As an old-fashioned liberal, I really only want what's best for us all, so when conservatives are upset by a rare affirmation of human rights by the Supreme Court I feel morally comfortable laughing at them.
The Bostock v. Clayton County decision, which suggests that transsexual Americans have the same Constitutional protections as the rest of us, has blown conservatives' tiny minds. Rod Dreher is of course writhing in agony and invoking Orwell and the Soviet Union; folks at The Federalist are fanning the flames in their own hair ("SCOTUS’s Transgender Ruling Firebombs The Constitution"); conservatives who cheered the appointment of Neil Gorsuch are mewling like toddlers whose toy no longer pleases. Those with mainstream perches to defend are covering their asses -- Ben Shapiro, for example, denounces the decision ("throws religious liberty, free speech, and employment law into complete turmoil") while telling everyone (falsely) that "I've been libertarian on same-sex marriage" (though one could make the argument that "libertarian" is a synonym for "full of shit").
My favorite so far is Dan McLaughlin, née Baseball Crank, doing the riddle-me-this-Batman bit at National Review:
Consider: What if the funeral home also employed a drag queen — a biological male (like Stephens) who identified as male (unlike Stephens) but dressed in women’s clothes (like Stephens)? The funeral home could say — truthfully — that it does not allow men to dress as women, and since the drag queen employee does not identify as a woman, it could argue that the drag queen was treated the same as any other man would be. Under the standard Gorsuch announces, Stephens and the drag queen are both biological men dressed as women. Could only one of them could sue? To reach that result, the Court has to go beyond the simple syllogism and decide the underlying question: Who is a woman? Yet...
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside bullshit! Try to imagine giving a rat's ass about this. Anyway, congrats to my trans friends.
Just as it took one day and two relatively trivial developments to awaken Americans to the scale of the threat, it took the events of one day for them to forget.
Memorial Day, the day George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis Police officer, changed everything. Suddenly, mentions of social distancing and masks, which had dominated news coverage for weeks, disappeared from the big cable shows and the front pages, replaced by coverage of the civil unrest sweeping the country. Gone, too, was the opprobrium meted out to recalcitrant “lockdown protesters,” who selfishly refused to stay home as an act of shared sacrifice. Politicians at the federal and state level, who had been appearing daily to remind their constituents about the importance of social distancing, were suddenly celebrating the open flouting of the rules they had imposed.
Now, normal people reading this might wonder: Didn't something else happen on Memorial Day -- namely, a whole lot of states, many of them red and not really protest hotspots, had opened up bars and beaches for the holiday weekend? Isn't that much more likely to be the cause of COVID spikes -- especially in states (cited in the mailer!) like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and South Carolina?
You're gonna love Crowe's pitch there:
These case spikes may not be directly attributable to the recent protests. But as the NBA cancellation and Tom Hanks’s announcement demonstrates, the public is fickle, responding to high-profile cues rather than CDC announcements about which phase of reopening their state is in.
If Americans across the country turned on their televisions in recent weeks, they saw virtually every major city awash in protesters, many of whom didn’t bother to wear masks or had them pulled down. Those protesters were allowed to move about freely, and in many cases encouraged to do so by “public health experts.” All of a sudden, the neighborhood barbecue or pool party didn’t seem so dangerous.
So according to Crowe, Mr. and Mrs. America didn't respond to the call of the ancient holiday weekend when they broke social distancing; no, they saw the protests on the TV and thought, "We were just sitting at home watching TV but, since the kids are giving each other COVID at the protests, I might's well take the family down the shore and eat burgers and drink beers and go swimming with a bunch of people I don't know."
Plenty of others are already working the basic theme, but Crowe takes the cake for creativity. So far.
(I should add that in my own personal experience, and that of others, protestors have a greater tendency to keep their masks on than people at bars and restaurants.)
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Metro Public Health issued more than a dozen citations to businesses violating COVID-19 Phase Two guidelines this weekend, three of which are bars on Broadway, including Underground and Kid Rock’s Honky Tonk.
Owners told News 2 it’s a double standard and they’re sick of it.
“It’s unfair for 5,000 people to march in front of our place yesterday in direct violation of the Phase Two order and then for Mayor Cooper and Dr. Caldwell to come in last night and give us citations,” said Bryan Lewis, attorney for Steve Smith, who owns Kid Rock’s and Honky Tonk Central, both cited this weekend.
Go here to see a picture of the folks crammed in and knockin' 'em back at Kid Rock's. But it's the marches that're making people sick. Well, it's no shock to see motivated reasoning among local merchants who a few months earlier were probably telling the cops "how come you're not out arresting street punks instead of writing me tickets?"
but it was new to me. I love Chuck coming in late,
but still ripping it up like a pro.
• I have to admit the statue-toppling thing going on is mostly funny to me, especially eloquent de-plinthings like the one Edward Coaston got in Bristol. Sure, take down all the Confederate Columbuses you like -- but I'd trade all that just to put Trump, Mnuchin, Barr, DeVos, and a few others on a dunking stool over an acid bath. In fact I'll be "moderate" about it and compromise: I'd accept seeing them tried in an honest court.
But if we can't have that, iconoclast away! It's not like we've got a Rodin or Saint-Gaudens Jefferson Davis to protect on aesthetic grounds. And as for the unloved items now defended disingenuously by terrified wingnuts, they don't seem to have suffered much at all. Here's Micah Mattix at The American Conservative:
HBO Max drops Gone with the Wind from its archive because to keep the title available “without an explanation and a denouncement of [its racist] depictions would be irresponsible.” Ah, yes, let’s avoid “irresponsibility.”
I’ve never seen the film and have no desire to see it...
LOL. I've seen it twice, it's not so hot. At least Birth of a Nation is well-made!
...but it’s now the number 1 film at Amazon and number 5 at Apple. Pamela K. Johnson reminds us that Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy, became the first African American to win an Academy Award. “I’ve sat through GWTW exactly once as research for a historical novel in which McDaniel is a character. I don’t like the film either. At the same time, it is sad to see the actress get canceled along with the movie. She endured so many trials to stand, briefly, in the spotlight.”
This is a pathetic dodge (but a popular one among conservatives now), using the long-dead McDaniel as an excuse to protest Gone With The Wind being "canceled" on... [checks notes] HBO Max. Plus which Mattix's same damn item says you can STILL GET GONE WITH THE WIND AT AMAZON AND iTUNES.
So in what sense is it "canceled"? A better word (and Mattix being one o' them-there intellectual conservatives should use it) would be "disfavored." And that's the whole grift here; they're not angry because they can't have their totems, but because their totems have been shown, vividly, to be out of favor, and they can't have the warm satisfaction of believing that everyone else was watching GWTW or tolerating a slaver's monument not because it happened to be on or because they were polite, but because they, too, secretly and in their heart of hearts, loved the Old Ways and the lash and chains and state violence that enforced it. Fuck these snowflakes. The mob, of which I am now in charge, decrees: You'll take having to click on a different website than before to get your product, and you'll like it!
