FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Who knew it had words?

•   From an alternative universe, Megan McArdle:

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:

A party that's constantly shitting on the findings of scientists to stir up culture war for their anti-intellectual rubes?

A party that demonizes Muslims and Mexicans as a contagion and pushes them out, while welcoming the European whites who brought the virus here in the first place?

A party that habitually turns every government function, not excluding public health efforts such as the distribution of emergency equipment, into a grift to enrich donors?

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.

SHUT UP AND GET A GUY TO EAT BUGS.

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.

A MAYOR FROM JAWS OPENING UP THE BEACHES, FOREVER.

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").

The story is padded out with references to data showing that the stress of living in the pandemic is bad. One source is what could be generously called a meta-analysis from Just Facts, an organization probably best known for claiming that as many at 5.7 million ineligible voters cast ballots in the 2008 election; its current paper, "Anxiety From Reactions to Covid-19 Will Destroy At Least Seven Times More Years of Life Than Can Be Saved by Lockdowns," has also been promoted in another WashEx story.

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.

UPDATE, 5/27: Funny thing about Dr. deBoisblanc's claims:

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Good show, too.

•   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!

•   On that head, like I said, I don't look in on the cartoon characters that have been alicublog's primary dramatis personae as much as I used to, but I did recently make a quick visit to the land of Rod Dreher. Quarantine has put the zap on his head pretty bad, and it's not getting better. He's had a full-length sputter about Norma McCorvey aka Jane Roe, who apparently revealed at the end of her life that she'd been grifting when she declared herself pro-life, followed by testimony from another wingnut (and fellow culture-warrior) saying McCorvey was "truly pro-life" ("I never heard her say anything about money"), so there. (Any of these people ever see Citizen Ruth?) In the sputter, though, are a few gems, including this:

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.

WARD HARKAVY, 1947-2020.

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.

LET'S GET RE-FARTED IN HERE.

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Monk knew: Some melodies are strong enough to do gymnastics on.

•  Just a couple of recent news stories. From KSCB News in Kansas (red state), May 6:

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.” 

And from the same day, at Loudon Now news from Loudon County, Virginia (blue state):

Feds Intercept Loudoun-bound PPE Shipment 

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.

It's obvious what the disparities in Trump's PPE distribution and seizure are about, to the point where we had a governor sending National Guard troops to protect his (blue) state's PPE stash from marauding feds. Why we talk about this administration as anything but a criminal conspiracy -- a homicidal one at that -- is beyond me.

THE DEATH CULT AND THE DEATH STAR.

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."

Death has become a big part of Trump's palaver lately. At his bizarre Honeywell appearance the other day, the sound system played "Live and Let Die"; in an ABC News interview Trump said "there'll be more death." At his Lincoln Memorial stunt, he said "We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people," casually as if he were talking about average rainfall or crop yields.

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.

RETURN OF THE WHITE WORKING CLASS WHISPERER!

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.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Yeah, I like cheesy pop music. What's it to ya?

•  At a press conference, after Bill Bryan of DHS talked about how sunlight and bleach can kill the COVID-19 virus, Trump gibbered this:

So, I’m going to ask Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing when we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.

You read that and, if you're a sane person, think, why am I living in this hellworld where the President of the United States is asking about using "disinfectant" to cure coronavirus victims by "injection inside or almost a cleaning"?

But if you're Ryan Saavedra, working for Ben Shapiro's Daily Wire, you think this is the headline the circumstances demand:

FACT CHECK: No, Trump Did Not Tell People To ‘Inject Themselves With Disinfectant’ Or ‘Drink Bleach’

Then he goes on to quote the ENTIRE THING I JUST QUOTED, and then portrays some other Trump gibberish he gibbered later about something else ("It wouldn’t be through injections, you’re talking about almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work, but it certainly has a big affect if it’s on a stationary object") as "Trump then clarified his remarks."

But he certainly didn't say the word "bleach."

We can talk about Orwell and all that but it gets boring. Even people who don't know Orwell from an oil well will look at this and, if they have all their marbles, recognize someone is trying to pull the old flim-flam on them. The issue isn't whether they can see that -- only whether they can be convinced that they'll stand out like sore thumbs if they say they do, because everyone around them is a devoted Trumpkin, and they don't want to make waves, which helps convince all the others that it's not a good idea, certainly not neighborly, to question the President even when he says things that everyone would agree is insane if, say, Nancy Pelosi said it. Clearly guys like Saavedra are hoping that's the case.

