Grandma Got Run Over By a Neoliberal Reindeer

 

Rochelle Walensky of the CDC

You probably got an inkling about your fate last January, when the nation's chief public health officer said, right out loud, that it's a good thing that the old, the sick and the immunocompromised are dying from Covid-19 in such far greater numbers than are the people who are still well enough and young enough to continue contributing to the Economy.

“The overwhelming number of deaths — over 75 percent — occurred in people who had at least four comorbidities, so really these are people who were unwell to begin with — and, yes, really encouraging news in the context of Omicron.” Walensky added a plug for getting vaccinated and boosted, before underscoring her earlier comment: “We’re really encouraged by these results.”

Now, with the news that more than 90 percent of the Americans dying from Covid-19 are over the age of 65, Rochelle Walensky has actually accomplished the incredible feat of making the cynical holiday tune Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer seem like a feel-good Hallmark Christmas card. You see, even when Grandma dies in a snowdrift after a Santa hit-and-run, her surviving family members still celebrate as if nothing had ever happened. Because not even death can interfere with the mindless consumption of material goods and the watching of TV sports.

 Life without Grandma is simply getting back to normal and moving on with life, and ignoring one of the worst public health catastrophes in human history.

If Joe Biden declared the pandemic to be over, then it must be over, even with close to 600 people now dying from it every day in the United States. Thank goodness, our elite policy-makers are probably muttering to themselves, that these vulnerable disposables are mostly in their 70s, 80s and 90s, and probably out of the workforce 

This is precisely why the government is currently only recommending that people don masks in public settings like grocery stores, where all those excess old people are prone to shop when they need to eat.  Because as the cult of neoliberalism has drummed into us, masking is not so much a matter of protecting others. It's about protecting yourself. (not to mention your own future Social Security and Medicare benefits.) To mask or not to mask is not even a question. This, the public health experts say, is purely about your own comfort zone and your personal choice and freedom, and being the entrepreneur of your own life.

And for Walensky, being in the zone means doubling right down on her own serial callousness. Not content to limit her disdain to the disposable victims of this pandemic, she also recently congratulated the deceased Black victims of the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiments for their "sacrifice" on behalf of American medical research. Since sacrifice, by definition, is all about making an informed, personal choice, she insinuates that these men knew all the risks of being unwitting guinea pigs, and chose to participate in their own destruction anyway.

In case you were wondering why Walensky still has her job, it's because she is a staunch team player in the Neoliberal Thought Collective still running this country on behalf of the oligarchy and the military-industrial complex. Her casually racist remarks on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Tuskegee atrocities are all of a piece with the recent New York Times revelations about our nation-state's junior ROTC (pre-officer training) program.  The thousands of freshman high school students who are being unwillingly enrolled in this federally funded program are disproportionately Black, Brown and poor.  By dint of their race, ethnicity and social class, they are being purposely groomed to fight in the US Imperium's forever-wars. And when it's the their  inevitable turn to get maimed and even die, they'll get thanked for their sacrifice, too.

Meanwhile, even though Congress just miraculously forced railroad workers back on the job without sick or personal time off, and allocated billions more for the Arms Industry's Ukraine proxy war with Russia, it is said to still be struggling to do anything for regular people of any age or  color, other than to urge them to "share the sacrifice" for the greater good of Wall Street and the war industry. In other words, we must learn to live with a resurgence of eugenics, or what Andre Damon of the World Socialist Website aptly calls "social murder." 

But who (besides Walensky, Biden and the whole merry band of professional pathocrats, that is) said we should accept our doom graciously? Not only should we not go quietly into that good night, we should all join together, as Dylan Thomas advised, to "rage, rage against the dying of the light." 

And on a related note, if you ever happen, like Robert Frost, to stop by woods on a winter evening, and you happen to see Grandma lying in a snowdrift, give her a hand. And put on a mask. Despite what "medical ethicist" Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel trumpets about gracefully dying by age 75 to avoid being a burden on society, we are all of us, at every age, in this together. We have miles to go before we sleep.

Culture War Witchery Strikes Again

So much for Bernie Sanders's prediction that a President Joe Biden would, after a 50-year conservative political career, become a raging progressive in the vein of FDR if we only give him the chance.

