Let Me Tell You How You Really Feel

by on Jul.03, 2020, under Race

For most of my lifetime, a vocal mixture of liberals, African Americans, and historians have insisted that the Confederate flag is a racist symbol. Until recently, conservatives always responded that this was PC nonsense, and that the flag merely indicated Southern pride.

Of course, within the last few weeks, everyone from NASCAR drivers to Mississippi state legislators have said, “You know what? It is a racist symbol. Let’s get rid of it.” They behave as if they never noticed the overt bigotry before, like they had to squint to see it behind all those stars and bars.

Now, this is the exact same emblem, long championed by the exact same people who are now denouncing it. All of this begs the question of why we have to fight with conservatives over and over again, sometimes sparring for years in heated debate, only to have them eventually discard their supposedly principled arguments, shrug, and say, “Oh yeah, everybody knows that. Old news.”

Nothing exemplifies this abrupt switch from loathing to loving as much as Black Lives Matter. As we all know, until recently it was perfectly acceptable to call BLM a mob of racial agitators or even a terrorist group.

But today, majorities across multiple racial and ethnic groups express support for BLM. In fact, “two-thirds of U.S. adults say they support the movement, with 38% saying they strongly support it.” Not surprisingly, this sentiment is “particularly strong among black Americans, although majorities of Hispanic (77%), Asian (75%) and white (60%), Americans express at least some support.”

Yes, it seems like everybody now supports Black Lives Matter.

Well, maybe not everybody (certainly not these two).

In any case, studies show that the percentage of Americans who consider racism and discrimination a “big problem” has skyrocketed since Trump oozed his way onto the political scene. Currently, three-quarters of Americans think bigotry is a national crisis, but as recently as 2015, barely half of Americans believed that. Furthermore, 57% of voters say that the anger behind the George Floyd demonstrations “is fully justified, while a further 21 percent call it somewhat justified.”

So only about one-quarter of Americans look at the protests and say, “I don’t see what they’re complaining about.” I am sure you will be shocked to know that the people who are most likely to dismiss BLM are white Republicans.

Keep in mind that the GOP “might want government to be ‘smaller’ when it comes to providing essential services, but it wants the violent authority of the state to be a constant intrusion into the day-to-day lives of many Americans, particular the lives of people of color, women and/or poor people.”

This attitude lines up with their standard bearer, old Mr. Racial Reconciliation himself. As we know, Trump is fine with ethnic minorities… as long as they never, ever disagree with him or question his authority in even the slightest way.

However, it is not enough to point out the hypocrisy of Republican attitudes, nor is it sufficient to state that they are woefully out of touch with mainstream American thought (i.e., the Silent Majority is as real as Pizzagate).

It is worth considering what, exactly, the conservative opposition to BLM is based upon.

After all, it is easy to pinpoint what Black Lives Matter protesters stand for (i.e., racial justice and an end to police brutality). 

It is more difficult to ascertain what BLM opponents want. The most generous interpretation is that they believe cops are being unfairly maligned and even endangered. This viewpoint, of course, doesn’t line up with statistics that show how the police disproportionally target ethnic minorities. Nor does it sync with the images we have seen over the past few months (unless you think an unarmed septuagenarian hypnotized a good cop into pushing him down and cracking his skull, brainwashed all the other good cops into walking away without offering help, then convinced all of them to lie about it).

So at its best, opposing BLM’s goals requires a strange suspension of disbelief. As we climb the ladder of probable motivations, we encounter familiar unpleasantries such as denial, delusion, fear, weaponized privilege, subconscious racism, and overt hatred.

In case you’re wondering, none of these are good.

All of the white conservatives who insist that racism is not an issue are basically saying that they understand the lives of ethnic minorities better than African Americans and Latinos do themselves. They are saying that we are imagining hostile interactions with cops and racial epitaphs casually tossed our way and smirking slights that can have only one origin. 

The white conservative believes that he alone is plugged into the happenings of the urban cities that he avoids as much as possible. The GOP stalwart insists that the 84% of African Americans who say they “contend with discrimination a lot or a great deal” are clearly wrong. And according to Republican guys with their fingers on the pulse of the nation, the one-third of Latinos who say that they have been slurred are just making it up for attention.

No, systematic racism is just your imagination. We know this because conservative suburbanites have told us so.

By the way, statistics show that African American men receive prison sentences nearly 20% longer “than those of white men convicted for the same crimes.”

Be sure to ask some white Republicans if that’s actually true. After all, they are the final authority.

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The Left Can’t Do Marketing

by on Jun.26, 2020, under Politics

If you are a progressive, you’ve likely had some variation of the following conversation:

“Global warming is real.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why was it so cold last Christmas?”

