What will kill us first - Covid-19, or the cancer on crack known as capitalism?
Judging from how the increasingly unpopular Donald Trump is so feverishly lumbering from virus hotspot to virus hotspot to hold his campaign rallies, you'd almost think that his main goal is not so much to win another term, but to be recognized as the bold Manspreader-in-Chief. He's a victor because he's a vector. Therefore, there is no need for masks - the ionized atmospheres in their dream palaces of worship and the fomentation of bilious hatred of The Other shall immunize them.
So, apparently, will threatening the nation's public health officials with actual bodily harm for trying to protect the country with testing and sound medical advice. And just to make sure that the pandemic sickens and kills as many more millions of disposable people as inhumanly possible, the White House also plans to officially transform the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta into the Centers Fighting Disease Control.
Forget about purging the virus. As reported by Politico, Trump wants to purge the CDC of its career scientists and replace them with political appointees. The first step will be to "study" the agency's missteps - failings caused at least partially by his own cuts to its funding.
Politically, Trump aides have also been looking for a person or entity outside China to blame for the coronavirus response and have grown furious with the CDC, including its public health guidance and actions on testing, making it a prime target. But some wonder whether the wonky-sounding CDC, which the administration directly oversees, could be an effective fall guy on top of Trump’s efforts to blame the World Health Organization.The CDC's early missteps, including actual laboratory contamination of faulty test kits, causing lethal delays in tracking and control, have given the Trump administration ammunition for further demonizing the scientists and - by trickle-down extension - the state and local public health officials who have been forced to compete in the private market for everything from swabs to masks to ventilators.
Not a few of them have begun taking early retirements when they haven't been fired outright. Not a few them report receiving credible threats from citizens, many of them emboldened by Trumpian rhetoric.
The world's sole remaining Superpower, the One Indispensable Nation, has become so "exceptional" that the European Union is initiating a ban on American travel to their continent because not only have we failed to contain the virus, the power elites are actively trying to spread it and make it worse through a too-hasty "reopening of the Economy" with the insane bipartisan demand that we all get back to work and consumption.
In just the past week alone, reported cases in the US have risen by nearly a third, with an "official" total of more than two million new cases. The cases have risen most precipitously in states in the South and West which have prematurely lifted their controls. Meanwhile, the Spreader-in-Chief bragged to reporters this week that he wasn't kidding when he said he had ordered testing to be cut back in order to artificially decrease the official caseload. What we aren't permitted to know will hurt us, but it will help him. Or so he thinks, given that he is tanking in the historically unreliable polls.
The US, despite its vast size and its vast wealth, is actually a pretty provincial place. It's as provincial as the small 19th century Norwegian town that is the setting of Henrik Ibsen's play "An Enemy of the People."
This "dramedy" is a miniature mirror of America's unhealthy "shoot the messenger" reaction to bad public health news.
Ibsen's protagonist, Dr. Thomas Stockmann, has just discovered that the water to be pumped to the town's new public baths has been contaminated by bacteria. As happened in Flint, Michigan, officials installed faulty pipes from a polluted source in their haste to turn a profit and boost the economy. Stockmann naively thinks that he will be lauded as an enlightened hero for warning the public of the danger just in the nick of time.. The local newspaper editor is at first fully on board with disseminating the truth, until the paper's printing press owner and the mayor (Stockmann's own brother) make him an offer he cannot refuse.
The mayor threatens the doctor with dismissal from his public health post if he does not refrain from his whistle-blowing plan. He gaslights the editor, claiming that if the truth about the contamination is revealed, it will be the public and not the bath's owners who will forced to pay for repairs and bear the brunt of business losses and economic pain.
Not guilt-tripped, and in a last ditch effort to get the news out, Dr. Stockmann rents a hall. But his speech is delayed by officials, who admonish the crowd that the good doctor is a bit of a loon and a fraud and subversive and not adhering to the pragmatic virtue of "moderation" that the public should value even more than they value their own physical health.
They claim that Stockmann has public opinion against him - not least because they themselves are manufacturing both the public opinion and the public's consent to being eventually poisoned, both physically and cognitively.
The doctor tells the crowd that it wasn't just the poisoned water he had discovered, but the "discovery that all the sources of our moral life are poisoned and that the whole fabric of our civic community is founded on the pestiferous soil of falsehood."
"The whole place is a pesthouse. The whole Bath establishment is a whited, poisoned sepulchre," he rages.
The crowd, duly insulted, boos. They form a mob and smash the windows of his house, after their leaders have graciously granted them their democratic right to vote and to officially declare Stockmann "an enemy of the people."
He is summarily evicted and fired from his medical post. But he quixotically chooses to stay in town to start a school.
Anthony Fauci, the country's chief epidemiologist, is no Dr. Thomas Stockmann. He has not chosen to utter the scathing words against Trump that Stockkmann aimed against the whole political-media-ownership class: "I cherish the comforting conviction that these parasites - all these venerable relics of a dying school of thought - are most admirably paving the way for their own extinction; they need no doctor's help to hasten their end."
