of those Negroes.

This extraordinary medical condition has been associated thruout history with African kings. Hannibal, Ramses II, Shaka Zulu as well as African-American revolutionaries Nat Turner, Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey were all tri-testonia positive. “I was born with three and I’ll die with three,” Lucius X told his doctors as a teenager, when the medicos wanted to surgically remove one nut in order to bring him to heel for the White Race. This was Lucius X's first refusal to be de-masculated. It would not be his last. Without the extra virility accompanied by a third nut, Lucius X would never have dared to question the status quo, commentators and doctors agree. Efforts by this X-Man to bring race to the forefront of international dialogue translated into various literary endeavors as well. His one-act play The Pool Man Cometh, about a black family entering the middle class, just celebrated its 1,000th performance, in Stockholm after being shunned at home, where X was blacklisted by The Man and The Man's media. On the scientific front Lucius X actually predicted the end of skin color as a social distinction within decades, as optimists have hoped, but its replacement by DNA. 

“There are two things a black man can’t allow anybody else to do for him,” he wrote to his unborn child in the New Yorker, “his fucking and his fighting.” The classic X essay “Dick Don’t Lie” explores the Black Man’s spiritual relationship with his bone and includes his famous warning for Black Men to avoid Caucasian women, as much as possible, if there is other puddy available, because, “White pussy has killed more niggers than gunfire.” X's “Electric Negro” speaks to the African-American and technology and was first published in the U.K. as “The Black Man and the Internet,” in which the prominent social theorist predicted the Fall of the White Race through the unfiltered protest of the unchained African-American male. Lucius X said he wasn't a sexist, or a racist, "just a realist." 

His mother, who was also a journalist, was denied a job at the Jim Crow-era New York Times, while Lucius X was denied employment half a century later in the same segregated Times newsroom because of his support for the Palestinian peep. He never lost hope however and continued to believe that, historically, most oppressors create the means of their own destruction—in the case of The White Man and The White Woman, Lucius X believed that Achilles heel is the World Wide Web. 

“Hills Like Black Elephants,” one of his most beloved stories, chronicles 48 hours in the life of a young Brother being asked to deny paternity of his girlfriend’s baby, and serves as a soliloquy by this would-be young father. The story appears in most anthologies of World Fiction. He liked to read women’s magazines, X famously said, “to know what the enemy is planning.” He saw women fundamentally as competitors not collaborators, unless she's really really really fine. “The fundamental conflict is not racial,” he wrote, “it’s sexual and I’m not at all sanguine about men’s chances. My sense is that women are plotting all the time.” 

The series of works that best illustrate X's theme was completed late in his life, during his so-called Black Period, and is called by critics, “The Fall of Man.” The scene of the narrative is deep space where X's most controversial work unfolds, the post-Modernist science fiction trilogy, Planet of the Hos. 

The three-book series, unfinished at the time of his death, POH recounts the struggle of a Black Admiral in command of a Federation Fleet chasing pirates in an outer nebula who are raiding robot cargo vessels in deep space. To set the scene. The Black Admiral follows the stolen goods to the far outskirts of the Federation itself—to a planet called Ho, run by women, where men are merely reproductive and used like bee drones, only in service to an all-powerful White Queen. The Times of London has called Planet of the Hos, “the ultimate work on race and gender in Deep Space.” X's oeuvre includes the black man's account of his Final Confrontation with white women who want to de-masculinate him, by draining his seed. “The medium is the message but more importantly,” Lucius X wrote in his autobiographic Electric Negro Plus, “the writer is the story.” His favorite two books, both by the same author, were Planet of the Apes and Bridge over the River Kwai by Pierre Boulle. Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan was X's favorite novel en francais, and Laura Branigan singing "Gloria" his favorite music video.