“Um, there’s a fundamental difference between climate and weather. Furthermore, your personal experience is—”

“Snow! There was lots of snow!”

“To hell with it. I’m just going to shoot both of us.”

Yes, all conservatives had to do to undermine the concept of global warming was to latch upon the word “warm,” and then demand that liberals explain how winter still existed. And in politics — as in business, love, and comedy — if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

We see this in other progressive concepts. We say, “white privilege,” and an irate white man launches into a diatribe about how he grew up poor and he never got a handout and who are you calling privileged anyway So then the liberal stumbles around trying to explain what “privilege” means and how it exists even if you don’t see it and so on and so on until the angry white man stomps off, more pissed off than ever that some tree-hugger implied that he had it easy.

And of course, even mentioning Black Lives Matter unleashes a furious retort of “all lives matter!” Once again liberals respond by employing metaphors and memes to explain what should be a pretty basic fucking idea (i.e., it’s not good for a society to murder black people at will).

It’s in this spirit of pointing out the poor marketing decisions of the left that I bring up the latest disastrous political catchphrase:

Defund the police.

This is quite possible the worst slogan for a good idea ever.

You see, when presenting proposals on how to reform law enforcement in this country, and end the militarization of our police departments, all while preserving the safety of our nation’s residents, it is not helpful to spend all our time saying, “No, don’t worry, someone will still respond if a man with a gun is breaking into your house.”

But that’s exactly what we are doing.

This should be a time for discussing new techniques, like that Scottish de-escalation method that’s catching on. Or we should be talking about the fundamental role of cops in America. Or we should be debating what public safety actually looks like. All of these ideas have public support.

Instead, right-wingers are sending out tweets and status updates that more or less consist of “Liberals want to allow criminals to run rampant over you.”

And then progressives get all defensive, like we always do, and explain that the phrase we’ve chosen does not actually mean what it appears to mean, like we always do.

And if you’re explaining, you’re losing.

Hey, I recently received an angry email from a reader who shrieked how terrifying it is that Minneapolis wants to abolish its police department. And indeed, it sounds scary — like our cities are going to descend into The Purge. 

Or maybe it will be like that scene in RoboCop where the police abandon the city, and the bad guys start setting off rocket launchers (bonus points if you read that sentence and shouted, “I like it!” and made an explosion sound).

In any case, this guy did not want to even hear about defunding the police, let alone abolishing them. Much of this, of course, can be chalked up to willful ignorance or woeful stupidity. But there are many jittery moderates who can be persuaded by simplistic answers to complex issues. And there are determined reactionaries who know they can suck all the oxygen out of the room by forcing progressives to defend “crazy” ideas and explain nuances and tiptoe around details.

Speaking of conservatives, give them credit where it is due. This is a crowd that knows how to sell shit. For example, they convinced Americans that they wanted a war in Iraq but that they didn’t want health care. They persuade poor Americans, year after year, that objecting to wealth inequality is “class warfare.” And they have weaponized the most inoffensive, effective way to combat coronavirus — wearing a damn mask — and turned it into a battle for “freedom.”

Conservatives know the power of symbolism and straightforward mottos. For example, they have claimed both the American flag and the Christian cross, and all the powerful emotions that they invoke, while liberals have basically said, “Sure, go ahead and take them,” thereby guaranteeing that both “faith” and “patriotism” get turned into clear, concise virtues that only Republicans could possibly ever have.

Meanwhile, progressives are the “mob” and “snowflakes” and Antifa fanatics.

Those labels don’t track well, as the marketing experts would say.

What’s the solution? Well, if I knew anything about branding, I would have sold nine million books by now and be riding out this pandemic in my New Zealand compound. So I don’t know the answer. I do know, however, that progressives have a problem. And feeling proud of ourselves for shouting, “Defund the police” is not a smooth path forward.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go explain to some conservatives that taking a knee during the National Anthem is not insulting the flag per se, but an indictment of a racist system that… never mind, I’ve already lost them.

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A Breather

by on Jun.18, 2020, under War

In the last week, America has endured even more protests (often marred by aggressive cops and/or right-wing lunatics), a surge in Covid-19, and allegations that the president is so corrupt that the House articles of impeachment were penny ante compared to his actual malfeasance.

On a personal note, I’m exhausted from overwork, an old friend abruptly begin spewing Soros conspiracy nonsense, and I think I’m catching a cold.

Yes, there was a major victory for LGBTQ rights, and a narrow win for the Dreamers. So that’s ending the week on a high note. But let’s not push it.

Yeah, I’m taking a break. 

I will be back next week with (hopefully) more astute and coherent points to make.

Until then, I will leave you with this quirky factoid:

A couple of weeks ago, Irene Triplett died at the age of 90 in a North Carolina nursing home. Her father was teenage soldier in the Civil War, and as his only surviving child, Ms. Triplett was the last person to receive a pension from a veteran’s Civil War service.