• As mentioned previously, Rod Dreher has been flipping out over the Dusky Hordes and their SJW Dhimmis swamping his Backyard Republic -- but he's still got his wits sufficiently about him to do the occasional "reader" "mailbag"! In the latest, one "reader" tells us she knew Nikki Oliver, one of the leaders of Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, in high school, and that Oliver "used to be an outspoken Christian who attended a non-denominational megachurch," but alas the megachurch was not truly godly -- "theology was fairly shallow," presumably lacking hellfire and tongue-speaking -- and Oliver's high school was "very diverse -- racially, socially, and economically... incredibly secular," which presumably explains Oliver's heathen radicalism; the "reader," conversely, found the Real Jesus and now hopes Trump's reelection "delays the rise of the leftist totalitarians until 2024."
Better still is the story told by a "reader" whose friend, can you believe it, turned into a white nationalist! And guess whose fault it is:
This transition began with his own reactions against the elite anti-racism movement and the Democratic party.
Totally reasonable, right? I mean, no one likes Democrats, or anti-racism either, it's so elite. All that having to watch what you say, like no using "colored."
At first I was able to have very interesting conversations with him about his concerns, his growing sense of isolation, and his defensiveness and anger (which I completely understood and in many cases agreed with). It was even refreshing to have conversations with him.
Ha, I'll bet he didn't watch his language!
But then it somehow tipped into strikingly different territory. He crossed a line into what I’d actually call white nationalism.
"Buddy, I find your positions refreshing, but do you have to wear the armband in public?"
This is a heartbreaking thing to watch: to see a previously sensible, smart, kind, and nuanced person descend into spewing a sort of ethnocentric vitriol that denigrates others, while using valid concerns that I truly agree with as their justifying axioms. It feels like you’re going insane.
Emphasis in the original, amazingly.
I had honestly always imagined (wrongly) that a white nationalist looked a certain way (like a mug shot of a serial killer, essentially), and had just always existed as such...
But then I looked in a mirror. Ha! Just kidding.
...but my friend’s journey in that direction was slow and subtle and even influenced by such small things as a couple of first coffee dates with super-woke girls he didn’t like...
In the world "reader" never enters, this is known as a Red Flag. But aside from incel-unfriendly dates, what set this lovely fellow on the road to Quiet Parts Out Loud?
But with the woke movement pushing more and more destructive dynamics (and showing no sign of slowing those), I see whispers of the potential for these beginnings in other people as well...
Of course!
I suspect that when he realized what was happening – that people like him had become the scapegoats for woke elites’ claims that, by and large, were actually a violent power grab made in the name of “justice” – he just cracked at some point and likely threw his lot in with the only folks he saw who would offer him a valued place in their group.
So you see, your honor, this is really a good boy gone bad -- driven into the arms of Hitler by social justice warriors who cruelly attacked him -- well, not him specifically, but things he believed in, like, you know, umm err -- well, good things like I believe!
But it is very frustrating talking to moderate or progressive friends who look at me like I’m crazy when I suggest that the anti-racism movement may be furthering white nationalism, giving fodder to a fringe movement that welcomes people like my old acquaintance, who may believe they have no other safe place to go.
Yeah, if you push that "anti-racism" thing, you've gotta expect people to go racist, it's like you're asking for it. Why can't we compromise and just be sorta racist?
National Review's Jim Geraghty wants you to join him as the recent racial unpleasantness chases him down an alley called Memory Lane:
The Nineties were a different time, kids. It was the kind of era where, in the aftermath of horrifying riots in Los Angeles, David Alan Grier and Jim Carrey could appear in a sketch on the comedy program In Living Color as beating victims Rodney King and Reginald Denny, and declare, “Staying in school and staying off drugs is fine, but it ain’t gonna do you any good at all if you don’t have sense enough to stay in your car. See, we were stupid! We got out of our car. We didn’t use our heads and look what happened. We may have won the battle, but the early bird got the worm.”
Ha ha, yeah that was funny, what the fuck tho.
You Millennials and Generation Z kids wonder why we in Generation X can be so tasteless and shocking in our humor and tastes? Try having your formulative years shaped by sketch comedy shows, National Lampoon’s, Gary Larson’s Far Side, and comedians like Sam Kinison...
Don't leave, I'll skip the rest of the Grandpa part.
I can’t find it online, but I recall another In Living Color sketch that depicted whites rioting after a jury acquitted the attackers of Reginald Denny. The sketch was funny because of the inherent absurdity: Wealthy, comfortable white people don’t burn down their own neighborhoods, no matter how angry they are about any particular event.
But every group feels anger at some point, even if they don’t express it in an easily visible way.
After the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson case, a few cultural observers argued that wealthy, comfortable white people “rioted” in a different way.
He explains by quoting Roger Boesche from the L.A. Times on all the service cuts and economic immiseration the black community suffered after the riots. In part:
So how do white people riot? They riot by eliminating affirmative action so that jobs and education will be more readily available to whites; by voting to deny services like education and health care to illegal immigrants; by declaring English as the official language and attacking bilingual education; by leaving 38 million people in poverty — 30.6 percent of all African Americans and 30.7 percent of all Latinos.
Now, this sounds to me like a bad reaction to the riots that just kept the wounds festering and led to the present explosion, which has to be Geraghty's point, right? Ha ha ha, guess you never read his shit before! After some yap about how "there are probably quite a few Americans outraged by the sights of statues of Christopher Columbus or other figures from history being beheaded or pulled down" -- I guess he doesn't name them because they're all Confederates! -- Geraghty warns:
There will be a backlash to these actions, but not in the form of the “white people’s riot” that In Living Color imagined. That backlash may come at the ballot box, or it may come in some other indirect form. Some people aren’t interested in direct confrontation in the streets. They may simply prefer to express their opposition in a way that these protesters expect it least — businesses moving out, reluctance to hire, reluctance to visit a neighborhood, effectively abandoning a community. Not every wall that is built is physical and visible. But one way or another, the reaction is coming.
Next to no black people are reading Bill Buckley's White Supremacist magazine. Geraghty's message is mainly going out to his honky rightwing readers who have seen the latest polls and are getting the sick feeling that they might not be able to just beat, gas, and shoot more protesters to get out of this fix. So I reckon it's meant as a comfort: Relax, we have ways of dealing with this -- we did it before, and we can do it again.
Thing is, the rest of us see this stuff too, and have our own reaction.