Throughout his life Lucius X tried to create an authentic Portrait of the American Negro, “etched in charcoal,” as he described his vision, “and painted Black.” In terms of his literary oeuvre, Lucius X is probably best known as author of what many critics consider the greatest single work of Black Literature—a unique story of human redemption that has served to light a fuse for an entire generation's struggle. Nigger on the Run is the story of the small-town thug Flood, the mythic Every Nigger, a petty gangbanger from Mississippi who escapes arrest in Tupelo, where he’s been robbing supermarkets after getting out of prison on parole, who travels to the old Slave Coast of West Africa and discovers his own Promised Land. To set the scene. 

Like the author, Flood has three balls. But unlike the real Lucius X, the antihero Flood lacks the self discipline to deal with the waves of sudden masculinity that eventually destroy him. For a time his experience in l'Afrique allows Flood to rise above baser instincts that he was born with and the sociopathic urges caused by having three Big Ones. 

Only when he returns to the source of his dysfunction, Mississippi, is Flood doomed. In this short work Lucius X portrays a Brother “who achieves Black Liberation not in America but from America,” according to Black Commentary. Denzel Washington who has portrayed Flood on stage describes the antihero of Nigger on the Run as the most difficult role in the Black Oeuvre. “Like Hamlet but deeper,” Washington told BBC last year, after a performance at the Old Vic.

Lucius X was always attentive to stagecraft. His one-man show Black Rage features a Negro male alone on stage, sitting in a chair with a bright light in his eyes, like during a police interrogation, you know? The White Interrogator remains in the shadows. Instead of turning rat and accepting the plea deal, Flood begins rapping to the unseen pig about his experience as a Black Man in America. The Negro turns the chair around, to sit astride it, still discoursing about Black Masculinity to the faceless and anonymous puercos. Rejecting the historical role of the Negro as “victim” of the nefarious White Man, and White Woman, this revolutionary Negro chose to become a Black Avenger instead. Thus was the Black Circle closed. 

The X-Man famously believed in so-called “reparations-on-the-go” in which black people take from white society, in small chunks, compensation for past wrongs. Often when no one is looking, like on the Bulk Aisle at Whole Foods. 

In an interview last year when asked to sum up his own life Lucius X said that he attempted to “reach the other side,” he called it, in which he could express his Black Manhood not without fear of retaliation by the so-called “white bitches,” male and female, black and white. That was something that he doubted would be possible during his lifetime. But, instead, without the retaliation having any effect. That was the goal of his life, he said, not Fame nor Fortune, not the most pussy or to only smoke the best weed. “The coherence of my rap is paramount,” he told the BBC three weeks before he put a gun to his own damn head. To set the scene finally. While in an inner tube a quarter mile offshore from Zipolite, in the State of Oaxaca, in order to feed the fishes and renew the circle once more. The frequent criticism leveled against X's work, that he turned whites into “stick figures,” was never true, Lucius X said. 

“We know white people. How could we not, working in their homes and kitchens and driving them around? Taking care of their spoiled little fuckhead kids? But they don’t know us because when they go to the hood they’re always just passing through, you dig? We are in white homes,” he lamented wistfully, “in order to clean up messes they’ve made.” 

In lieu of flowers he asked everyone to fire up a fat one and put on some funk. 

X suggested, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” by the Gap Band. 

Governor Abbott's Sister-in-Law the MD

  

            Governor Abbott’s sister-in-law is a physician in Austin. She’s internal medicine, works with a group that visits a few hospitals around town, or she did two or three years ago when our paths last crossed. Her name doesn’t matter. Not knowing her on a personal level but having taken orders from her as a nurse, on a couple of occasions, and still not being an expert on her practice or anything but having seen her do her job—talking about her job performance is useful in the context of judging how well the governor himself is doing his, handling pandemic in the state. 