THE CORONAVIRUS LIBERATION ARMY.

As someone who covered the first Tea Party wave in early Obama days, I wonder how many people are fooled by the Tea Party II protests demanding the right to spread coronavirus. Republicans are certainly trying hard to bamboozle them. Trump is, in his usual incoherent way, playing both ends against the middle, yelling to LIBERATE states from social distancing while formally supporting social distancing (he even mildly chided Brian Kemp -- well, it's Georgia, what's he got to worry).

In this Atlantic article you can see Congressman Bill Huizenga (R.-Mich.) doing Trump's shtick more smoothly (helped considerably by reporter Russell Berman, who refers to him as a "mainstream conservative" pursuing a "middle ground" and "common sense"):

The Washington Post has reported that the organizers of the Michigan protests included a conservative state lawmaker and a longtime political adviser to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. A family of gun-rights activists with ties to the libertarian former representative Ron Paul is behind similar demonstrations in other states. 

Yet Huizenga, who first won election to Congress in the Tea Party wave of 2010, dismissed the suggestion that the demonstrations were mere Astroturf and unreflective of public opinion. “I’ve seen Astroturf and I’ve seen organic,” he told me. “Everything I saw was organic. Once it started happening, then certainly people started throwing some fuel on the fire, but I believe the origins of this were just pent-up, frustrated Michiganders going, ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t make sense with what we are experiencing and living with.’”

How bothsidesy -- with a strong emphasis on one's own side, as it usually is! He's just helping out gosh-darned fed-up friends of Betsy DeVos.

Missing from most of these discussions is the stark fact that opening massage parlors and hair salons during a deadly epidemic is LIBERATION for impatient well-off Republican constituents and the campaign operatives who exploit them, but the literal tens of millions of people unemployed by coronavirus measures need to be LIBERATED from poverty, and that $1200 stimulus check and (barely)-enhanced unemployment insurance that's absurdly hard to get isn't going to do it for most of them. And putting them back in harm's way is not the preferred alternative.

Don't worry, though -- some rightwing conmen are thinking about those meager benefits. And what some like Noah Rothman of Commentary think is, the peons are getting too much of them and won't want to come back to work in the virus hotbeds! Behold his analysis in "Republicans Were Right about Unemployment’s Perverse Incentives":

“If the intention was to get people back to work, they’re not doing it,” restaurant owner and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio said of the expanded unemployment-insurance benefits in the CARES Act. “They’re not going to come back to work because unemployment is too attractive.” Colicchio is not the only restauranteur mourning the likelihood that, when furloughed service industry workers are called back to their places of employment, a simple cost/benefit analysis may lead their former employees to stay home. “They’re getting paid more on unemployment than they would if they were actually working,” Minneapolis-based coffee-chain proprietor Christian Ochsendorf told Politico. “Heck, if they’re making more money sitting at home,” Ohio bar owner Adam Rammel speculated, “I’m fearful that some may not want to come back.”

Who could have possibly foreseen this perverse incentive associated with expanded unemployment benefits? Well, as it happens, a lot of Republicans.

Republicans tried to warn us:  They knew if you gave peons enough money to live on, they wouldn't want to return to their shitty jobs!

“You’re literally incentivizing taking people out of the workforce at a time when we need critical infrastructure supplied with workers,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of the provision that allotted an extra $600 per week beyond state-level unemployment benefits for four months. Sen. Ben Sasse expressed similar dissatisfaction with this measure and its potential to sever employees’ relationships with their current employers. “It’s perverse,” he declared. “It’s against the purposes of the legislation, and it could exacerbate life-threatening shortages in a number of critical sectors.” Sen. Tim Scott outlined a scenario in which someone who makes $30,000 annually in the service sector collects the equivalent of $50,000 per year on unemployment. “So, if you’re on unemployment for 16 weeks,” he noted, “we would give a 50 percent raise under that scenario.” 

Yet instead of being hailed as heroes, these Senators "were caricatured as irredeemable villains, and their objections were pilloried," weeps Rothman. Now people making 30 grand -- which, if they pay the average U.S. rental of $1,405 a month, leaves them the princely sum of $1,095 a month to pay for food, utilities, student loans, etc. -- will get used to a better way of life. True, we were going to kick them off it as fast as possible, but now they'll be discontented!

