"The Inventor"

Here are two ways of thinking about that word.

One, an inventor is a person who creates innovative technology, like Thomas Edison.

Or you can use the word “inventor” for, like a kid, inventing an “Invisible Friend.” 

Watching “The Inventor” an HBO documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, it is arguable she did both.

And by the way, so, as least for a while, did Thomas Edison.

“He invented the invisible light bulb?”

No.  He invented a light bulb he claimed worked, the documentary asserts, four years before it actually did.

Offering the persuasive “backstory” of an aversion to needles and a beloved relative dying “too soon”, Elizabeth Holmes promoted her invention of the “Edison Box”, a machine able to diagnostically test – and allow the early detection of – over two hundred diseases, using a single drop of blood, pricked from a fingertip.

The thing is,

It couldn’t.

Allow me to sidetrack a moment.

Without getting into specifics, through a traditional blood test where they knot an elastic strap around your arm, you grit your teeth and/or squeeze a rubber ball which not only helps with the procedure it provides an outlet for your anxiety, and then they fill up, for me once, four test tubes blood, it was discovered by this primeval process that I needed to see a hematologist. 

Moving things along – so as to not upset myself further – it turned out that a doctor-prescribed supplement I was taking was causing the anomaly and when I stopped taking it, I was cured. 

I love when that happens.  (Although I’d have preferred to be warned about the supplement’s side effects, rather than… never mind.  I’m okay.  Of course, I changed doctors.) 

The reason I am relating this cheery anecdote was that, to determine how I was doing, the hematologist’s assistant pricked my fingertip, testing the drop of extracted blood in the office.  The results returned in less than five minutes.

The point being, you can already do that.  To a limited degree.  Not diagnosing two hundred diseases.  My hematologist’s test reported – I just checked my files – on 13.

If Holmes’s “Edison Box” had worked, it would have revolutionized Health Care, both from the hurty needle and the economic perspective.  And you could get tested at a drugstore, picking up a package of Q-Tips along the way.  No more waiting in doctors’ offices, while your parking lot charges go skyrocketing through the roof.  Drugstore parking is free.

Unfortunately, the thing just didn’t work.

And then they cheated to pretend it did.  (Secretly substituting the traditional blood-testing procedure for the faulty “Edison Box”.

I don’t want to give too much away, in case you want to check out the documentary.

“Big Business Cheats” is not a new story.  See:  Enron, Volkswagen and Wells Fargo.)

Do they all cheat?  I hope not.  But a system more beholden to shareholders than to customers…

Nah, they’re good people.

Don’t you think?

What intrigues me is the character of Elizabeth Holmes, who, for starters, always dresses like Steve Jobs.  (In the ubiquitous black turtleneck.)  I find it strange when someone dresses like somebody else and it’s not Halloween.  A surprising number of Dr. M’s psychoanalytic colleagues sport identifiable “Freud beards.”  It seems childish.  Not a desirable trait in a psychoanalyst. 

Notwithstanding the iddentical get-up, the discernible difference between Steve Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes is that if Steve Jobs’s gizmos don’t work, nobody dies.  You just don’t get unlimited music on your cell phone.

More importantly, however,

“More importantly than dying?”

Start the sentence you own way.

To this day, Elizabeth Holmes stands by her deception, claiming she did nothing wrong.  The “Edison Box” works, and nobody cheated along the way.

Except, the evidence proves it doesn’t, and they did.

How can she do that?

A zealot’s belief that what you’re doing is right – or at least will turn out right in the end – can, according to a psychologist on the documentary – bamboozle a “Lie Detector.”  If you convince yourself, you can convince the machine. 

Along with prominent Board Members – among them, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz – supplying cachet and infusions of cash.

Bringing it home…

A Canadian commentator I watched during a visit to Toronto explained,

“Donald Trump is an American character.”

So is Elizabeth Holmes. 

In fact, they’re the same character.

Consummate sales people who lie to your face and call it The Future.

The thing is,

Sometimes, those outlandish promises are right (and we land on the moon by the end of the decade.)

Creating “cover” for scalawags.

And a vulnerable public,

Hoping for the best.