            We had a revealing interaction once a few years ago, not me and the governor but me and his sister-in-law, at my prior hospital or the one before that. So, like, she reminded me, at that time, that we had actually interacted years earlier too—me calling her in the middle of the night once to get orders. My first name is not common and she remembered it and remarked this time, in person, about putting a face to the name and all that. Anyway this time in person she was behind the nurses station doing some charting and the reason for approaching her was that my patient—our patient—was going south. 

           So, like, it wasn’t like TV or a movie, people running here and there—no code was called, that was my call actually and there was no reason to make it. Calling the rapid response team as a precaution might have been appropriate, in hindsight, that won’t be debated here. The problem was developing slowly, the patient wasn’t critical and we had time. It was a problem beyond my training to resolve or fully understand. The patient was African-American, not that that’s important here, a former University of Texas football player, again not that that’s important. His blood pressure was dropping, that was important. An IV was started, he’d gotten a whole bag of fluids and his pressure was still going down. So, like, the physician who happens to be the governor’s sister-in-law looked up at me, listened to my explanation of what was going on and after that it was pretty much textbook all the way. She checked her computer for prior vital signs, checked his labs and looked at her notes, a handful of folded sheets of paper taken from her white coat pocket. She picked up her stethoscope and went to the bedside and did a head to toe examination. As it turned out this guy had an internal bleed.

           The thing about the governor’s sister-in-law is that she’s a good doctor. That’s said with 20 years experience as a RN, having taken a lot of orders, having seen a lot of MDs—the good, the bad and the scary. It’s also said given that nurses like to rag doctors. Working with physicians, taking their orders—not only listening to the decisions being made, but having to carry them out—you get to be a pretty good judge of physician foibles and competency. The governor’s sister-in-law more than passed muster. 

           Most of my experience has been in pediatrics and my occasional practice, for whatever reason, is to imagine people as they were when they were kids. Hearing about this lady doctor’s powerful brother-in-law—and checking her out later, out of the corner of my eye—in my mind’s eye she was a kid back in middle school, sitting at a table alone doing her work. 
           A little introverted, and quiet, good at math and maybe science or drawing, she kept her own counsel except maybe mom. And kept on trucking through medical school, graduated about ten or fifteen ago, during a less diverse time, not at all easy, especially coming from a family of modest means, American-born descendants from Mexico, Wikipedia tells us. And the way nurses judge physicians, it comes down to a basic question: Would you want that doctor taking care of you or would you want him or her writing orders on your child? My answer is most definitely yes. Because, me standing there telling her about the patient going bad, what was important about this physician's response was what she didn’t do as much as what she did. 

            She didn’t keep on charting. She stopped typing at my approach. She didn’t tell me to send blood to the lab. She didn’t say, “I’ll put him on my list.” She didn’t tell me to do the head to toe exam myself. She stopped what she was doing, made eye contact and got up to examine the patient. She’s a good doctor and a good person too. She is probably also under considerable pressure not to fuck up, as the governor’s sister-in-law, and all, the same way the governor is under pressure not to fuck up because he’s the governor. Anyway, no code got called. The governor's sister-in-law took care of the problem before it became an emergency. The thing that nursing teaches you, and taught me, is that the best way to deal with an emergency is not to have it in the first place. 

            Get to the patient early, like the governor’s sister-in-law did with the ex-Longhorn. With kids especially there’s nothing you can say later as explanation to a mother or father who has lost a child and the best way to handle that conversation is not to have it, which is an impossible standard but one to keep in mind with COVID-19. The best way to deal with a viral outbreak may be to lock down—extreme measures may be called for—call the code—but better yet, don't have the outbreak in the first place. The learning curve can be steep. 

            An example of how everyone was so caught by surprise involves, once again, the governor's sister in law, the MD. Many physicians, internists like our lady doctor, are part of private practices, of maybe a dozen MDs, or advanced practice nurses, also mostly internists, who have contracts to see patients at different hospitals around town and must travel between those sites. 