Every month, the Veterans Administration paid Irene Triplett $73.13. By the time of her death, the family had been collecting the pension for 155 years. One has to wonder about the VA employee tasked with cutting Ms. Triplett’s check each month. He now has a little more free time.

In any case, Irene Triplett was the last living link to the Civil War. Her demise is ironic, considering that it comes at a time when all of us are primed to become living links to the Second Civil War.

So there’s that to consider.

See you next week.

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A Tale of Two Walls

by on Jun.10, 2020, under Politics

And then everybody made the exact same joke at the same time.

You see, the timing was too good, the irony too evident, and the metaphor too glaring for us to help ourselves.

So that’s why half of Facebook, most of Twitter, and all of the headline writers in America shouted the following:

“Trump finally got his wall. But it’s at the White House!”

And then we all laughed, or at least chuckled as much as we could while coughing up tear gas or choking down existential angst.

Yes, the president who is so popular with his nation’s citizens that he has to hide in the basement now has a riot fence to protect him from America. As many have pointed out, only despots ruling over troubled lands construct barriers to keep the populace at bay. A wall around the presidential residence is what “authoritarian rulers in third-world countries build to protect themselves from the passions of their own aggrieved people, and a far cry from the ‘people’s house’ that has for centuries symbolized a president accountable to the citizens who elected him.”

Furthermore, “as Trump tries to project strength, he instead appears weaker than ever.” After all, Mr. Law and Order can “bluster about force and domination” but the new multilayered black fencing “around the executive mansion reveals the reality that he is operating not from strength but from fear.”

Seriously, can you imagine anything that petrifies Trump more than thousands of black people massed outside his bedroom window? The only way it would be scarier for him is if they all waved around copies of his tax returns.

To add insult to — well, insult — those protesters who terrify the president so much are now marching right up to White House wall and plastering it with Black Lives Matter slogans. So the administration has given the demonstrators an even bigger platform.

With such a heavy-handed symbol of Trump’s ineptitude and cowardice encircling the White House, it’s a good time to ask, “Hey, whatever happened to the origina l wall?” 

You know, the one that Mexico was going to pay for? The Trump campaign’s chief selling point to xenophobes? The central promise of his presidency that inspired racists to taunt Latino kids with chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Yeah, that one.

Well, I’m glad you asked.

It turns out that the administration’s goal of blocking Latin America behind 2,000 miles of towering concrete has fallen just a little short.

The Customs and Border Protection has acknowledged that a mere 194 miles of border barriers has been constructed since Trump took office. Furthermore, 191 of those miles “already had barriers in place.” This means that the president has placed fresh obstacles on a grand total of three miles of borderland. Once again, the number of miles with new barriers is… three.

You can walk that distance in an hour or so. It amounts to less than a mile per year that Trump has been in office.

This is even more pathetic when you consider that the president has pulled billions of dollars from other military projects, and engaged in blatant cronyism while doing it.

Of course, it’s not just about length (ahem). It’s about strength.

Which makes it all the more laughable — or tragic, who can tell the difference anymore — that the new barriers have been easily climbed, hacked through, carted off, and toppled over by heavy breezes.

Yes, the president “wants Americans to believe he’s built hundreds of miles of impenetrable wall that cannot be climbed.” But in truth, his half-assed engineering project is “not a wall; it’s not hundreds of miles; it can be climbed; it’s penetrable, and in one instance, it failed to withstand wind gusts.”

And it bears repeating that “Mexico isn’t paying for any of it, the Republican’s campaign promises notwithstanding.”

At this point, let me remind everyone that I repeatedly said, back in 2016, that there would never be a huge wall on the Mexican border, and to think otherwise was just racist, delusional nonsense.

I should have bet money on that statement.

So maybe the wall around the White House is as good as it gets for our beleaguered, doltish commander in chief. Yes, it’s true that “apresident who needs to take shelter behind fences and barriers because he feels threatened by his own citizens is not their leader.” More accurately, “he is their prisoner.”

But give the guy a break. It’s the closest he’s come to fulfilling a campaign promise, and it won’t matter to his dead-eyed worshippers anyway

No matter what, they will all keep chanting to “Build the wall! Build that wall!” — in denial to the very end.

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All In

by on Jun.03, 2020, under Culture

If you could time travel back to 2016 and issue dire warnings about the Trump Administration, as soon as you mentioned the president tear-gassing peaceful protesters in order to engineer a photo op in front of a church while waving a bible around… well, your listeners would dismiss you as a deranged liberal spewing heavy-handed metaphors that defy belief.

And yet, here we are, in the clutches of a fascist Snidely Whiplash who is so comically corrupt, idiotically inept, and grotesquely authoritarian that he’s morphed into a human parody. Except nobody is laughing.

