Parallels Between Lyme Disease and the Washington 'Swamp'

What often happens with Lyme disease is that you don’t know you’ve actually had it for a long time, sometimes for many years or even for your whole life. It’s stealthy and likes to keep a low-profile. If you’re lucky, you finally get a diagnosis, and you start taking a medication, antibiotic or herb, to fight it. This disturbs the disease, stirs it up, makes its otherwise stealthy presence very well-known, and also makes it VERY angry. In retaliation, the disease releases powerful neurotoxins into your body, to make you feel even sicker and to deter you from fighting it any further.

Something similar has been happening in America’s recent political culture. For a long time, there was the Washington “swamp”, a diseased power structure made up of political insiders and career politicians who ruled us through division, identity politics and victimhood. They profited off of wars, favored multinational corporations and big banks over people, played the role of puppets for big pharma and Wall Street, did the bidding of lobbyists and wealthy campaign donors etc. But then an unlikely (and undoubtedly flawed) outsider named Donald Trump – the “great disruptor” – came along and challenged this power structure. Whether you liked his personality or not, he was the antibiotic that attempted to begin eradicating the so-called “swamp creatures”, once and for all. Just like with Lyme disease, this antibiotic disturbed and stirred up the creatures, they didn’t like what was happening—not at all—and fought back…hard, released toxins into our culture (largely via the corporate-owned mainstream media) and made America very toxic for about four years (the last of which, the year 2020, was the most toxic of all). People blamed Trump for this toxic culture when, in fact, the toxins were mainly a direct result of Trump trying to cure us of the swamp. The toxicity was, in effect, the swamp’s defense mechanism, a way to deter Trump and likeminded people to stop fighting it.

If Joe Biden, a man who’s basically been swimming in the swamp that is Washington for almost 50 years, does indeed become 46^th president of the United States, this “defense mechanism” will have ultimately worked, because Biden’s presidency will put an end to the fighting of America’s swamp disease. Biden claiming that he will *restore* peace, unity, decency and normalcy in America is his way of saying he will *restore* the old political power structure, a place where the swamp creatures rule unchallenged yet again. They’ll stop releasing many of their toxins into our culture, things will appear to settle down and there will be the illusion of peace…

But, alas, we’ll still be just as diseased as we always were.

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MATT BURNS is the author of THE BURNZO PAPERS: Selected Articles & Essays and also the novels JOHNNY CRUISE, THE WOMAN AND THE DRAGON and WEIRD MONSTER. In addition, he’s published a memoir called GARAGE MOVIE: MY ADVENTURES MAKING WEIRD FILMS. Check out these books (and many more) on his Amazon author page HERE.