A gaffe, the journalist Michael Kinsley once said, occurs not when a public figure says something false but when she says something she believes to be true. Thus it was with Oxiris Barbot, New York City’s health commissioner, and her utterly repugnant remark in March to a senior NYPD official about how she didn’t give “two rats’ asses about your cops.”
Barbot’s exchange with Chief of Department Terence Monahan exposes the nature of her own morally diseased ideology — a viral worldview that spreads social incohesion just when the Big Apple needs unity.
Imagine it: a public health official who doesn’t believe the city’s police officers require her attention in a pandemic when it comes to their health.
Barbot clearly feels no common cause with the 38,000 public servants who work for the New York Police Department — public servants who literally put their lives on the line every day to see to the safety of their fellow citizens. Far from it; judging by her hideous words, she likely considers them a kind of enemy.
And these are police officers who now take on the added risk of viral infection on top of the possibility of thugs who might shoot or knife or otherwise harm them in such a way that any day’s shift might be their last.
For his part, Monahan was just looking to protect the officers under him as well as the general public. He must have presumed this would be a concern Barbot would share. He asked her to supply his department with 500,000 masks — a grand total of about 13 per officer.
Whichever of the purposes masks are thought to serve during the pandemic, whether to protect the wearer or those with whom the wearer might come into contact, it should go without saying that cops, of all people, must have free access to them.
Police officers cannot “socially distance” by definition, either in their interactions with the populace or in relation to each other.
If a police officer were to contract the virus and remain asymptomatic for days, the number of people he could infect could stretch into the dozens, if not the hundreds.
Evidently, Barbot informed Monahan that she could only spare 50,000 masks. He must have reacted with disbelief, and the words that followed must then have triggered Barbot’s anger and raised from her peculiar brain to her potty mouth the disdain that emanated from her invocation of a pair of rodents and their posteriors.
The fact that Barbot felt free enough to say what she said — even if it happened because she lost her cool — also offers some instructive guidance about how she might have gotten the job she holds in our city in the first place.
The antagonism toward the police she expressed in her heated argument with Monahan isn’t a bug — no matter how far Mayor Damage de Controllio might find it necessary to socially distance himself from his own appointee in the wake of The Post’s story about Barbot’s offense.
No, it’s likely a feature.
The progressive culture from which de Blasio and his administration spring is anti-cop. It is drenched in the attitude that police officers are effectively carriers of disease themselves — social-spiritual diseases like hostility to “the other” and virulent racism. No matter how much Hizzoner tries to hide that mentality, it seeps out like ooze out of his administration.
Such is the perspective that informed Dr. Oxiris Barbot’s disgusting outburst and may lead to her dismissal. Should that happen, another health commissioner will be appointed — someone who will know not to make the same kind of gaffe.
But really, will it make any ultimate difference? In the de Blasio mayoralty, the fish rots from the head.