There is some comfort, however, in the fact that American society has deteriorated so far and so quickly that subtlety, subtext, and irony have all been trampled under the leaden heels of conservative fear-mongering and white nationalism. And that sliver of a silver lining is this:

We all know exactly where we stand.

There is no more justifying tortured syntaxes, misogynistic insults, or racist asides with mutterings of “What the president really meant to say is…”

There is no more dismissing neo-Nazis on parade as potentially good people in disguise, or claiming that the GOP is going along with high-caliber insanity in exchange for tax cuts.

There is no more shadowboxing the truth, rationalizing praise for dictators, or dismissing the fetishization of violence.

There is not a conservative or a liberal who is confused about this president. 

You say that Trump wants to censor social media — a blatant kneecapping of free speech — solely because Twitter fact-checked one of countless lies? That sounds about right.

You say the president has “mused” (now there’s a quaint word!) about unleashing American military might on American citizens on American soil? Not a shocker.

Similarly, we cannot be too taken aback at the state of this country, and the morass of shameless, vile behavior that erupts forth every day.

So there’s a white woman in Central Park who calls the cops on a black man, knowing full well he could be killed because of her false accusation, because he dared to ask her to follow the rules? Yes, we could have predicted that.

And a homicidal cop in Minneapolis kneeled on a black man’s neck for several minutes, for no reason other than to inflict critical physical pain, without even the slightest concern that people were watching and videotaping for minutes on end? Hey, the only surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.

And you shout that we now have nationwide — and even worldwide — protests against America’s systemic racism that have turned hundreds of city streets into rolling street battles? Honestly, who couldn’t have seen that one coming?

Yes, perhaps there is yet one sad, stupendously delusional Trump fan who is muttering, mostly to himself, that our jabbering chief executive is not as power-hungry as he seems to be, and that our nation is actually on the right track. 

Well, I’m sorry, my friend, but when it comes to this president and this country, plausible deniability died long ago, brutality and decisively. Its essence was cremated, and then the ashes were scattered over cages holding migrant children. 

The benefit of the doubt has been executed, and conservative “principles” have been revealed as the pathetic façade they always were. 

Those moderate Republicans who still believe Trump will magically become a unifying leader? They are as real as Bigfoot. 

And journalists who still believe that Trump won the votes of rural whites because of “economic anxiety”? They are some strange fairy tale or a half-forgotten urban myth.

Nobody truly believes any of those absurd ideas anymore.

Instead, we believe in the undeniable, the clear-cut and the perfectly obvious. We believe in rage and malicious motives and unquenchable greed. We believe in irrational fear and shrieking and the banging of heads against walls. We believe in those things because we see them every day.

It’s all out in the open now. 

African Americans are sick of being targets. Progressives are tired of being polite. And racists aren’t even hiding it anymore. Everyone knows where one another stands.

And everyone is poised.

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The End of All Conspiracies

by on May.27, 2020, under Culture

Over the past few months, I’ve learned a number of interesting things from conservative media.

For example, I’ve learned that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu — wait, check that — it is no worse than a really bad cold. So we should all stop cowering in fear, jam ourselves into a crowded bar (without a face mask of course), and inhale a big old lungful of freedom. It’s all a hoax!

Also, I’ve learned that coronavirus is a highly lethal weapon that was created in a lab, then unleashed on America as an insidious plot to kill millions and destroy the country. 

Now, you might think that those beliefs are completely contradictory. 

But that’s just what they want you to think.

Yes, these are the golden days for people who love a good conspiracy theory. Or for people who have a soft spot for full-on lunacy. Or for sociopaths who want to undermine society and turn us all into babbling, paranoid freaks. For any of these people, these are the good times.

For the rest of us, these days suck.

You see, it’s bad enough that we are all preoccupied with the thought of ending up unemployed and hooked into a ventilator. The real world is sufficiently horrifying, thank you.

But no, we have C-level celebrities and right-wing demagogues overruling medical professionals because doctors are, you know, in on it. 

Meanwhile, across all social media, we hear shouts to “stop being a sheep and think for yourself,” a phrase usually screeched by people who have formed their entire worldview based on one YouTube video from a disgraced scientist and forwarded emails from acquaintances who barely graduated high school.

And of course, there is Q, an amalgamation of madness so twisted that it is difficult to believe that its adherents are not enacting some bizarro performance-art piece.

As we know, people who worship Q are proud of seeking the truth, which is odd in that they believe literally anything that an unknown person with unknown motivations and unknown credibility says on the internet. If this Q individual — who again they know absolutely nothing about and has not called a single thing correctly — told them that ducks were secretly cows, they would believe it.

This is what thinking for yourself looks like.