Rothman's touching concern for the bosses, though, pales in comparison to that of Dan "Baseball Crank" McLaughlin at National Review who not only wants the slackers sent back to work ASAP, but wants their employers held harmless for any contagion that may ensue.

What will it take to reopen the U.S. economy and civil society? One obstacle that may stand in the way is the fear of lawsuits. State legislatures and Congress should act now to limit the threat of lawsuits so as to encourage economically and socially necessary activities that are bound to carry some risks. 

You know, economically and socially necessary activities like serving food from crowded kitchens and waitstations, or handling packages, or looking after children in a day care, or cutting up beef carcasses -- stuff National Review authors don't have to do. McLaughlin wants employers LIBERATED from the prospect of lawsuits if they force their currently-idle drones back to work and they get sick. Like Bill Huizenga, McLaughlin just wants to be reasonable and common-sensible:

For factories, plants, or shipping hubs, it is not unreasonable for the state to require some enhanced safety procedures during a pandemic. But social distancing will be impossible for a lot of factories without huge, expensive renovations or For factories, plants, or shipping hubs, it is not unreasonable for the state to require some enhanced safety procedures during a pandemic. But social distancing will be impossible for a lot of factories without huge, expensive renovations or massive reductions in the workforce on duty.

You can tell "massive reductions in the workforce on duty" is just a way of repeating "huge, expensive renovations" that makes it sound as if McLaughlin is looking out for the workers rather than the business owners who would profit from their return:  He then names a lot of lawsuits of the sort he'd like to squelch and, surprise! None of them are against workers:

Cruise ships have faced suits for failing to adequately disclose whether previous passengers got sick, or for claims that they contributed to outbreaks by sailing. Nurses have sued hospitals for not providing adequate gear. A wrongful-death suit brought against Walmart by the family of an overnight stock and warehouse employee alleges that the company “failed to clean and sterilize the store [where the employee worked] properly..."

While admitting "some of these types of suits may be justified," McLaghlin's heart clearly is with the moneymen, and he has several plans to protect them, including this beaut:

The strongest protection would be an absolute bar of the sort given to vaccine makers, possibly coupled (as in that case) with a public fund for compensating those who get sick as a result. 

Princess Cruises, vaccine makers -- same diff, really. Oh, and here's lagniappe for law students:

Some would object that this is government interference, but any lawsuit is government action; the only question is whether the rule of law being applied is made by a legislature or by a court.

Why not tease that out and instead propose nationalizing these industries that are so frail they must be protected from simple justice?  Some would object that this is government interference etc.

These people are mad and must be stopped.

UPDATE. We got a million of them:

Steve Doocy suggests that allowing states to go bankrupt would be good because it gives them a chance to cut pensions. pic.twitter.com/OxrrwioOOC

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) April 23, 2020

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Joe Pass had monster chops, but like all the greats

he knew when to lean on a good melody.

These are rough times, let's let that theme ride.

Same goes for vocalists.

•   It is to laugh:

The Age of Coddling Is Over
Learning what hardship has to teach us.

...by -- get this! -- David Brooks! Yes, he actually typed with his soft, manicured fingers (or maybe someone does that for him now) that "over the past decades, a tide of 'safetyism' has crept over American society," a tide that led to (or was caused by, kinda hard to tell) "a wave of overprotective parenting," and this -- not an economy that grinds up and disposes of an increasing percentage of its young citizens -- is what causes their rising depression diagnosis and suicide rates.

But not everyone's a suicidal sissy! In previous incarnations one would have expected Brooks to nominate as America's Toughest Avatar his laughably poorly-drawn "Flyover Guy," but the times demand a new model why-can't-you-be-more-like object: The American Healthcare Provider!

But there has been one sector of American society that has been relatively immune from this culture of overprotection — medical training. It starts on the undergraduate level. While most academic departments slather students with A’s, science departments insist on mastery of the materials. According to one study, the average English class G.P.A. is above 3.3 and the average chemistry class G.P.A. is 2.78.

While most academic departments have become more forgiving, science departments remain rigorous (to a fault). As much as 60 percent of pre-meds never make it through their major.

While you liberal-arts pussies are going bankrupt paying loans on your postwar feminist bullshit, these students are getting their asses toughened up by drill-sergeant grading curves! And that's why they're staying at work now even though they can't get proper protective equipment and are dying at alarming rates -- because they're macho enough to cover for our inept government! Look at them, not the idiots who put them in harm's way! Ain't it heroic?

