Hero Stuff

As one of my partners in the paramedic game put it:

Everyone wants to be a hero, until it’s time to do Hero Stuff.

Let’s use that lens to compare two leaders in extreme crisis: Governor Andrew Cuomo’s management of the COVID pandemic in New York, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s leadership during the Russian invasion. 

First, Cuomo: The Governor was called by fate to do Hero Stuff. Our media reported that he was doing Hero Stuff and gave him an Emmy award for apparent Hero Stuff. He probably believed he was answering the call. While his decision to return COVID patients to the nursing homes, the very place where they would do the most harm, doomed a disproportionate number of our most vulnerable, causing the worst outcome from COVID in the country (almost twice as bad as the next-worst, often three times worse than average). 

He lied to conceal the damage.

We can speculate that Governor Cuomo lied for any of several reasons: to sell a book, his lies at some point turned into more lies for CYA (Cover Your Ass), or he was maneuvering for his political career (which also meant battling his Republican enemies in the Trump administration). None of this is Hero Stuff.

Looking at Cuomo’s biography gives us no reason to expect he would behave any differently. He is a life-long political functionary, his dad’s “hatchet man,” himself another life-long politico. Son Andrew is a legendary bully (and got away with the COVID lies by bullying the whistle blowers, evidently). That means that for two career generations, the ecosystem he lived in was the world of politics, infamous for its unreality and compromises (compromise is almost an antonym for Hero Stuff). A man with that perspective would very naturally see the COVID crisis mainly through a political lens.

Our political system rewards people like this. We know it by the simple fact that there are so many of them around (with nobody doing Hero Stuff visible on either side of the isle, waiting on the bench, for as far as the eye can see). That’s before we get into the many studies that correlate politicians very strongly with psychopathy, which is basically defined as a lack of empathy. And that lack of empathy is precisely the trait needed to be able to make a decision no intern (hell, no orderly) would make: putting COVID cases where they posed the greatest risk (and then distorting the evidence of the damage they were causing). Regular people crawl away and die of shame if they do anything like this (if they get the power to do anything like this, which is a huge part of the problem). 

Cuomo is launching a resuscitation of his image for another bite at the apple as of this writing (evidently, with strong financial backing: our system rewards people like this).

President Zelenskyy’s life is practically an antipode of Cuomo’s: he was trained as a lawyer, left that profession when he became a comedian, to criticize the Ukraine state back when it was Putin’s puppet (at grave personal ris:, actual Hero Stuff). I saw his career described by a wag as if “John Stewart became Prime Minister of England during World War Two.” 

One of the reasons President Zelenskyy’s leadership is resonating with us, is that it is inconceivable that our politicians would take on any direct personal risk for any greater good.  Try as I might, I can’t remember the last time any American politician uttered the sentence “I take responsibility” to any question (feel free to remind me in the comments.) People taking responsibility for what they do is Hero Stuff. We watch President Zelenskyy, the highest priority target of a nation willing to threaten total nuclear war, leading his people in the combat zone. While at the same time we watch our own Congress fail to pass a law ending their exemption from the insider trading laws that’d land normals in jail for such behavior.

As infuriating as all this is, none of it really matters: the biggest difference between the two leaders is that President Zelenskyy leads a state doing what states do well: applying coercion to solve a problem of coercion. There is no matter of mass political organization more straightforward than: “those foreigners are running amok in your country.” President Zelenskyy can put that on his banner just as easily as Sargon of Akkand, the first leader of the first army. War is political child’s play, which is why politicians love it to death. 

Cuomo’s COVID problems were war’s antipode: a technical problem. And not just any technical problem, it was an unprecedented medical problem, and the people we expect to solve them need more training than anyone. It involved huge numbers of patients, none of whom are the same, encompassing incomprehensible amounts of detail. Triaging which patients have risk factors that predisposed them to COVID, and how to manage them, among a sea of regular people “merely” sick with COVID, tested every iota of my powers and thirty years’ experience as a paramedic. Asking a career politician, rather than a career clinician, to solve this quandary is no less ridiculous than trusting a TSA worker to run a nuclear reactor.

“Politicians correlate highly with lack of empathy.” Just so.  For people having to fight a war, a lack of empathy is just what the doctor ordered. President  Zelenskyy is succeeding in a role elemental for government, Cuomo failed at a job many orders of magnitude more complex (far too complex for any one man, much less any government, we libertarians argue). It was a problem that REQUIRES empathy (and adaptation that other thing no government on earth can do well).

President Zelenskyy is obviously the more honorable man, the man accomplishing the Hero Stuff, but I fear that even an honorable politician could not have conquered COVID. A criminal like Cuomo? Not a chance.