Keep in mind that there is no liberal equivalent to the Q movement. It is yet another odd manifestation of the right-wing mindset that conspiracies are more prevalent among conservatives (along with their tendencies to be more fearful and to possess absolutely no sense of humor).

In any case, Q fans and Plandemic believers and 5G truthers and others of their tribe all insist that their beliefs are true because they cannot be disproven.

Indeed, can you definitely prove that lizard people are not running the post office? I didn’t think so.

However, what these lovers of speculation and heresy forget is that “there are no good conspiracy theories, because they are attractive precisely because they’re unproven, imprecise and non-falsifiable.”

Science, in contrast, rests on the assumption that theories can be verified, or replicated, or dismissed based on the evidence. 

But that’s damn dull in a world that thrives on “confusion to create a sense of comfort and control when it’s in short supply,” such as when a killer virus arrives, apparently out of nowhere, to decimate society.

Instead of acknowledging that viral pandemics are part of the natural course of civilization (which they are), many Americans declare that it’s all the fault of Bill Gates, so if we can somehow stop him, everything will return to normal.

So then we enter a vicious loop where “you can’t productively question someone’s superstition, because they never really thought it was an actual explanation of how the world is.”

In this way, conspiracy theories aren’t theories at all. They aren’t hypothesis about how the world works. 

They are desperate, illogical, and pathetic attempts to gain control of an uncontrollable narrative.

The result is that we now have millions of Americans who believe the government has engineered a fake crisis in order to… what exactly? Keep us at home for a few months? Exert power over our lives (and then inexplicably relinquish that power over several weeks)? Or groom us for nefarious ends that are conveniently never identified?

No, I’m pretty sure that the number of people who are petrified of being microchipped far exceeds the number of people who actively want to microchip them. I mean, nobody gives a fuck about tracking your every movement, because your every movement is boring.

But in the spirit of reaching out to my conspiratorial brothers and sisters, I propose a friendly wager. Let’s assume that coronavirus is indeed a manmade plot. Now please note that Covid-19 is the worst pandemic in a century, has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and pulverized almost every country on Earth. That can’t be easy to pull off, so this shit is not a test. This is the final gambit of the Bavarian Illuminati or the New World Order or the UN black helicopter dudes — whoever you like. 

That means it’s time to put up or shut up. Five years from now, if people are no longer dying by the thousands, a malicious government has not imprisoned you, and you have not been microchipped, will you lunatics shut the fuck up permanently? Will you admit that you were wrong, and your nonsense did nothing but terrify people and poison the nation? Will you see that Covid-19 was not a means to a totalitarian end, but a horrific plague made worse by governmental incompetence?

Or will you just make up some new insanity about the ceaseless quest to destroy your freedom, even though that war never seems to actually get waged?

How will you possibly justify the next conspiracy?

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A Bad Time to Be Brown

by on May.20, 2020, under Culture

A majority of Americans now say they would sooner trust a one-eyed, rabid hyena to lead our country than Trump.

OK, they didn’t actually say that. But they might as well have, because the fact is that most Americans disapprove of our bleach-guzzling chief executive’s response to Covid-19, and the percentage who recognize the president’s bumbling ineptitude is steadily rising.

Foremost among the president’s critics are Latinos, which is only fair, considering that he is highly critical of our very right to exist. You see, we have a new reason to dislike the Trump Administration — yes, an additional reason for our continued antipathy to the most powerful racist in modern American history.

It turns out that Hispanics are “disproportionately dying” because of the coronavirus.

For example, in New York, Latinos make up 29% of the population but are 39% of those who have died. In San Francisco, Hispanics make up 16% of the population but constitute 80% of those hospitalized for Covid-19. Or look at Austin, Texas, which is 34% Hispanic, but where Latinos make up 53% of all Covid-19 patients. And then there is the whole state of Illinois, where “Latinos are testing positive to coronavirus at higher rates than any other demographic group.”

Across the country, “a combination of factors — including working in low-paying front-line jobs and a lack of savings and health insurance,” plus systemic racism and institutionalized poverty, means that “Latinos are shouldering a disproportionate burden of the pandemic.”

But wait, it gets even grimmer. On the economic front, the country’s “widening income inequality gap has led to many minority groups paying a higher price” during this pandemic. About 40% of Latinos, compared to 27% of all Americans, have taken a pay cut, and 29% have lost their jobs, as opposed to 20% of the overall population. 

The Hispanic Consumer Sentiment Index (a real thing) is way down, and many Latinos don’t have enough money to send remittances to Latin America, which affects “the well-being of families and cripples the economies of developing countries.”

Also, Latinos often have worse health insurance and tend to have less money saved. Here is where I will mention that “for every $1 of liquid assets of a white family, the median Hispanic family has 47 cents.”