           Ditto some of the specialists and many, many surgeons. They travel between hospital campuses. And just because you have a medical degree, you know, or a nursing license, and no matter how well you scrub your hands, you can still be a disease vector, and despite the gowns and gloves—and the masks—you can be a carrier. And had people thought of that beforehand, maybe, but maybe not, because what we’re seeing now is unlike anything we’ve seen before. This is some dystopian shit. 

            So, like, that's why it's good to know there are good doctors out there. It’s important because it really is like your mother told you back in the day. You can be judged you by the company you keep. And the governor is presumably keeping good company, with the First Lady's sister. And let's hope he's listening to her advice.

           

 

The Queen of Big Pharma Talks the Covid-19 Vaccine

 There’s been a pissing match between President Trump and the world’s second-richest man, Bill Gates, and Gates’ wife Melinda, who is from Dallas btw, about the president’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis and for good reason. We won’t go there. Instead what’s interesting is how the individuals involved, none of who is a doctor or has any kind of healthcare training or research cred, has been so sure of what they’re talking about. At the heights of power or wealth you can hire experts. 

In fact the president has been widely criticized for doing just that, hiring Big Pharma ex-executive Moncef Slaoui—former head of drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline’s vaccine division—to lead the U.S. government’s push for a COVID-19 vaccine. In the early days of the pandemic the Gates Foundation had its own veteran of Big Pharma leading vaccine efforts too. Her name is Susan Desmond-Hellmann—everyone calls her Sue. You can bet Sue was where the Gateses got their information to challenge the president. She's produced a few medicins herself. Then she stepped down from the Gates foundation, perhaps because it’s hard to criticize the president when your science guy, or girl in this case, has worse ethics than his does. Sue has returned to her first love, Big Pharma, as a director of Pfizer. She has just made her own pronouncements on a COVID vaccine and it’s especially scary coming from this scary lady doctor.

Dr. Desmond-Hellmann served as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s CEO for almost six years and is an oncologist by training. Described as über-competent and very focused—the way Atilla the Hun was—she is a former chancellor of the University of California’s healthcare campus in San Francisco and before that was president of product development at drugmaker Genentech (now owned by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche.) While concerns have been raised about the possibility of ethical embroilments for Professor Slaoui, being a Big Pharma alum and all that, and working for President Trump, in the case of Dr. Desmond-Hellmann ethical compromise is not a mere possibility. She’s a full-fledged bio thug. Which may make her a good person to have around in the present pandemic environment. She recently expressed a few thoughts on the search for a COVID-19 vaccine, specifically, and her insights are valuable because the one thing we know about Dr. Desmond-Hellmann is that she doesn’t let sentiment get in the way of creating pharmaceuticals. But, as your mother told you, you still have to consider the source. So, like, a few more words about Sue.

         We pick up her background in a passage from A Nigger in Nursing, about the culture of racism and corruption at the University of California’s San Francisco campus, where a young Dr. Desmond-Hellmann served first as chief resident and a couple of decades later returned as chancellor. 

         “Her back story was easy to outline because Sue talked a lot about herself: If you spent any time on the university website you got a general idea of her career trajectory without even trying. Medical school in Las Vegas, a very successful residency in oncology and then teaching in San Francisco followed by two years in Uganda doing research that she portrayed as—and well may have been—a genuine effort to help. But which may also have been a first step in another career entirely, Big Pharma, making really big bucks might have been on her radar even in Africa,” Nigger tells us. “Upon return to the U.S. she and her husband, also a physician, worked in practice for a time in her chosen field, in the South, and then she went for the money, first at Bristol Myers Squibb in New Jersey and later at Genentech in South San Francisco. When she came back to UCSF as chancellor in 2010 she had just cashed in her Genentech stock and received $30 million, per press reports. Her husband was already independently wealthy, Hollywood money. Suddenly, Nicholas Hellmann and Susan Desmond-Hellmann were a S.F. power couple with the spotlight on her.”