With the specter of a far-right Supreme Court tribunal controlling the country for at least another generation, Biden just nixed the antidote of Democrats packing the court.and ending the Senate filibuster, should he win the presidency. Even though the Republican majority has locked in the votes to confirm Donald Trump's nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Biden was still appealing to them to examine their consciences and delay the vote until after the November election.

Judge Amy Coney Barrett, widely believed to be a shoo-in for the nomination, is, like Biden a devout conservative Roman Catholic, and the jurist that Democrats believe will usher in the final death-blow to Roe v Wade.

Biden could very well be delighted with this nomination, given that he already had to bow to liberal pressure and in 2019 disown his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal funding for abortion. He has always opposed late-term abortions, voted against aid to organizations which promote legalizing abortion overseas, and, as vice president, he unsuccessfully fought for increased religious exemptions to birth control coverage in the Affordable Care Act.

So, in keeping with his outreach to conservative Republican voters and his dismissal of such progressive policies as Medicare For All and a Green New Deal,will Biden now openly pander to the "right to life" advocates whom he so sorely disappointed when he disowned the Hyde Amendment last year? His ongoing silence on the issue speaks volumes.

Meanwhile, the increasing liberal angst surrounding a newly revived and very serendipitous (for the duopolistic oligarchy, that is) wedge issue of abortion is all of a piece with the much more contrived angst over Donald Trump's trolling revival of the eugenics movement.

Much is being made of how his praise of the "good (Nordic) genes" of Minnesotans and "racehorse theory" is inspired by the rhetoric of Nazi Germany. But none of these current critics add that Adolf Hitler was himself directly inspired by the American eugenics movement that held sway in the interwar years of the 20th century. The Nuremberg Laws barring Jews from full status as German citizens contain numerous glowing references to America's racist Jim Crow laws.

 The designated targets of xenophobic exclusion from the US in the early decades of the century were Southern and Eastern Europeans, mainly Italians and Jews. The latter group was later denied refugee status and barred by draconian US immigration laws from entering the country to escape Nazi oppression. Tens of thousands of Jews are believed to have been killed when they were forced to return to Nazi-controlled territories.

Trump's allusion to racehorse theory actually stems from an American book called "The Passing of the Great Race" published by Charles Scribner & Sons in 1916 and heavily promoted and praised by politicians, intellectuals and such media mainstays as Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post and the New York Times. Its author, Madison Grant, was once widely lauded as one of the leading thinkers and environmental activists of the Progressive Era.

It's no surprise that forced sterilization, along with xenophobia as government policy, is also making a comeback. Anybody who is shocked, shocked that imprisoned migrant women are reportedly undergoing forced hysterectomies in a  Georgia ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) prison shouldn't be. Laws upholding sterilizations of the "unfit" were on the books in many states until fairly recently. The irony that these procedures are now allegedly being performed under a Republican administration which purports to be anti-birth control should not be lost on us. The purported religious principles of the "right to life" crowd is simply a fig leaf serving to mask their real agenda, which is the empowerment and enrichment of the ruling classes though the debasement of women, minorities  and let's face it, just about anybody who has no power and no money.

Trump may be a throwback to an era when racism and xenophobia were openly celebrated and championed by the most respectable elements of American society. But he is certainly no anomaly in the big historical picture.

And speaking of the Supreme Court: it has never expressly overturned its ignominious Buck v Bell decision, an oversight which theoretically makes the reported ICE sterilizations perfectly legal. In the 1927 opinion against Carrie Bell, a woman wrongfully committed to a Virginia asylum for the "feebleminded" after her rape by the son of her wealthy foster parents who'd used her as their personal maid, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote (relying upon the fake "science" which claimed that deviance and imbecility are passed down from generation to generation):

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was actually the first liberal rock star of the Supreme Court, thanks in large part to the mainstream media marketing and fawning by his elite peers. Lionel Barrymore even played him in a hagiographic movie.

And speaking of irony - First Amendment champion Holmes also wrote the opinion which upheld Woodrow Wilson's reactionary Espionage Act, the law under which Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was indicted. Confined to a Dickensian British prison while his extradition trial proceeds, Assange is essentially being punished for exposing American war crimes and political corruption. The First Amendment itself is effectively on trial, while mainstream corporate media remains largely silent.