As one final insult, keep in mind that if Latinos dare to go out for a walk, we are more likely to get ticketed for violating social distancing orders, even while white Americans “in privileged neighborhoods flout mask-wearing and distance rules.”

In essence, this crisis has increased the odds that we will die early, fall into poverty, or get cuffed by the cops, all of which is ironic considering that Latinos are more likely to be deemed “essential workers” and are a huge reason that this country hasn’t totally collapsed.

So yeah, it’s a bit irksome.

Now, you might ask what our president is doing to alleviate this grossly imbalanced suffering. Well, considering that he himself is grossly imbalanced, the answer is clear: A whole lotta nothing.

For example, although 86% of Latino small-business owners “reported significant negative impact on their businesses by the pandemic,” a survey of Latino small-business owners who applied for coronavirus relief loans found that fewer than 20% of them received money.

The government’s mislabeled, mishandled Paycheck Protection Program money “went to Wall Street billionaires” and banks, with the result that “Lupita’s taqueria or Juana’s quinceañera shop didn’t get money while Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and major hotel chains are getting millions of dollars.”

Sounds about right.

Now, it seems odd that this depressing cavalcade of information is not influencing the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic. After all, the president is charged with ensuring the safety of our country’s residents. There is really nothing in the job description more important than that.

But of course, you just forgot that the Trump Administration is nothing more than thugs, cronies, morons, zealots, con men, hypocrites, xenophobes, and straight-up lunatics.

And that’s on their best day.

No, the orange man with the tiny fingers and the big temper will not save us. Nor will his lickspittle flunkies in Congress come to the rescue. Keep in mind that “because the disease is disproportionately killing black and brown people in cities, Republican powerbrokers simply don’t care about it as much as they would if it were disproportionately killing their supporters.”

So conservatives will not plug in until the virus hits the heartland. By the way, this is already happening.

But even then, Latinos will not be considered “the regular folks,” or have their sacrifices acknowledged or their pain relieved.

As long as this administration is in power, it simply will not happen.

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What Are the Odds?

by on May.13, 2020, under Culture

Your life is worth $10 million.

Reading that statement, you may have one of the following reactions:

Wow, I am seriously undervalued.

Does that include the black-market price of both kidneys?

Is that how much the hitman wants?

Just give me five minutes to develop a scam involving life insurance.

What the hell are you talking about?

I will now address the last of those statements.

What I am talking about is the fact that “when evaluating the impact of government policies that affect public health, analysts place a statistical value of about $10 million on each human life as a way of measuring the appropriate amount of risk a policy may cause or mitigate.”

That’s right — when it comes to implementing new policies or jettisoning old procedures, we crunch the numbers and assign a cash value to each life.

Makes you feel valuable, doesn’t it? 

Keep in mind, however, that our old assumptions about the value of human life are changing in this hellish new era. Local governments are fretting about economic damage and the possibility of armed lunatics storming their capitals, and they are responding by ending lockdowns even though “in every instance, looser restrictions improve the performance of the economy but also lead to more deaths.”

This means that the value of a life varies from state to state. For example, one analysis found that “relaxing business closures and stay-at-home rules could cost 13,000 lives in Texas and 12,000 lives in Georgia by September 1, [but] it will also preserve $3.4 billion in statewide income in Texas, and $1.7 billion in Georgia.”

Extrapolating those numbers to “determine the income gained per death when comparing moderate and strict measures” means that your life in Texas is worth $254,000. But your life in Georgia is worth just $247,000.

Talk about a loss in value.

The study estimates 116,000 American deaths by the end of June “if tough restrictions remain in place —but 353,000 deaths if those restrictions are partially lifted.” The researchers add that “if fully lifted, with no further restrictions, deaths would spike to 895,000,” before helpfully adding that “that would save jobs, though.”

Now, when we refer to hundreds of thousands of dead Americans, we most certainly are not talking about you. We are talking about someone else — anyone else — and never you or someone you know. It’s always someone else, probably someone poor with darker skin.

Indeed, most of the people who advocate for reopening the economy don’t seriously believe that they or their loved ones will be infected. Oh, they might say they’re willing to die for the economy, but come on. Who would want their epitaph to be, “He heroically died for a microscopic uptick in GDP”?

On some level, perhaps even subconsciously, most of these people believe that they are magically immune to the virus, or that it won’t kill them because they pray to the correct god, or because they are tough Americans, or because they can buy their way to safety (ok, that last one might be true).

In any case, it’s always a numbers game. For example, consider this hypothetical scenario:

“There is contagious disease that will kill 99 Americans if we do not shut down the country.”

It is doubtful, of course, that we would go into full lockdown if fewer than a hundred people were at risk of dying.