Big companies saying nice things about Black Lives Matter is okay but it doesn't mean a lot. A bunch of businesses on H Street NE here in DC recently covered themselves in particle board to guard against looters -- who never came, by the way; the looting was very limited here -- and the bigger ones wrote inclusive-sounding slogans on the boards, apparently as talismans to ward off vandals. They were all pretty anodyne, but the one on Starbucks was my favorite: "We Stand With You!" I think that speaks for us all, no? (Ben's Chili Bowl, not the original, just put an 8.5" x 11" flyer in the window that said "Black-owned business," LOL.)
So I think of telecoms and grocery chains going "Black Lives Matter" the same way; in the words of George W. Bush, there, you covered your ass.
One of the funnier bits is the cop sob story "America, We Are Leaving" that wingnuts are passing around in which Captain Yates from the mean streets of Tulsa, OK has had enough, dammit, and is throwing his badge on the ground. And it's not just the protestors he's mad about; "Kids used to be taught respect and now it’s cool to be disrespectful," laments Yates; "...Parents used to get mad at their kids for getting arrested and now they get mad at us." And the language they use on TV these days! As for George Floyd, Yates says:
Doctors kill 250,000 people a year. They call them “medical mistakes” because society understands that they do a very difficult job under high stress and they must make the best possible decision in the moment.
So can't you spot the cops a certain number of murdered suspects? It’s only fair! Yates says he's been in 27 years, so his pension must be pretty fat. Vaya con Dios!
What’s next? The following list features films considered deeply “problematic” or sharing messages deemed untenable to the Modern Left. And make no mistake, it’s the Left tearing down statues, rioting nationwide and erasing history wherever it can...
“Blazing Saddles” -- Cultural observers have had this Mel Brooks classic on their list for some time. The film liberally uses the “n-word,” features stereotypically gay characters and employs slurs now considered taboo. Brooks himself repeatedly tells us he couldn’t make “Blazing Saddles” today, a toxic reality all by itself.
See, if volume dealers decide not to stock works that celebrate the Confederacy, they're gonna "cancel" Mel Brooks! Toto probably doesn't get that the rest of us -- and I don't mean only liberals, I mean normal people -- enjoy Blazing Saddles because it's funny. And a big part of the reason it's funny (apart from pure skill) is not because of its abundance of n-words, but because it makes the racists that conservatives are currently clutching to their bosoms and weeping over like Stephen weeping over the dead Calvin Candie in Django Unchained look like, well...
I'm sure we've all heard more than enough "bothsides" bullshit -- the rhetorical approach that seeks to obscure one's own crimes and idiocies on the grounds that someone else dropped a gum wrapper on the sidewalk so who's to judge. But it never stops coming. While it's annoying enough when it comes from weak-kneed liberals, it's a total stinkbomb coming from conservatives and is a favorite gambit of JustTheTip Trumpers -- here's a classic example by David French. But things have reached the point where even some of the usually loud-and-proud wingnuts are starting to crocodile-weep for comity. Here's Jim Geraghty at National Review:
Our Civil War of Stupidity The loudest, most dominant voices in American political discourse often are the ones with the least thought-through, least useful perspectives.
For a brief moment, we had a broad, bipartisan national consensus that the police should not kill those in their custody.
We did? When was that? I and a whoooole lot of black people missed it.
Then, our warring factions of idiots went and ruined it.
Why would anyone do that? What might each of these "factions" been in favor of -- oh why do I bother.
On May 25, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin did something terrible, pressing his knee on the back of George Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, during which time Floyd’s heart stopped beating and he died. Chauvin’s fellow officers, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao, stood and watched. This angered many Americans, if not almost all Americans.
Then, some residents of Minneapolis chose to respond to Chauvin’s actions by setting fire to the Third Precinct headquarters of the city police.
Boy, as your cousin on Facebook would meme, that escalated quickly. Did something else noteworthy happen between Floyd's killing and the fire, like national protests?
Our national discussion was quickly overrun by those who wanted to use the actions of Chauvin and his fellow officers to define all police across the country, and those who wanted to use the actions of the looters and rioters to define everyone participating in the protests. Anyone with eyes can see that not all police officers are Derek Chauvin, and not everyone who attended a protest, march, or demonstration in response to Floyd’s death was looting and committing acts of violence.
Anyone with eyes can also see hundreds of videos of police violence against the innocent during the past few weeks of protest, which seems to have caused a massive change in public sentiment -- Americans appear to support the protestors and think the cops went too far, which for the land of Nixon and Agnew and endless Law & Order editions is pretty amazing. But Geraghty doesn't mention it.
Near the end is Geraghty's most concentrated pellet of motivated bothsiderism:
The president wants to restore order in the streets with soldiers; his opposition declares that the proper alternative is to do away with policing entirely. The president wants to reopen the economy; his critics contend that steps in the direction of reopening are an “experiment in human sacrifice.”
Thus Trump's looter-shooter ravings (and other provocations, including his attack on the Minneapolis senior citizen whose skull was cracked by a cop) are portrayed as a sensible call for order, while the Democrats are portrayed as off-the-pigs lunatics because some leftists want to drastically reduce police budgets; also, Geraghty describes Trump's threats to force states to cram workers who might have coronavirus into their warehouses and offices as a simple desire to "reopen the economy," and if you think that's bad how about this, Democrats interpreted it uncharitably, hmmph!
Where are the sane grown-ups? Isn’t anyone willing to take a break from the usual partisan food fight to spend just a little time trying to solve our actual problems? Or are we just destined to be bystanders in a Civil War of Stupidity indefinitely?
It's all too much -- everybody back to the status quo, where black people got extra-judicially executed on the regular but at least we weren't arguing about it.
• Oh, speaking of libertarians and how they're full of shit* I'll add that Mike "Freedom" Lee demanding the quartering of troops in DC against the Mayor's wishes is a beautiful example of the general ass-exposure of these people at this moment in history. (*does not apply to Radley Balko.)
I know we're all a little leery of horrible conservative people from the Before Times getting graded on the curve by liberal simps just because they're not Trump -- and I certainly felt that way about George W. Bush and his statement on the protests, which sounds like it was written by his former lackey and con artist Michael Gerson in full treacle mode.
But like the other ex-presidents beating up on Trump, its relatively non-unhinged message was nice not only as a change of pace but because of how it hit Trump loyalists. The best example is from Byron York, late of National Review and now laboring at the malignant Washington Examiner.
York starts with some shit about how, well, whatever the coroner and your lyin' eyes told you, the medical examiner's autopsy "revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation," and York is surprised that Bush, like everyone else who isn't a cop, "appeared to reject the findings," and he must have some nefarious reason for doing so: "Perhaps Bush's writers liked the notion of saying that Floyd was suffocated and injustice and fear are suffocating the country. But the turn of phrase required rejecting the official finding of death."