And that leads me to my final question. Why the hell do we even have a Supreme Court? It has become more than ever the equivalent of the archaic and unelected class of priests which have always existed in authoritarian regimes. The highest court is neither the check nor the balance that our own overly-honored Pantheon of Founders envisioned.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, that great 19th century literary critic of American pathology, reminds us that neither right wing authoritarianism nor liberal hypocrisy nor personality cults nor culture wars are anything new under the Trumpian sun. From his novel The House of the Seven Gables about the execution of Matthew Maule, an accused witch:

"He was one of the martyrs to that terrible delusion which should teach us, among its other morals, that the influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. Clergymen, judges, statesmen - the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day - stood in their inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived."

Bring Out Your Canceled Dead

Two more iconic American corpses have bitten the dust this week. Environmentalist John Muir, father of the national park system and founder of the Sierra Club, and  Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, are the latest high-profile casualties of the Cancel Culture Craze that is sweeping the nation as virulently as Covid-19.

The Sierra Club officially disowned Muir because he was a racist prone to uttering the N word. Planned Parenthood of New York is removing Sanger's name from its clinic because she was an avowed eugenicist who was also notorious for canoodling with the KKK back in the day.

The Cancel Culture Club (CCC) has more than one criterion for membership.

President Woodrow Wilson, for example, was canceled earlier this summer because he was both a racist who uttered the N word and a eugenicist who wanted to cull Blacks, Browns, Asians, Poor White Trash and just about everyone that his entitled class deemed unworthy of inclusion in American society. The recent wokeness by Princeton University regarding its erstwhile hero makes Joe Biden's  own recent claim that Donald Trump is the first racist president all the more baffling.

"The way he deals with people based on the colour of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” the former vice president said. “No sitting president has ever done this. Never, never, never. No Republican president has done this. No Democratic president. We’ve had racists, and they’ve existed. They’ve tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”

Given his authorship of the Crime Bill, which has jailed Black people so disproportionately as to cause their incarceration numbers to exceed the number of slaves prior to the Civil War, and given his friendship with such white supremacist politicians as Jesse Helms and James Eastland, you almost wonder whether Biden is miffed because Trump demotes him to a sloppy second in the racist presidential sweepstakes.

To be fair, though, Biden is likely just being his same old befuddled self. But it is certainly strange that the establishment media is not questioning Biden's cognitive status as vociferously as it is hounding Trump over his.  What president hasn't been racist? Even FDR made a deal with Southern Democrats to bar Black workers from the Social Security program in order to get it passed in Congress. Even Barack Obama, our first Black president, referred to Black protesters reacting to the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore as "thugs" as he passive-aggressively oversaw the worsening of the economic plights of Black communities during his eight-year stay in the White House. This doesn't even factor in the de facto racism of record deportations and droning dark-skinned people to death in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia and other "tribal" areas. Come on, man.

Donald Trump, for his own part, reacted to Biden's racism accusations in his usual modest fashion:

“I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible of exception of Abraham Lincoln. Nobody has even been close.”

Abe Lincoln, for his own part, was also reputed to regularly utter the N word in conversation. He also seriously considered deporting newly freed slaves back to Africa or relocating them to a special colony in Panama, telling a quintet of Black leaders he invited to the White House just before his death that he believed "the African race suffered greatly by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence." 

Well, at least he didn't use the term "shithole countries" as Trump so racistly did.

Conservative and liberal pundit-apologists alike love to make excuses for their beloved figures whenever they're caught behaving or talking badly, whether pre- or postmortem: "It's complicated." Or its close relative: "It was a different time."

But back to Margaret Sanger. Historian Edwin Black writes in "War Against the Weak" that Planned Parenthood has always been open about her history in the eugenics movement, which swept the nation in the early 20th more virulently than Cancel Culture is in the 21st. It was only when Nazi Germany co-opted its pseudo-scientific cant and exterminated six million Jews that  the "progressive" eugenicists of the USA decided that it was probably best to shut up about culling undesirables.