But let’s change a key detail:

“There is contagious disease that will kill 99 million Americans if we do not shut down the country.”

I’m pretty sure most of us would say, “Bolt the doors now,” if one-third of Americans could potentially be killed. Hey, even most of the gun-toting, freedom-lovin’ protesters would suddenly abandon their “principled” arguments if they and their families were in an epicenter.

So that’s the problem. Somewhere between 99 and 99 million is our problem.

There are those who argue, of course, that we should never take economic concerns into consideration when we talk about human life.

But we do this all the time, usually in a subtle, easily acceptable manner. We give cash awards in civil trials for wrongful deaths. We value interstate commerce so much that we built a freeway system that kills thousands of Americans each year. And then there is that aforementioned $10 million number (or $247,000 in Georgia).

Yes, we routinely roll the dice with death.

Of course, it’s a lot more fun to gauge the odds of non-lethal matters. For example, the odds of Joe Biden being elected president are pretty good, as of this writing. But they should be even better, considering that he is running against the only president in history to be both impeached and run the country into an economic meltdown. Plus, this president thinks swallowing bleach is a good idea.

Seriously, how is this even close?

But ultimately, we return to the question of our very existence. What are our odds of making it out of this Covid-19 mess alive?

Well, perhaps we can listen to our old friend Chris Hedges, widely regarded as a brilliant writer, insightful thinker, and possibly the most pessimistic man alive.

Hedges recently discussed our terrifying new era, and he encapsulated his thoughts with the following sentence:

“These days are the good times, as compared to what is coming next.”

Well, I feel better now. Don’t you?

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Why Argue With Lunatics?

by on May.06, 2020, under Culture

If there is one thing that a corrupt president, a neo-fascist political party, and several thousand gun-toting protesters know, it’s that the simple act of saying you can now get a haircut will cause our economy to rebound so quickly that every citizen will get prosperity whiplash. Just like that — no more Great Depression 2!

Oh, and also, the virus has been defeated, and only a few disposable people will die from this point on, so don’t concern yourself with them.

Yes, the same individuals who told you that we would be welcome as liberators, that the glaciers aren’t melting, and that job creators will trickle down their cash are now insisting that opening up restaurants will cure our financial ills — even though a lot of economists agree that many Americans remain too terrified to mingle in crowds, which would thwart any economic improvement, and every serious epidemiologist has said that opening up now only ensures more death and misery from Covid-19.

But who are you going to believe? Esteemed scientists from top institutions with access to the latest data and sophisticated predictive models? Or a guy who says gurgling bleach is good for you? 

I think the answer is obvious.

Now, to be fair, there are coherent arguments for considering a slow, phased-in reopening for some parts of the country. And one can even disagree — to a point — about the lethality of Covid-19, the effectiveness of face masks, and the constitutionality of lockdown orders.

But we’re not hearing the reasonable arguments that conservatives could have made. Instead we are hearing from ferocious right-wingers who insist that 70,000 deaths is no big deal, that social distancing is a myth, and that patriotic behavior consists of screaming obscenities into a cop’s face from one inch away (guess that whole Blue Lives Matter movement is done).

Soon, we will hear Fox News shriek that washing your hands is un-American. After that, it’s just a matter of time before a gang of bellicose conservatives burst into a New York City ICU ward and lick all the ventilators (just to own the libs).

In essence, we can’t have a rational discussion of how to reopen the nation if one side says, “Let’s look at the science,” and the other side says, “It’s all lies! Sacrifice the weak!”

Furthermore, there will be no limit to the madness, no turning point where hardcore Trump supporters will abruptly say, “Enough.”

Yes, imagine the following worst-case scenario: 

Over 2 million Americans die. Unemployment hits record levels. Chaos engulfs the nation. 

Even with all that, 40% of Americans would still vote for Trump and insist that liberals are out to destroy America.

To understand this, keep in mind that just as the virus took years to evolve and mutate in order to spark a pandemic, the GOP took decades to arrive at this moment, when Republicans openly dismiss “scientific merit and expert recommendations and instead award lucrative contracts based on political connections and cronyism.”

You see, the Republican Party has, “dating back to Ronald Reagan, attacked the very ideas of the common good and mutual obligation, equating the idea of success with violent, personal sacrifice.”

For the modern GOP, the noblest thing you can do is die for a corporation, and the most evil concept in the world is the idea of societal benefit.

As a result, there is no conspiracy too insane, no rationalization too idiotic, no pivot too jarring, and no excuse too pathetic that will prevent hardcore conservatives from shouting that progressives are scheming to steal our freedom.

So where does that leave us?

Exactly here, in this nation where millions of citizens honestly believe that doctors and nurses who risk their lives working to save Americans are, in actuality, opportunistic villains or brainwashed stooges.

