Meeting your heroes can be demoralizing. Reading more than 1,000 pages of their personal diary can be worse. Or, alternatively, totally riveting, at least in that rubbernecking-at-a-car-crash kind of way—the car crash, in this case, being one of most storied careers in the history of American science.That’s been my takeaway after cringing my way through the pandemic-era musings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases inexplicably saved on a government server.Predictably, Fauci’s diaries made their way into the hands of one of mainstream science’s most notorious mean girls: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Also predictably, hundreds of pages of Fauci’s entries came to light—or were leaked to light—just in time to embarrass the embattled doctor before his appearance on Wednesday in front of Paul’s Senate committee that’s investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. In response to taunts and baiting questions from Senate Republicans, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.If only he’d shown the same discretion with his diary.A generous reading of the compilation is that Fauci, long seen as a paragon of selfless, nonpartisan government service, was attempting to catalog the mounting disbelief he felt during a surreal period in the nation’s history—and certainly in his own history. “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he wrote in one entry from April 2020. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.” He refers to “stories of granmothers who have crushes” on him (the misspelling is Fauci’s) and to petitions to vote him “Sexiest Man Alive.”[Read: The unmaking of Anthony Fauci]But whatever Fauci’s intentions might have been, the document has become an instant classic in the genre of bubble-world anthropology that confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about Washington being a cesspool of pampered, preening, and panting self-regard. More than a decade ago, I wrote a book that tried to explain to readers, essentially, what Beltway people are really like when the cameras aren’t rolling and the talking points are tossed aside. If I were working on that book now, Fauci’s diary would be a godsend.His saucer-eyed romp behind the curtain renders a not-especially flattering impression of the people allegedly in charge of our country during a precarious time. Foremost, this includes the diarist himself, as Fauci becomes more and more high on his own supply of Washington adulation, at a time when COVID death rates… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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