Just so everybody knows where York's head is at. Then:
More remarkable was the fact that Bush said almost nothing -- literally, almost nothing -- about the riots, violence, and civil disorder following Floyd's death. At one point in the 507-word statement, Bush said, "Looting is not liberation, and destruction is not progress." Perhaps Bush's writer liked the looting-liberation alliteration. But to devote just nine words out of 507 to the nationwide convulsions after Floyd's death -- the very situation that prompted Bush to speak out in the first place -- seemed more than a little strange.
What about the people who have died in the rioting? The businesses that have been damaged and destroyed? The fears of people whose homes and businesses were threatened by violent mobs? To say Bush gave them short shrift would be generous.
York's apparently mad because he and the rest of the guys on the payroll are pushing the "Protestors = looters and rioters" thing that's been working for them for decades, but polls show ordinary people are saying fuck that noise, and here's this RINO whose illegal war York and all the rest of them supported coming out against Trump's strongman bit -- just when authoritarianism needed a unified front and the Lawnorder Tinker Bell needed everyone to clap for her!
I'm happy to see citizens standing for equal justice under the law -- despite the fact that conservatives have conspired to make it a radical concept -- and pray for their success. But I confess I'm almost as happy to see this blowdried shit and others like him squirm over it. UPDATE. Of course, Rod Dreher has to up the ante(bellum) -- here he reacts to former Trump SecDef James Mattis' denunciation of Trump:
Personally, I think it’s undeniably true that Trump does not try to unite the American people, but I find it insupportable to believe that the riots tearing apart America today are the culmination of Trumpism. What’s more, why did Mattis have nothing to say about the rioting? Not even a line? A military veteran friend says Mattis’s statement sounds more like score-settling than anything else.
Dreher's column is called "Trump The Girardian Scapegoat." Don't ask -- it's basically an intellectual way of saying "I'm no Trump fan but," The Oh you like Black Lives Matter well then you must like looting! shtick is all these guys have, now that saying who cares what happens to the darkskins is no longer cool -- thanks to the damn SJWs! I wouldn't be shocked if Dreher got in Black Bloc drag and started smashing Starbucks for the cause.
Once he got the cops to tear-gas away the protestors, Trump waddled over to St. John's Church (against the wishes of its clergy) and held up a Holy Bible for what his handlers must think is sure-fire rube bait -- The Leader showing those protestors, in front of a church, damaged by fire of unknown origin, who's boss. No doubt for a certain demo it's a Reichstaggering success; we'll see who actually bites. Speaking of bites, Breitbart's Joel Pollak turned his turgid prose toward the cause:
Democrats and the media were aghast, claiming the president had ordered “peaceful” protested tear-gassed merely so that he could hold a “photo-op.” In fact, Trump’s gestures held immense positive significance for the country and will likely be remembered that way.
Translation: It was not a photo op, it was an opportunity for a photograph with "immense positive significance"!
The president, seeking to restore order in cities across the country, could not very well have done so while allowing thugs from Antifa to lob bricks at Secret Service officers, or chase reporters away from the public square outside his own office.
Well, I'd certainly have liked to see him try. Funnier still is the idea that it was protestors who posed the danger to reporters when cops have been shooting and smashing journalists from sea to shining sea. Not sure why Pollak was pretending to give a shit about reporters anyway, given that he also says the "media" is "unable to distinguish between right and wrong, or between assembly and anarchy." Maybe he thinks a few more rubber bullets to the eye will get them to love The Leader. (In a similar spirit, Pollak also cites Martin Luther King.)
The whole thing's a mess but Pollak's big metaphor reach is extra:
The media, and the crowd, did not realize it, but Trump had seized the moral high ground in that moment. He reached into the mainframe of the American machine and rebooted it with the source code that is the common basis for all we do.
I think he just intuitively knew that "boot" should be involved.
I'll certainly have more tomorrow morning in my newsletter (Subscribe! Cheap!™), but I got around the DC protests yesterday (though I bailed on the night watch -- I'm an old man, y'know) and first I'm here to set you straight that the crowd was racially mixed and not just white anarchist punks, and it was very young -- in other words, disenfranchised from jump and not here for your "but my lawnorder" concerns. But one sees what one wants to see, and sure enough here's Rod Dreher quoting James Lileks -- talk about double penetration! -- in one of his many pants-wetting posts about "Weimar Minneapolis" etc. --
I encourage everyone to take a look at Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks’s melancholic yet powerful blog take on what some of his fellow citizens have done to the city they share. He took a drive through the riot areas, and took pictures. He posts images of gang graffiti. The Bloods have been here (this is their territory in the city). Also a Mexican gang that is heavily involved in human trafficking — they tagged a wall.
What kind of freak looks at nationwide clashes between young Americans and police and his first words are about the Bloods and Mexicans?
Well, now a new generation is introduced to Ol' 9-11 Jim. As for Dreher, he's doing his usual thing, just at even greater length and in a more screechy, panicked voice -- that noise, far outside my compound! Could it be Antifa? Like, for example, "reader" "mail" from "a liberal(ish) white reader" who "writes to say he has been truly shocked by how all his white liberal friends are acting now, at least on social media." Liberal(ish) White Reader tells Rod, "I know on this issue you’ve had the same response as me, which is sympathy for Black people who are the victims of police brutality," so you know he's legit, right? And he's had "substantial conversations" with "Black people (both college educated, one who still very much lives as part of the Black community, the other who is in a mixed-race marriage and from what I can tell travels in a mostly White social circle)," which... is a weird way to qualify his interlocutors; maybe Dreher's readers would be interested in how much exposure to white people the "Black people" had, in order to know how to judge their responses.
Anyway, Liberal(ish) White Reader says the "Black people" were "hot, and all 5 were more sympathetic to the riots than I was," but never mind them because the white liberals (as opposed to liberal[ish]s) accused him of blindness to the situation because of privilege, which is ridiculous because the white liberals were all limp-wristed caricatures:
The perspectives [the black people] had on it came from growing up scared of the cops, knowing people who’d been manhandled or profiled, and just navigating America and all the systemic racism in it (which I 100% believe is real) as Black people. So it was nuanced and grounded in reality. The White liberals, on the other hand, for them it was purely ideology and performance.
In other words, you have to expect the "Black people" to be this way, but it's obnoxious for whites to sympathize. I've seen this shit for decades: guys like Rod (excuse me, Liberal[ish] White Reader) can at least compartmentalize their feelings about "Black people," but what they really hate is "Black people"-lovers.
Also Dreher's customary "I'm no Trump fan" JustTheTip-Trumper construction is taking on many, many more waste-words:
You see that kind of [graffiti] scrawled on the wall of a building in the city that’s in the process of being burned down by Antifa, and you might think differently about Trump’s obnoxious boast about shooting rioters. I wish he had been more statesmanlike, and laid down a hard line without being so provocative, but it’s hard to look at, and listen to, Antifa without believing that Trump is more right than wrong.