          Or the Wikipedia version: “Returning to clinical research, Desmond-Hellmann became associate director of clinical cancer research at Bristol-Myers Squib Pharmaceutical Research Institute. While there, she was the project team leader for Taxol. In 1995 she joined Genentech as a clinical scientist; she was named chief medical officer the following year, and in 1999 became executive vice president of development and product operations. From March 2004 through April 2009 she was chief of product development, playing a role in the development of two of the first gene-targeted therapies for cancer, Avastin and Herceptin.” Susan Desmond-Hellmann is not a person who thinks of what you can’t do, like a lawyer—what is or is not permitted by law or by custom. She thinks of what you can do, physically, like an engineer or the scientist she is. That’s the source of her success, she has a wider view of possibilities than most people. That’s the source of her genius and is probably what attracted Bill Gates to her in the first place. It’s also what gets Sue into trouble.

         Ethical troubles began almost immediately after assuming office as chancellor of UCSF, on the imposing Mount Parnassus, in Outer Sunset, in Baghdad by the Bay. To set the scene.

         The New York Times reported that her University of California financial disclosure form for 2010, while Sue was serving as leader of the preeminent public healthcare university in the world—that includes a well-regarded, cutting edge cancer research operation, and an anti-tobacco institute, exclusively dedicated to digging dirt on cigarette companies. Sue’s disclosure included major holdings of the maker of Marlboro cigarettes. She explained to the Times that she had merely signed what her investment adviser placed in front of her, yet the financial disclosure was handwritten and her initials appeared beside corrections in the margins. An appalled murmur arose on Mount Parnassus, in Baghdad by the Bay. That was just Sue, you might say, and it was just the beginning. Also on her watch the federal government fined UCSF for a wide variety of inhumane conditions for lab animals. She would eventually be sued in federal court by the African-American who served as UCSF’s diversity coordinator, who said she fired him for speaking up about race issues at this traditionally white UC campus. When she was called out on her ties to industry she wrote and published a paper in a scientific journal in which she and UCSF’s then head of commercialization, neurologist Clay Johnston—now dean of the University of Texas Dell School of Medicine in Austin—said that there were not enough ties between academia and Big Pharma. In other words she doubled down.

        There’s a classic Sue story, told by former UC President Mark Yudof, who actually hired her to lead UCSF. No moral giant himself, Yudof nonetheless marveled over the audacity and impropriety of her management proposals, in an oral history given to a UC Berkeley researcher in 2018. You have to imagine the scene. It’s 2012 at a UC Regents meeting. In San Francisco, Chancellor Desmond-Hellmann is planning to ram through construction of a new campus in Mission Bay—including a Genentech Hall for Regents’ meetings—displacing a formerly minority neighborhood in the process and God knows how many low-income residents. But we digress. President Yudof picks up the narrative from there. 

        Press reports were that the Regents’ response to her new idea was icy but It wasn’t gentrification that upset them. Sue had decided she wanted to privatize the whole San Francisco campus. 

“One thing I’ve discovered in life,” Yudof told the Berkeley historian, “is you can spend a lot of time trying to move around the black boxes and get nowhere by saying the answer to our problems is in a restructuring of governance. [But] it’s in the [California] constitution, the governance of the University of California. You’ve got the speaker of the Assembly; you’ve got the California superintendent of public instruction; you’ve got the lieutenant governor on the board; you’ve got regents that are there. We’re not going to turn the world upside down and establish a new board for UCSF. If we were on a blank slate, maybe there could be movement in that direction. And we’re not a private university. Even though they’re only paying 5 percent of the bills, the taxpayers say, ‘Wait a minute, we built this place over all these years,’ and now you want to be free of what I call public accountability? So it just was not to be. Sue made some governance changes, which I think were all good, but at the end of the day — to be honest with you, I didn’t make many phone calls," Yudof said. “It was going nowhere. I told her that — the structural stuff. Everything else she was doing was really first-class, but I just couldn’t see how it would work. Every time someone says, ‘Let’s take one of our campuses private,’ I don’t know what that means. The taxpayers built a lot of the buildings; they built it over 100 years, 150 years. The legislature’s not going to do it. The people are going to vote for a constitutional amendment to set a campus free? I wasn’t going to waste a lot of time, but I also wasn’t going to campaign against it because I knew it would never happen.” That’s Sue again. In the end her academic career was done in by another media report, much like the one about her investment choices, this time in the Washington Post.