When the pre-woke New York Times reviewed Black's book in 2003, though, it was dismissive of his "muckraking" on the rich and powerful proponents of the eugenics movement. Even though the Rockefeller Foundation funded three eugenics laboratories in Nazi Germany, reviewer Daniel Kevles wrote, it was unfair to claim that Hitler was inspired by such well-meaning American plutocrats, who really, really hated Nazism. Plus, it is patently unfair to single out the wealthy in the U.S. as the only ones desirous of a master race. The middle class was fully on board with eugenics, too. It was the zeitgeist, stupid! Mistakes were made. They meant well. Nobody could ever have predicted....

Meet the new Zeitgeist, a/k/a Cancel Culture, during the reign of President Hitler Trump.

So I'm curious. If you're going to cancel Margaret Sanger, then shouldn't you also cancel Andrew Carnegie, whose vast fortune provided the seed money for the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics research laboratory on Long Island? You might want to change the name of Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon University, the Carnegie Art Museum, and the Carnegie Foundation for Peace (Since the latter is a think tank funded by the "defense" industry for purposes of never-ending war and surveillance, its disbandment might not be such a bad idea.)

The aforementioned Rockefellers were also gung-ho eugenicists. Does that mean that we should change the name of Rockefeller Center and cancel the continued streaming of 30 Rock reruns, and boycott NBC? (again, not a bad idea, given that its executives reportedly are keeping The Apprentice  outtakes of Donald Trump uttering the N word under lock and key.)

To prove their sincerity, the newly woke should cancel Nazi sympathizer Henry Ford by changing the name of his iconic car company right this very minute. But why stop there? Then we should get rid of Ford's overpaid CEO and investors, and let the workers take over ownership and production - once there's a vaccine, that is.

 Above all, we should cancel the whole idea of forcing people to go back to work before it is safe for them to do so. 

It has now reached the farcical point that the mere questioning of Cancel Culture will get you canceled.

Writers are so afraid of being called racist or misogynistic that they're shutting up and self-censoring to avoid giving offense and possibly losing their livelihoods along with their reputations. There is a distinct McCarthyesque stench to the self-righteous Cancel Culture Club.

Just as the original McCarthy era architects destroyed the New Deal and solidified social and economic inequalities by inventing the Communist threat, so too are a new generation of reactionary neoliberals and neocons engaging in Virtue Signalling Gone Wild as the whole capitalistic framework of oppression and legalized corruption collapses around them - a collapse hastened by Covid-19. Against all reason, the Cancelers are of the same breed (sorry, eugenicists!) as those promulgating the various manifestations of Russiagate. They need to constantly manufacture outside enemies to hide the fact that they are the enemy.

The hard right side of the ruling oligarchy, exemplified by Trump, decries the tearing down of  Confederate statues and the disrespect shown by "terroristic" citizens of their militarized domestic police forces. The centrist, or soft-right, side, exemplified by Joe Biden's corporate Democrats and Lincoln Project Republicans, points the finger of racism at Trump while they themselves tacitly reinforce endemic racism through, among other things, refusing to entertain any discussion of Medicare For All during a pandemic which is disproportionately killing Black and Brown people. They reinforce global racism by giving Trump even more money that he wants or needs in order to continue oppressing and assaulting people both at home and abroad with tear gas, bombs, drones, and mob-style looting and intimidation.

With any luck, and with a lot of help from the activists and rabble rousers now out on the streets, the bickering oligarchs will cancel each other out before Covid-19 and climate change cancel out the rest of humanity.

Exceptional USA: So Special, So Sick

The New York Times finally discovers what thinking people living in the real world have known all long: that Obamacare is not only not all it's cracked up to be, it's a disease unto itself. Insured Americans are still going bankrupt, getting sicker, and dying younger. (Hillary Clinton, for her part, has cold-bloodedly called such atrocities mere "glitches.")

The Times is even openly soliciting testimony about medical insurance nightmares from its readers.The lede of the front-page article is reminiscent of Rep. Alan Grayson's legendary 2009 rant on the House floor:

Here is the surest way to enjoy the peace of mind that comes with having health insurance: Don’t get sick.

The number of uninsured Americans has fallen by an estimated 15 million since 2013, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act. But a new survey, the first detailed study of Americans struggling with medical bills, shows that insurance often fails as a safety net. Health plans often require hundreds or thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket payments — sums that can create a cascade of financial troubles for the many households living paycheck to paycheck. 

In the new poll, conducted by The New York Times and the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 20 percent of people under age 65 with health insurance nonetheless reported having problems paying their medical bills over the last year. By comparison, 53 percent of people without insurance said the same.