The American media (including me) did not see the Donald Trump election coming, and they’re going to miss the political blowback from these riots. I say that as someone who did not vote for Donald Trump, and who wishes we had almost anybody else in the White House right now in this time of grave national crisis, given that his big mouth is likely to make a bad situation much worse. Nevertheless, the fallout from these riots are going to push so very many middle-class and working-class people to the Right. Count on it. As Douthat writes...
Ugh, I'll spare you. (I would also ask: What "middle-class" and "working-class," anymore?) Lately I've been leaning toward the explanation that Dreher's a con man playing his obviously confused readers with his fancied-up Get Ready Man shtick, but this latest wave suggests to me that he's legitimately unhinged, and suffering mightily as he is inevitably driven by fear and hatred into the arms of Spiro T. Trump.
If you had asked me six months ago to predict which party would display extreme levels of concern about a deadly pandemic and which party would downplay the risk, I’d have thought you were tossing me a softball question.
A disease that makes China look bad for a hapless initial response that let a new virus get established, followed by a coverup that let it infect the world?
A disease that exposed the dangers of sourcing essential goods such as medical protective gear from a strategic rival?
A disease that has restored and hardened borders, halted migration, and demonstrated how toothless and ineffective transnational institutions are at dealing with mortal threats?
A disease that has killed 100,000 Americans — which is approximately 100,000 more than the 2014 Ebola outbreak that Republicans thought President Barack Obama didn’t take seriously enough?
Republicans, I’d have said, will be the party of total war against the virus. How could it be otherwise?
Yes, well, I’m still trying to figure that out, too.
You think that's what we're trying to figure out? From my perspective:
That's a party that will fuck up anything including a pandemic. I mean if these fuckers got us into a nuclear war with Russia I'd expect Republicans to spend half their time blaming it on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other half selling weapons to the enemy.
And part of what makes it like this is that their propagandists will grease the skids for them -- as is demonstrated further down McArdle's column:
For years, conservatives have explained that public health efforts are a legitimate exercise of government power.
Sure, this was usually a prelude to complaining that public health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were neglecting this vital mission in favor of paternalistic nannying. But given the CDC’s many boneheaded errors over the past six months, conservatives were in a position to score some political points by shouting: “CDC, you had one job!”
McArdle is talking about the CDC that had a robust epidemiology team in China -- the country Trump keeps reminding us COVID-19 comes from -- before Trump pulled them out. He has also been generally trying to destroy the CDC, presumably because he couldn't figure out how to make a buck out of them. And even now when CDC does crawl up out of trash-heap to lend a hand, Trump kicks them in the teeth.
McArdle seems to be trying to say that conservatism is a noble tradition and will be again if Republicans can get rid of this embarrassing goon and put in a slick operator like Josh Hawley. But who at this point is she trying to convince? Conservatives today just want to own the libs by acting like COVID-19 doesn't exist -- and they're certainly not going to take no mark-of-the-beast vaccine for it from Ol' Pedi-Bill Gates! As for the rest of us, I can't imagine anyone will buy this shtick now that our country has been reduced to a shambles by application of McArdle's conservatarian principles in their purest form. Maybe her editor is fooled, though, and I guess that's all that matters.
• Dan McLaughlin aka Baseball Crank has a nightmarishly bad Minneapolis column at National Review that I don't have time to get into, but this is typical:
It is always hazardous to draw sweeping conclusions about society from individual criminal cases. Every individual case involves individual facts, and those facts often turn out to be quite different from the initial media narrative, as happened in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases.
Yeah, you remember how we all decided Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown actually had it coming, don't you? Man, fuck this guy.
The overthrow of the mainstream media has been a conservative dream for decades, but in recent years it seems the mission has changed: Now it has less to do with pushing rightwing ideas into public discourse and more to do with making that discourse so idiotic that no one who spends time in it will be able to tell a good idea from a bad one -- which, to be fair, is probably a better way to get the electoral results they want than airing think tank assholes to explain for the millionth time why rich people pay too much in taxes.
We've already seen the effect of long immersion in Fox News in recent polls finding Fox fans are likely to believe absurd conspiracy theories, but after a few years of exposure to Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens and their clones I imagine a President promoting bleach as a cure for a new disease will no longer be seen as an absurdity but rather as an arguable point over which intelligent people can disagree.
Which reminds me of the Bari Weiss New York Times column on Joe Rogan, in which she hips her readers to the new podcast thing which is totally taking down moldy ol' mainstream media:
Imagine if I had told you, a dozen years ago, that the former host of “The Fear Factor,” an MMA color commentator who loves cool cars and shooting guns and working out, a guy with a raw interview show featuring comedians, athletes and intellectuals, was more influential than the entire slate of hosts on CNN.
You’d think I was nuts. But it’s true. His fans are everywhere — I’ve met them working behind the register and wearing loafers at hedge funds.
Wow, lazy signifiers for the high and the low -- he sounds even cooler than Cool Kids' Philosopher Ben Shapiro! I've only seen about 10 minutes of Rogan rappin' with Elon Musk, and he seemed to me not to have advanced much from his days watching people eat bugs. But maybe I'm just prejudiced. Who am I to judge? Maybe --
While GQ puts Pharrell gowned in a yellow sleeping bag on the cover of its “new masculinity” issue (introduced by the editor explaining that the men’s magazine “isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all”), Joe Rogan swings kettlebells and bow-hunts elk. Men are hungry. He’s serving steak, rare.
-- ugh, forget it, obviously I was right the first time. When Weiss says podcasts like Rogan's are causing a "world-changing, brain-rewiring transformation in how we consume information," she clearly means they are continuing the Great Work of making us all imbeciles.
Making everything worse as always is Rod Dreher, who's not only excited by Rogan's new status as a conservative intellectual, but angry that the snotty, limp-wristed cultural commissars of the MSM are giving jobs to uppities like Nikole Hannah-Jones instead of to Rogan:
Joe Rogan is one of the most popular and influential media figures in America, but he could never be hired at an American newspaper. Seriously, the little Robespierres in the cubicles would raise hell, and the lily-livered managers (like college presidents) would capitulate. Alas for journalism. [boldface in the original]
There are already newspapers with people like Joe Rogan in them. Doesn't Dreher get the Weekly World News? But I hope his column is a harbinger of class-A conservative journalism to come, and that we see the Washington Examiner, for example, running columns by Joe Rogan, Johnny Knoxville, Larry the Cable Guy, and Lee Greenwood. They can even run regular features about how stupid liberals are to take their political cues from celebrities, as an inside joke that no one, alas, will by then have enough brain cells to get.