Personally, I look forward to watching Fox News in October, when their commentators will insist that the reports of our societal collapse are exaggerated. They will tell us to pay no attention to the rampaging hordes outside our bedroom windows, and they will opine that liberals won’t tell you that Lord Humungus is actually a really great guy.

And much of America will believe them.

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Our Life With the Thrill Kill Cult

by on Apr.29, 2020, under Politics

“We do in all honesty hate this world.”

—Heaven’s Gate cult leader Marshall Applewhite

Many conservatives long ago declared their willingness to let others suffer in order to advance a political agenda (e.g., if a 100,000 Iraqis had to die so Americans could buy SUVs, too bad).

Then they increased their zealotry by making suffering an integral part of their appeal (e.g., let’s stuff migrant kids into cages for the sole reason of inflicting pain on them and their families). 

And now they have topped out their fanaticism by embracing homicidal — and even suicidal — behavior (e.g., dying of coronavirus is worth it, just to own the libs).

No, the GOP isn’t merely a fractured political party.

It is now a death cult.

Of course, the phrase “death cult” has been employed “to describe the Republican Party enough lately that it’s probably lost any real meaning, but it’s not far off as a descriptor.”

After all, this is the party that has advocated — strenuously and vigorously — for Americans “to go back to work and make their employers richer even if it kills tens of thousands or more, because they would rather have that happen than adopt the social welfare policies of a civilized nation.”

This is the party that believed voters in Wisconsin should court death to cast their ballots.

This is the party that believes letting Americans die of coronavirus is the “lesser of two evils” compared to harming the economy.

This is the party that dismisses those who have died because they “were on their last legs anyway.”

This is the party that sincerely believes that there are “more important things than living.”

So yeah, the term “death cult” is not an exaggeration.

Still, we have to wonder where this embrace of nihilism and destruction came from. In less than a decade, we have gone from conservatives screaming that fictitious “death panels” were a liberal plot to conservatives screaming that actual death is your patriotic duty.

Well, studies have shown that many of Trump’s supporters have a pathological “need for chaos” that manifests itself in a strong desire “to tear down the system.”

By their nature, these conservatives “think society should be burned to the ground.”

Much of the white working class (i.e., Trump’s base) are depressed about how their lives turned out. Furthermore, they despise both the force of unstoppable demographic change and their loss of unquestioned power and status. They fear the new face of America, which is young, urban, and not white.

Now combine that hatred and anger with a belief that is rooted in hardcore religiosity and/or unyielding political philosophy. And this belief states that “mass death is either necessary or actively good, the product of a higher power — God, the planet, the economy — working its will.”

For good measure, throw in a refusal to admit that they were even a tiny bit wrong to support a corrupt psychopath incapable of empathy or sacrifice (or sarcasm).

You see, “continuing to proselytize on behalf of a doomsday cult whose prophecies have been disconfirmed, although it makes little logical sense, makes plenty of psychological sense if people have already spent [time] proselytizing on the cult’s behalf.” This is because “persevering allows them to avoid the embarrassment of how wrong they were in the first place.”

And wow, were they ever wrong.

Today, “to be a Republican is to believe either that people won’t die if social distancing is ended or that if they do it’s alright.”

Fortunately, even as Covid-19 ravages the country, and armed zealots shriek about “freedom” in a self-righteous suicidal frenzy, most Americans “are striving for social cohesion and solidarity.” This is true even though “Trump is doing everything in his power to divide us, to keep people on edge, mistrustful and at one another’s throats.”

But coronavirus is only the most visible aspect of the GOP’s fascination with death. We know, for example, about the conservative opinion that guns are more important than the lives of schoolchildren. This fanatical devotion to firearms ignores all statistical proofand anecdotal evidence, causing Republicans to view homicide as a minor inconvenience compared to, say, not having a closet full of AR-15s.

And what of the Republican Party’s insistence that climate change is no big deal? Despite just about every scientist in the world saying, “This is going to kill us all and wipe out civilization,” the American conservative basically says, “Like I care.” In fact, the Trump Administration has reversed or weakened almost 100 environmental rules designed to, among other things, prevent the planet from turning into a molten ball of lava.

No, the concept of death does not frighten Republicans — unless it’s at hands of some swarthy foreigner. Then they’re petrified. 

Otherwise, many of them appear to relish to idea of more devastation and violence. They are willing members of a death cult.

In Trump’s inaugural address, he evoked the phrase “American carnage,” which remains a great name for a punk band. Our deranged chief executive — who cannot even be bothered to acknowledge the 50,000 Americans who have died in the last few weeks — promised that he would end this so-called American carnage. Instead, he has brought it to life. Now that “the real carnagehas arrived, he is reveling in it. He is in his element.”

As are his most devoted followers. And they insist that we join them.

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