Waking this morning, I remember what it was like to awaken as a child.  Children are permitted to live in an idyllic world.  They are cared for, they are at the beginning of a long learning curve, of all that responsibility entails.  With responsibility comes stress.  Stress is what it is like to be an adult.  Stress is what you feel, when you remember that today you will write a check to the IRS.

Sometimes I hear something on the News that sticks in my craw.  That happened yesterday when I read two words uttered in an interview with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.  Those two words were “I do.”  Here is the quotation taken from CNBC.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that he believed it was possible that the U.S. could open back up next month.

“I do, Jim,” Mnuchin said after CNBC’s Jim Cramer asked about reopening the economy in May. The comments came during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.”

Why would this simple “I do” affirmation be felt as a personal affront?  In the past I have heard Secretary Mnuchin speak.  He is not a virologist, but an economist.  I know that he serves the President in the most rudimentary fashion. He believes, and speaks unconditionally whatever the President desires that he say.  The President will declare the economy “open for business” in the near term, never mind the data on the virus, — if he can get away with it.  The President cares about “business” and chafes under the restraints that he feels with the exponential spread of covid-19.  He has not taken personal responsibility for imposing the severe constraints upon movement, or for widespread testing that tamping down the plague demands.  He just wants to “open” the economy.  Mnuchin is a mouthpiece for the President.  He may well have said, ‘I am the Mouth of Trump.’

I thought of this passage from J.R.R. Tolkien’s great work.

And thereupon the middle door of the Black Gate was thrown open with a great clang, and out of it there came an embassy from the Dark Tower.

At its head there rode a tall and evil shape, mounted upon a black horse, if horse it was; for it was huge and hideous…, and in the sockets of its eyes and in its nostrils there burned a flame. The rider was robed all in black, and black was his lofty helm; yet this was no Ringwraith but a living man. The Lieutenant of the Tower of Barad-dûr he was, and his name is remembered in no tale; for he himself had forgotten it, and he said: ‘I am the Mouth of Sauron.’

…And he entered the service of the Dark Tower when it first rose again, and because of his cunning he grew ever higher in the Lord’s favour; and he learned great sorcery, and knew much of the mind of Sauron.

The Return of the King, Lord of the Rings, Book 5, Ch 10, The Black Gate Opens by J.R.R. Tolkien