I noticed last week that the Washington Examiner, a wingnut talking-point distributor disguised as a newspaper, ran a story called "California doctors say they've seen more deaths from suicide than coronavirus since lockdowns." The plural is interesting, as the story contains quotes from only one actual doctor -- Dr. Michael deBoisblanc of John Muir Medical Center. The only other California medical personnel quoted is Kacey Hansen, "a trauma center nurse" at the same institution. (Conservatives have a massive hate-on for liberal California, and love to intimate that it is full of people who agree with them but are trapped in a dystopian hell by Gavin Newsom and his homosexual army. "California doctor says" doesn't put that vision over so well.)
Hansen merely expresses regret that her trauma center is seeing "so much intentional injury," while deBoisblanc seems to at least lean toward the obvious point of the Examiner article -- that the stay-at-home orders to protect public health are now counterproductive and should be ended ("originally, this was put in place to flatten the curve... our other community health is suffering").
There's also a reference to a "letter to President Trump" signed by 600 doctors (featuring, a quick scan reveals, members of the crackpot Association of American Physicians and Surgeons) "referring to the continued lockdowns as a 'mass casualty incident' and urging him to do what he can to ensure they come to an end."
I, too, would love to see an end to the lockdowns, though I would prefer Trump and his government achieve that by extending sufficient financial resources to our citizens that they will not be driven to reenter public spaces and workplaces before it's prudent to do so, and devote sufficient public health efforts to ensure that when we do unlock, we do so without unleashing a deadly second virus wave, as most Western European countries have managed but which we, despite our vaunted wealth, cannot.
Meanwhile the Examiner story has been spread by many other outlets -- some with headlines like the Examiner's that also claim multiple California doctors' input, though some are compiled and edited more attentively. If you're mad at those dummies crowding up the pools and bars over Memorial Day weekend, at least spare a dark thought for the ones who spur them on.
But in an interview with BuzzFeed News, deBoisblanc said his comment about the hospital seeing "a year's worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks" was inaccurate. He added that at the time he didn't know what the true numbers were...
Numbers provided by the hospital and the coroner's office also show that the "sharp rise" in suicides initially claimed by deBoisblanc, which alarmed political pundits criticizing quarantine orders, were either overblown or outright false. According to the hospital, it has seen five suicide deaths during the county's shelter-in-place order, compared to two suicide deaths during the same period last year. In general, Contra Costa County sees about 100 suicide deaths per year, and officials said that that's remained stable so far in 2020.
"If you look at it from a contextual standpoint, I think it's accurate," deBoisblanc told BuzzFeed News when asked whether the number of suicide attempts treated at the hospital was actually unprecedented. "If you contextualize in concrete numbers fashion, it's not accurate."
"Contextualize in concrete numbers fashion" is perfect for this era, isn't it? Kudos to Buzzfeed News for running it down; most of us don't have time for that sort of thing, which is how bullshit like deBoisblanc's circulates in the first place.
• Just wanted to pass along a street scene: Some years back I first noticed in our DC neighborhood an ice cream truck that worked local housing projects and was not a unit from Mr. Softee or Kool Man, as I recall from New York days, but a hard-used delivery van painted brown (not by Earl Scheib but by, apparently, non-professionals using many layers of house paint) that announced its arrival, not with a recorded jingle or chimes, but with an old-fashioned, covered metal burglar alarm mounted on its side. A side window had been cut and fitted with sliding lucite doors and I guess they had a cooler back there for the popsicles and Nutty Buddies. The other side was windowless and decorated with decals of Disney characters. I had not noticed it for a few years, but yesterday as I biked through the alley behind some Pinnacle housing, the truck was parked and serving to a gaggle of kids. I can't say for sure the burglar alarm was still there because I hadn't heard it ring and I was riding past on the blind side, but I noticed for the first time that above the Disney decals the proprietors had stuck colorful, squiggly letters to the van, the kind of letters you see in low-budget child care centers, and the letters read DREAMS OF PARIS.
Oh, here's another local ice cream vendor -- at least I think it's ice cream:
• As mentioned last week I am very busy with the Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter (to which I bid you subscribe, it's cheap and as a Monday-through-Friday publication may add shape to your quarantine-malformed weeks), and this sadly reduces the time I can spend on alicublog. But! From time to time I release one of my issue to non-subscribers. Here's one from this week about the Liberace ladies vs. Alex Jones. Enjoy!
I’ve seen this kind of thing in all kinds of activists, left and right, over the years. Again, it is possible that some pro-life leaders coldly chose to exploit McCorvey. Again, I think it more likely that it was unconscious. That doesn’t make it right, but I think this kind of thing is common in the world of political activism. I do know, though, of one pretty hardcore pro-life activist, a Christian who had no scruples about deceiving pregnant women about his crisis pregnancy centers. Other CPC workers distanced themselves from him, because they knew he was dishonest, and they were afraid that he would hurt the reputations of all CPCs. This guy believed that the cause justified anything. Eventually he got in trouble over his deceit.
Gasp -- a guy who runs a "crisis pregnancy centers" being dishonest? What's next -- dishonest snake-oil salesmen? Elsewhere Dreher, who sometimes tsk-tsks over egregious racist murders like that of Ahmaud Arbery, actually does the yeah but what about all the black people who kill white people bit, and even throws in some gay-thrill-killer shit, citing the murder of Jesse Dirkhising, which even Andrew Sullivan has stopped using as a distraction. And here's the closer from Dreher's latest post on COVID-19 in Europe:
One thing is for sure: Covid-19 is going to take care of the immigration crisis to Europe. No government will be able to remain in power if it allows more of the Third World poor to flood into their nation under these economic conditions.
This sort of thing is why, when someone identifies themself as a Christian to me, I assume he's a vicious bastard.
During lockdown I've been remiss about looking in on friends who've dropped off the grid, and didn't know Ward Harkavy had been sick until he was dead -- recovering from an infection when he got hit with COVID-19.
In 2008, I parachuted into the Voice from essentially nowhere (this guy has a blog, you say?) and was suddenly surrounded by people who knew not only more about journalism than I did -- not excluding the kids who wrote calendar items -- but in many cases knew everything about journalism. The guys who put me at ease were Tony Ortega, whose experiment I was, and Ward, the news editor, who managed to give me the impression that the job was not actually that hard.
For him it wasn't. Ward was a real journeyman. He had banged around Arizona papers and the New Times alt-media conglomerate for years and had done all kinds of reporting, but was especially interested in the politics of our low mean time (still ongoing) and the Voice gave him room to ruminate on it under various column headings -- Morning Report, The Smart Asset, Bush Beat, et alia. For a while he ran Press Clips, which had become an media-criticism institution under Geoffrey Stokes and Alexander Cockburn, and kept the adversarial posture but also made it fun and breezy -- e.g., "Another rich putz gets bailout money," which turns out to be about newly acquired Mets pitcher J.J. Putz, ha ha. But he also covered the coverage on actual corporate bailouts ("Real motherfuckers: AIG still hands out bonuses") and such shondas as Abu Ghraib, with tags like "PRISONERS (COWERING)" and "PRISONERS (MASTURBATING)," and exposed such newspeak oddities as the "incorporeity damages" that stood for damages assessed by courts when U.S. troops murder civilians.