The story was about two Genentech drugs—Avastin and Lucentis—one that costs $50 and the other $2,000 a dose and both of which do the same job in preventing blindness from macular degeneration. So, like, the story was about Sue’s time as Genentech's head of product development, the five years right before she came to UCSF as chancellor, basically, and as the Post recalled, the extreme efforts she took to push the more expensive drug by misrepresenting the cheaper one.

“’When Lucentis did go on sale,’” the Post reported, “'Genentech’s blockbuster drug already had a competitor [Genentech’s already existing and cheaper cancer drug, Avastin, which works just as well for macular degeneration]. How could the company convince doctors and hospitals that Lucentis had any major advantage over Avastin? Over and over again [The Company] sought to discourage use of Avastin by raising concerns about its safety. They told doctors that Avastin was not approved by the FDA for use in the eye—Lucentis was. They reminded doctors that if the repackaging firms cutting Avastin into smaller doses were careless, infection could be introduced. And despite the lack of conclusive evidence on the point, they said that Avastin patients might suffer more side effects than Lucentis patients. Sometimes, senior FDA officials said, these warnings stretched the truth.’ The named culprit in the misrepresentation in which patients facing blindness were forced to pay $2000 a dose for a medication rather than $50 was one Susan Desmond-Hellmann—incumbent chancellor of the University of California San Francisco, although the authors of the Post story did not appear to know that when they published. 

“Genentech stopped selling Avastin to repackaging companies that cut the med into smaller doses,” the Post said, in order to force sales of the 4000% more expensive Lucentis. On Sue's watch. The result was that Genentech under Sue’s leadership pushed a med that was 40 times more expensive and no more effective because that math was better for her company. Which is Sue too. Despite being an innovator and thinking what no one else dares to think, including massively overcharging patients, she is oh so conventional in one respect. Sue likes money. Actually she spoke on that very issue, in a Zoom conference at UCSF in early June, after leaving Bill Gates’ employ. The conference was intended to address recent shocks to the American system of health care, the George Floyd murder and COVID—race, money and disease, in other words. And how things might change in the future? And here, at first, her wisdom was conventional.

“For me, I don’t think you can or should blow up the existing medical system,” she said, speaking for example of the important role of academic medicine. “I think that there are tools that one can use with existing infrastructure to drive more productive outcomes. I actually think that UCSF or Stanford in and of themselves are less an impediment than the number of doctors who go into expensive specialties. I think that is an impediment if you just say we don’t need that many surgeries of this, or interventions on that. Because if you don’t drive medicine that way—humans do what they’re incentivized to do. If you pay differently, people will go where the money is. So, the one thing I found at UCSF and at Genentech, less so at Gates Foundation, because we didn’t have that much money, but the money matters.” Where she really got interesting—innovative or anti-innovative, depending on your point of view—was the subject of vaccines and research on vaccines. Cue COVID-19. To set the scene.

As a Big Parma executive and research university chancellor, Sue was a big proponent of speed in studies and speeded-up approval of drugs by the federal government. Apparently no longer. Asked about the flood of unvetted research on the COVID virus, she said, in UCSF’s Zoom conference, “I think it’s mostly bad. And I’m surprised to hear me say that.” Again she referenced her time at Genentech. “One of the most important assets that a [drug] product developer has is confidence. When I was at Genentech, it was just, ‘Be sure about it,’" she said. “Not uncommonly we would use more time or more [test] patients to have more confidence. What I think is the downside to the speed that’s going on now—and you see it, you follow Twitter, it’s the wild west, and I’m not talking about crazy people,” she said, but instead established scientists. “The papers are coming out so fast that people are having to change things. The latest is the hydrochloroquine study. You do not want to have a bunch of retractions. So, I’m pretty negative about the early publications when people haven’t seen the source data, or just going too fast.” 