Fauci, who had achieved mystical anti-Trump Father of Our Country status in corporate media accounts, admitted recently that he had initially lied to the public about the efficacy of face masks against the virus - so as to avoid a panicky run on scarce face masks as the catastrophe unfolded.
Millions of people have contracted this virus because government at all levels and from both oligarch-controlled political parties have failed abysmally. Now it's a feverish race to the bottom of the grave.
The bright spot is that not everybody is zombified. They are out in the streets protesting state-sanctioned violence and upending myriad monuments honoring slave-holders, warmongers and exterminators of indigent populations. People are refusing to drink either the poisoned water or the political kool-aid.
The great reckoning has finally arrived. We can only hope that it's not the kind of flash-before-your-eyes reckoning that people in books and movies get only when they're on their death-beds.
6 comments:
Beautiful dear Nancy, how about running against trump ( lower case a sign of contempt). Love you girl
Beautiful Nancy I love your style. Run against trump, (contempt shown for Orange man in lower case). You’ll have my vote.
We enter the world in absolute need. For most of us lucky ones, the ones who chose our parents with care, all of our needs were promptly met. And, growing up at the center of our loving attendants, trust blossomed within us.
But then came kindergarten, or the kids next door, or our first competitors called sister and brother. And we began to accumulate everyday experiences that told us not to trust so absolutely.
As adults, past graduations and lots of job experience, after the faintest acquaintance with local, national and world history, distrust began to permeate our core and harden our shell. By the time we reach our fifties and sixties we become great repositories of distrust. Look at me. Look at yourself.
Trust family? Trust teachers? Trust bosses? Trust bureaucrats? Trust doctors? Trust banks? Trust print? Trust any authority? Trust God? Only fools do that.
The influential Ibsen––second only to Shakespeare around the world in performed plays––warned us about trust. And so it came to be that Modernity, Ibsen's modernity, took over in the culture of the West. But forget about Ibsen and the attendant chatter of high culture. Hasn't humdrum experience alone taught everyone, the high and the low, again and again to trust nobody?
In the swirl of the news of the day
so many of us can truly say
I ... I am ...
I am Stockmann.
Hard to know whether Fauci made the right or wrong decision in lying to the public about face masks. He might have been paternalistic in taking it upon himself to make such a decision, but I can't hate him given how he told truth to the public about so many aspects of Covid 19 when he surely must have been under constant pressure from pretty much everyone in authority over him to lie about the seriousness of the virus.
I remember the shortage of PPDs in March and April in hospitals in the early days of the virus - and the the ways nurses and doctors were having to provide their own. Who should have had them? Who needed them most? Those seeing Covid 19 cases one after another on a daily basis, or an unsuspecting public that assumed they were safe? I don't think these are easy decisions. Now we realise that any kind of face mask is preferable to none. Perhaps if Fauci had all the facts we enjoy at this point in time, he would have suggested that people make their own during the period of shortage.
Stockman, in my mind, stands for every whistle blower who has been persecuted by those in power for telling it like it is. Did Fauci do this? Was his keeping the lie about facemasks for the purpose of keeping his job or did he have a more benign - and possibly misguided - motive for keeping the need for masks away from the public?
Poor Dr Fauci beset with his version of Sophie's choice. The clinicians or the masses?
The same scenario was unfolding in Quebec. The doctor in charge of advice to the party in power and of education for citizens of the province, Horatio Arruda, early on strongly advised against wearing masks, for a mix of stupid reasons along with the supposed real one, that of making more available to frontline clinicians.
And yet, and yet .... At the same time all over YouTube doctors and nurses were advocating the wearing of masks and showing us, in detail, how to make a variety of pretty good masks cheaply.
Compared to the rest of Canada, Quebec now has the worst statistics for deaths from Covid-19. (Most provinces took different steps to stifle the virus.) Scroll down to table 5.4 of the link showing Quebec surpassing even the UK, Spain and Italy and the rest of Canada in the number of deaths per 1,000,000, a standard measure in such comparisons.
https://www.inspq.qc.ca/covid-19/donnees
The Quebec government, with Dr Arruda still at the elbow of Quebec's PM, has recently changed its tune. Wearing masks is now "encouraged." There is no obligation to wear a mask in public, only encouragement to wear one.
When you go out to markets and hardware stores, most clerks and customers are not wearing masks. Dr Arruda insults journalists who question his rebuffs to medical experts in neighboring provinces and his not wearing a mask at press conferences while PM François Legault beside him does wear one. Meanwhile, the "opening up" of the province sooner than later is also being encouraged by the business community and the government.
To put words in the mouth of Montreal's Leonard Cohen (rest his soul), "Everybody Knows herd immunity / is the true agenda./ Everybody Knows / the PM lied."
@Jay--Ottawa:
Re Quebec's COVID-19 public mask policy (first rejection, now only encouragement): It's the province's French orneryness heritage. Or maybe they think their Gauloises consumption will protect them from COVID!
Post a Comment