Also Ward had done heavy background work on the rightwing propaganda movement -- see for example this 1994 Westword article about Paul Weyrich's C-NET cable venture and precursor to Fox News, rich in details about the seminal wingnut. You can see how he and I would get along. We commiserated on the horrible events of the day while trading stupid jokes and sidewalk smokes.
I moved on, he kept on; occasionally the higher-ups let me do my rightbloggers column for the Voice while Ward and a rotating cast tried to keep the show going. When they fired him in 2011, he seemed resigned -- that's how the Voice has always done things -- and more or less content to retire to his Long Island home, take up running, and shoot spitballs on social media. When the Voice itself went under, Ward hoped someone would pick up my column. (No one did, but that's okay; I'm still peddling my papers, so to speak.)
On his Twitter header, Ward wrote, "Every day I try to write part of Trump's obit." I regret to say that it looks like it went the other way. But the great work he was part of goes on, and I expect we'll get some payback. I'll do my bit anyway. Meanwhile stay close to your friends, especially the ones you figured would always be around.
I have reduced the pace of production here at the old plant, not out of laziness but because between my God Damn Job and my daily efforts on the subscription newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!), I'm very short of time anymore. Thus some of the many rightwing writers who have become stock characters in the Droll Satire of Contemporary Mores that is this site go unspanked.
One of the ones that got away is Jonah Goldberg, who has mostly retreated from his much-befouled perch at National Review to occupy the Assness Chair ("No, Asness! Asness!" Potato, potahto) in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute, and to contribute to The Dispatch, a redoubt for JustTheTip- and Never-Trumpers of the old school which is mostly subscription and thus beyond the reach of my self-punishment budget (though I did have a look-in at an early issue, which showed the Old Gasster in good form).
But someone has tipped me to a recent Goldberg white paper from the Ass Chair, and I must report, first, that it is about 4,000 words long -- not as hard a slog as his terrible books, but for readers accustomed to his short NatRev columns that he only made SEEM long an ordeal nonetheless.
It carries the Mark of Goldberg from the very start, with a quote from DeTocqueville (whom conservatives were ruining well before they ruined Orwell) followed by this...
Few students today — or their parents — saw the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger when it premiered. Like many old Bond films, it violates some modern norms, particularly of the #MeToo variety.
Neophytes would already be wondering if it's some sort of joke. But hang in there, aficionados, because Goldberg's about to uncork:
But in one respect, it remains very relevant. Its eponymous villain, Auric Goldfinger, loves only gold. The story climaxes at Fort Knox, the famous gold depository, though Goldfinger's plan is not to steal the treasure there but to irradiate it, making it unusable.This will increase the value of Goldfinger’s hoard of gold. Naturally, because it's a James Bond movie and Goldfinger is the villain, he fails. But his plot is akin to something happening in modern education and our culture, where the largely well intentioned villains are mostly succeeding in irradiating the historical gold reserve of our civic tradition and national narrative.
I assume AEI rejected Goldberg's Star Trek-themed first draft, "The Trouble with Libbles."
Thence proceeds a long, long recounting of one of the rightwing foundation myths: How earlier Bond-villain liberals like Dr. NoNukes and Ernst RainbloParty taught everyone Wrong History. See, kids today don't know their Parson Weems, as is revealed in the latest of several million polls given on the subject since the 1960s, and this is why kids like socialism and speech codes.
Why do kids today cotton to these things when they didn't in the 1980s, when they were also dumb? Because they're all politically correct snowflakes, thanks to "certain social obsessions—physical safety, college admittance, antibullying, self esteem, and so on" -- not like the intellectual hand-to-hand combat on which ruff-tuff contrarians like Jonah Goldberg were raised.
Perhaps sensing this by itself won't do for a think-tank thing, Goldberg lards in more wingnut history: How John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson made "a cultural movement that began to reject America's past" and a New Class of pointy-heads who believed "that they as a class should rule," which begat the G.I. Bill, which "created a mass market for discontent that exploded in the 1960s."
These Baby Boomers, Goldberg goes on, "turned inward to remake society," leading to Howard Zinn turning American history into "the story of victims" in which "the heroes of previous ages become villains, their ideals villainous," which foul libel on American Exceptionalism has been taken up by their wimpy kids via the New Class, which "now controls American education."
For some reason Goldberg doesn't offer as evidence of this Victim History the most obvious, pertinent and widely-known example -- namely, the toppling of Confederate statues that so distresses his Southron colleagues and neo-Nazis. Of such status anxieties are NeverTrumpers made!
Instead Goldberg gingerly pleads for some still-more-dead victims of revisionism -- "It is fine to argue that Christopher Columbus was terrible, but is that all there is to him?" -- before turning to the last refuge of a rightwing scoundrel, famous black people:
Students could learn much from [Frederick] Douglass's righteous anger. But his anger is not what is most instructive. Its righteousness matters more. For despite America's sins, Frederick Douglass did not seek its destruction. He focused on America's "hypocrisy," demanding that we live up to our ideals, not abandon them.
A century later, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke similarly. Like Douglass, King's anger was righteous...
To the trained ear, this strikes a familiar, wounded and baffled Goldbergian chord -- how is supporting the grievances of King and Douglass a retort to the kids who are also "focused on America's 'hypocrisy'"? And even if this is just an evasive rhetorical maneuver -- admitting an opponent's point to gain an advantage -- what would the advantage be? With Goldberg, we know what the result of such a gambit will be 99 times out of 100, and sure enough:
It would have been better if the founders had never been hypocrites. But we should feel deeply grateful for that hypocrisy, because it was the irritant that created the pearl.
FARRRRRRRT The pearl is FREEDOM you stupid liberals FARRRRRT stop laughing if it weren't for slavery how could you even HAVE the Emancipation Proclamation FARRRRRRRRRT
There's the old Goldberg! You just have to dig for it. Whether it's worth digging for is an open question.
White House Authorizes Additional PPE for Kansas Hot Spots
After the direct request from Congressman Roger Marshall, M.D., the White House Coronavirus Task Force has responded in-kind with another shipment of two ventilators, 550,000 N95 masks and 13,000 Tyvek suites to Kansas hot spots, including Southwest Kansas as they continue their fight against the Coronavirus.
“Once again, President Trump has stepped in to ensure those working on the front lines of this pandemic receive the protective equipment they need to remain healthy and safe,” said Dr. Roger Marshall. “The White House task force has continued to respond to the needs of Kansas. While states have been encouraged to procure their PPE through non-governmental sources, President Trump continues to directly track needs and ensure those needs are met.”