But she draws a distinction between publication and product development, where she’s more gung ho. “I think you can go very fast but you have to have a clear asterisk. So, it’s not uncommon in oncology and cancer medicine to say I’m getting an accelerated approval and people who are very sick and are going to die of cancer can get this medicine, while in parallel, we do a trial. And if that trial is negative the drug is gone because that asterisk is on there. There are ways with products that you can do that. Here is what I don’t know how to do. I don’t know how to do a vaccine approval—an accelerated approval—if three hundred and thirty million people are going to get it.” 

She returned to her favorite subject. 

Money

“So, now, I could make a case that you could do a vaccine, because there’s so much money. You have so many patients that you have a big big database, that you feel good about it, or you have a small safety database and you go to small groups of individuals who are at particularly high risk, and so you build your safety database. But for me the two things are confidence, number one, because once you screw up on confidence, it’s over.” Sue changed the Gateses but apparently the foundation has changed her too. Because she said her second concern is transparency, something she wasn’t known for before, on Mount Parnassus.

“The second thing is just clarity of communication. If this is an accelerated approval, if it’s conditional—if this is, ‘we’re not sure yet,’ tell people you’re not sure yet. People can go with that. But this aura of confidence, especially when you’re not confident yet, makes me very very concerned, especially with vaccines. I think with vaccines it has to be safe and effective unless you’re really clear about who you give the vaccine and then those people know how much you know about it.”

On the subject of a COVID 19 vaccine, presumably including the one being developed by her own Pfizer, “I think it’s great they’re going as fast as they are. This vaccine speed is truly unprecedented. And not being done sloppy, not being done bad, but when it’s ready for approval, just think, okay, you’re in charge of the vaccine program, you start Phase 3 [trials] in July, you go to December, you have six months of data, and the wrap-up of the patients in the trials, and in January you’re going to treat two hundred million patients with your vaccine? You’ve got to make sure you know enough.” Which turned out to be the case.

          “Here’s the thing,” Sue said during her Zoom comments at the Covid end-of-the-world conference on the Mount. “So, this is for most product developers. This is binary. If you had a cure for COVID 19, have at it—have a human challenge model. If you don’t have a cure—if you’re 25, if you’re 40, if you’re 15—I’m not going to challenge somebody when I don’t have a remedy for what I’m challenging them with. There’s a human challenge model for malaria, but we have drugs for malaria. My own belief is that the enthusiasm for a human challenge [model for COVID 19] kind of went up, and then it went away. And it may be because of that, because there’s just no cure.” She was asked on Zoom, by Dr. Robert Wachter, head of the Department of Medicine at UCSF—an institution where money is used as a reward, a tool and a cudgel—medicine can be a dirty business. 

           Dr. Wachter asked her about just paying test participants for taking the COVID-19 vaccine—for the danger incurred by being guinea pigs, and all.  

“You could make the argument, and you could pay them,” Sue said, “and make sure they really volunteered and all that. I don’t think it’s crazy that—let me be clear—I don’t think it’s crazy. I don’t think it’s crazy at all—and I [also] understand why people are avoiding it.” Sue's other recent gig has been Facebook, where she resigned from the board last year. For most of the last decade she's been the lead independent Facebook director which meant she was responsible for keeping Mark Zuckerberg & Company on the straight and narrow path of ethics. We know how that turned out. 

The point is that Sue has the moral development of a nematode and if she's concerned about the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, even by her own company Pfizer, how should that make the rest of us feel?