These financial vulnerabilities reflect the high costs of health care in the United States, the most expensive place in the world to get sick. They also highlight a substantial shift in the nature of health insurance. Since the late 1990s, insurance plans have begun asking their customers to pay an increasingly greater share of their bills out of pocket though rising deductibles and co-payments. The Affordable Care Act, signed by President Obama in 2010, protected many Americans from very high health costs by requiring insurance plans to be more comprehensive, but at the same time it allowed or even encouraged increases in deductibles.

***

Sick and Sicker:

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson came uncomfortably close to channeling Heinrich Himmler as he outlined his reasons for rounding up Central American refugee families for imprisonment and quick deportation back to the countries they had fled out of desperation for their very lives. Many of the deportees face almost certain death upon their return. Johnson's cold-blooded statement:

 The focus of this weekend’s operations were adults and their children who (i) were apprehended after May 1, 2014 crossing the southern border illegally, (ii) have been issued final orders of removal by an immigration court, and (iii) have exhausted appropriate legal remedies, and have no outstanding appeal or claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief under our laws. As part of these operations, 121 individuals were taken into custody, primarily from Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, and they are now in the process of being repatriated. To effect removal, most families are first being transported to one of ICE’s family residential centers for temporary processing before being issued travel documents and boarding a return flight to their home countries. 
Given the sensitive nature of taking into custody and removing families with children, a number of precautions were taken as part of this weekend’s operations. ICE deployed from around the country a number of female agents and medical personnel to take part in the operations, and, in the course of the operations, ICE exercised prosecutorial discretion in a number of cases for health or other personal reasons.

.... I know there are many who loudly condemn our enforcement efforts as far too harsh, while there will be others who say these actions don’t go far enough. I also recognize the reality of the pain that deportations do in fact cause. But, we must enforce the law consistent with our priorities. At all times, we endeavor to do this consistent with American values, and basic principles of decency, fairness, and humanity.

Contrast this to Reichsfuhrer Himmler's cold-blooded rationale for rounding up and deporting the Jews (and unlike Johnson's boasting, his speech was given in secret):

 I ask of you that that which I say to you in this circle be really only heard and not ever discussed. We were faced with the question: what about the women and children? – I decided to find a clear solution to this problem too. I did not consider myself justified to exterminate the men – in other words, to kill them or have them killed and allow the avengers of our sons and grandsons in the form of their children to grow up. The difficult decision had to be made to have this people disappear from the earth. For the organisation which had to execute this task, it was the most difficult which we had ever had. [...] I felt obliged to you, as the most superior dignitary, as the most superior dignitary of the party, this political order, this political instrument of the Führer, to also speak about this question quite openly and to say how it has been. The Jewish question in the countries that we occupy will be solved by the end of this year. Only remainders of odd Jews that managed to find hiding places will be left over.

 As Ian Buruma writes in Theater of Cruelty, "Evil deeds are often committed by people who have convinced themselves that they are doing something good. When Heinrich Himmler told his audience of SS officers in Posen in 1943 that 'exterminating' the Jews was a necessary duty carried out 'for the love of our people,' he was most probably sincere. No doubt he reveled in his own power, but I don't think he was evil for the sake of being evil. Himmler was not Satan, but a repellent human being with the means to put mad and murderous fantasies into practice."

Likewise, Jeh Johnson can ease his alleged conscience by adding social workers and medical personnel to his own de facto extermination squads. He sends "illegal" people to their deaths in the sincere belief that he is acting purely from decent and humane principles, for the love of Exceptional America.

Likewise, if millions of the beloved American people who are allowed to remain in the Homeland by virtue of their birth on American soil go broke, suffer and die prematurely through a lack of basic medical care, then the architects and defenders of the Affordable Care Act are smug in the knowledge that at least they are giving mercy to a chosen, select few. The unlucky others have been simply designated as necessary internal deportees. Despite Obamacare, as many as 17,000 legal Americans are still dying unnecessarily every single year. That is a feature, not a bug.

  Internal and external deportees are what the neoliberal thought-collective, the cold-blooded cullers of the herd, euphemize as the collateral damage of their "hard choices."

Sick, sicker, sickest.