Loudoun County is among the localities that have ordered personal protective equipment only to see it taken upon arrival by the federal government.
County Administrator Tim Hemstreet said Loudoun has been bundling its orders with other localities to buy directly from manufacturers. But, he said, that can also attract attention, and he confirmed at a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday that an order headed for Loudoun had been intercepted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Upon arrival, the federal agency outbid the localities for the personal protective equipment and took it, he said.
I don't buy the popular analysis that Trump and his team as geniuses, evil or otherwise, and that anything they do that looks nuts or counterproductive -- including the recent tweet from his tiny-faced campaign manager associating the Republican Party with the Death Star from Star Wars -- is actually brilliant. For one thing, the only talents and interests Trump himself possesses are entirely devoted to his grift -- his disastrous presidency confirms that outside the arena of self-promotion he is lost. As to his handlers, they have mainly been busy cleaning up after Trump's messes, like the functionaries in M.K. Brown's old "Whistle Stop" cartoon ("Do you suppose actually seeing the candidate eat the rat could cost us the election?"), which is why Trump's numbers have been underwater for the most of the past three and a half years.
But Trump has had a Gallup poll bump in the past few weeks, which gives a clue that the Death Star thing isn't about Brad Parscale misapprehending the point of a popular nerd entertainment, as critics suggest, but about the Trump team consciously pursuing a strategy that most of us thought was just the subconscious force behind their and Trump's clusterfuckery. In other words, they're doing it on purpose and here's why.
All things being equal, we can assume Trump has benefited from the reopening plans in most states, of which he has been a booster, if a passive-aggressive one. Now, it's not that voters can't appreciate good management over bad; high-profile governors of states with lockdown and reopening plans like Andrew Cuomo, Ned Lamont, and Gina Raimondo have had much larger poll boosts than Trump, while bumblers like Florida's DeSantis and Georgia's Kemp have seen large drops. So the voters are clearly favorably impressed by active and apparently competent leadership.
I would guess that the difference is that Trump has so accustomed everyone -- supporters as well as detractors -- to his gross incompetence that no one expects anything else from him. So for his base of idiots, and for a slice of that all-important persuadable constituency, it doesn't matter that he doesn't know what a virus is nor probably what day it is; it is enough, maybe more than enough, that Trump steadfastly expresses his fantasy, and theirs, that the whole thing is ending very soon and that it's okay to relax and get back to normal. We'd all like that to be so, and some of us are less clear on the difference between fantasy and reality than others.
But not even American voters, not even Republicans, are dumb enough to really believe Trump's insane assertion that the virus is "just going to disappear." What I think they do take seriously is what previously looked like subtext: That they can go back to normal only by passing through a deadly gauntlet, for the reopening of America after its mostly half-assed and thoroughly underfunded shutdown will come with, as Trump has been saying for weeks, "death... a lot of death."
A lot of people have remarked on his apparent lack of empathy when he mentions the people who, thanks to the quick reopening, will drown in their own phlegm, but he doesn't seem to lose much support for it. Have you noticed?
At the same time, Trump's operatives are playing down the death count, even saying it's all a big conspiracy of the biased media and the so-called scientists to make Trump look bad. We know that, under Trump, their reality has become, let us say, fluid and changes with the Leader's whims. But there's something about death that's pretty inescapable and, based on my experience of human beings, while it brings these guys pleasure and comfort to sneer at the libtards who try to bum them out with epidemiology tables, in their heart of hearts they know that a lot of people will die -- maybe even their loved ones, maybe even themselves. But at this point, if that's the price they have to pay for this wonderful fantasy Trump has given them -- where their diminishing job prospects and earning power are fake news because the stock market roars, where they'll get even better health care once Trump lets insurers do what they like with what they have now (the same way landlords are presumed to lower rents once freed of the burden of rent control), where their own lives gain meaning and purpose and dignity when Mexicans and Muslims are made to suffer -- then it's worth every sacrifice, including the ultimate.
If you watched the old Mad Men series -- which, I am told, is enjoying a kind of revival -- you may recall the subplot about tobacco advertising and the famous Surgeon General's report and the idea that consumers could be encouraged to make peace with the idea of death and the addictions that bring it to them more quickly. You probably don't need Mad Men to tell you that, as the Marlboro Man and Joe Camel already told everybody. We could spend all day talking about the way death is threaded into our culture, and how we embrace and deny it at the same time. We can even imagine a political cause that does that, and that advertises itself with an emblem of mass destruction. It's cool, to many people, to be associated with something of such enormous, deadly power -- even when it's likely to be turned on them.
I've been saying this is a death cult and I'm not kidding.
I've unlocked a few recent issues of Roy Edroso Breaks It Down, a wonderful newsletter to which all you good people should subscribe (especially at my low, low COVID-era prices, which conscience compels me to state are the same as pre-COVID prices but still damn low). Today's freebie is loosely about a recent column by White Working Class Whisperer Salena Zito. I confess I haven't been following her lately; there's low-hanging fruit, and then there's rotten apples lying in the tall grass, and after a spot of controversy about the, how shall I say, integrity of her sources back in 2018, she seemed to be making an effort to hack in a more traditional rightwing journalistic manner, which made her less interesting to me.
More the fool I; there are no small subjects in the view of the mature satirist, and I was alerted to a great new Zito column by the intercession of longtime Zito advocate and rightwing buffoon Bethany Mandel, who in a recent, increasingly deranged stream shook her Twitter fist at unnamed "doxxers" who felt "entitled to destroy the life, reputation and career of a good woman from behind a keyboard... while remaining anonymous," and suggested Jim Swift of the Bulwark was the Soros behind it. (Mandel gets so worked up she even does the "[Zito's] not a Trump supporter BUT she gives voice to those who are" bit, as if anyone who didn't know any better would be paying attention.)
The Bulwark is hilarious, like all NeverTrump integrity shtick, but to me the really interesting thing is Mandel not being more specific -- what doxxers did she mean? And what Zito column had set all this off? It's difficult to tell and I'm practically a Kremlinologist when it comes to these guys. Following the bread crumbs, however, I ascertained that they probably meant this thing, which is hilarious from jump:
HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania—Charlie Gerow has lived and worked in Pennsylvania’s state capitol for a very long time. “I've seen a lot of rallies and protests over the decades, and generally they're relatively small.” On Monday, when he walked up to the state capitol steps to observe the demonstration, urging Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, to reopen the economy, Gerow was blown away at the number of people in attendance.'
For a man who has long given up on being blown away by anything in politics, that says a lot.
“The parade of cars alone was unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed..."
Bliss it was to be alive then, but to be the Republican media consultant/single source in a Salena Zito column was very heaven! Anyway enjoy my trenchant analysis.