But have a care -- the limp-wristed ways of the West threaten tough-guy med-school culture:

Med schools are struggling to become more humane and less macho, more relationship-centered and less body-centered. But when you look at what’s happening across the country right now, you see the benefits of their tough training...

I’m hoping this moment launches a change in the way we raise and train all our young, at all ages. I’m hoping it exorcises the tide of “safetyism,” which has gone overboard. 

You gotta get your kids to man up if you want great things from them. Take it from Brooks, who built his intellectual muscles forging sociological insights in the smithies of the University of Chicago and The Weekly Standard; can you imagine Bobos in Paradise and The Third Mountain, with all their tensile strength, emerging from some Oberlin pink-tea? The moral is, if you want heroes, you have to grade tough, so the weak drop out, which means they deserve their banishment into debt slavery, and the winners can take their place on the front lines of medicine and everything else, to be mowed down by whatever gets unleashed on them by the inspired leadership of such statesman as Brooks endorses. Don't change the system, harden the proles!

THE BLAME GAME BECOMES THE NAME GAME.

I have opened up the latest Roy Edroso Breaks It Down issue, with lyrics from the new Battle Hymn of the Republic, to be sung by the people protesting for their right to spread coronavirus in defiance of the fascist heath inspectors.

Conservatives will do anything to deflect the whole thing onto their traditional enemies. You all know that Trump has been trying hard to shift attention from his disastrous mishandling of coronavirus by blaming China and calling COVID-19 the "China virus" (which is so gross his own CDC director condemned it).

In this Trump has plenty of help from the usual suspects. Josh Hawley role model Tom Cotton has been weaving conspiracy theories about Chinese germ warfare and Jim Geraghty, who was probably sad his junior high career fair didn't have a "propagandist" track, does the Just Asking Questions bit at National Review:

A few people sometimes ask whether it really matters whether this virus originated from someone being less careful than they needed to be with a bat in a laboratory or biological material from the bats. I assume these are good faith questions, and not some sort of effort to preserve the good name of the Chinese government.

LOL fuck you buddy.

...But if we want to ensure nothing like this happens again, we need to know how this virus first got into humans.

The irony is that every possible transmission path paints the Chinese government as incredibly reckless and unconcerned about the risk to human life. 

If it originated from a person eating bat or pangolin at a wet market, then we need to take steps to ensure that bat and pangolin consumption and trade stops everywhere in the world.

See, he's just being thorough.

...The Chinese government is incredibly reckless and unconcerned about the risk to human life because they keep the wet markets open. Put another way, right now in your community, you’ve got to stand in line six feet apart to get into your local supermarket, but Beijing won’t even shut down the exotic animal butchers.

I assume the next wave of nutcakes hollering outside state capitols will be carrying signs denouncing wet markets, illustrated with drawings of slanty-eyed pangolins wearing Red Army hats.

Speaking of the ChiComs, nomenclature is an important part of the propaganda. The Epoch Times -- a worthy successor to the Washington (Moonie) Times as America's #1 fucked-up far-East wingnut disinfo disseminator -- actually has a house style (not even kidding, go read their stories and see, though I warn you they'll harvest your email) requiring it be called "the CCP virus" or "the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, commonly known as the novel coronavirus." And you'll see cagey locutions at places like Ben Shapiro's Daily Signal ("As the world continues to battle the terrible COVID-19 pandemic that began in Wuhan, China...")

But as longtime readers know, the mainstream media outlets that like to class up the ravings of their rightwing pals will always be a bit smoother. At the Washington Post Josh Rogin tells us that Trump saying Chinese virus "is simplistic but technically accurate" but nonetheless he's willing to accommodate you snowflakes. "Accuracy is not the only consideration the president should take into account," Rogin says, and some people might get the wrong idea, so he has a workaround:

Let’s stop saying “Chinese virus” — not because everyone who uses it is racist, but because it needlessly plays into the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to divide us and deflect our attention from their bad actions. Let’s just call it the “CCP virus.” That’s more accurate and offends only those who deserve it..

Rolls right off the tongue, don't it? Definitely using a neologism that has not filtered up through common usage, but has rather been cooked up in a lab by propagandists, will not seem awkward -- and it's an easy way to show patriotism in a time of crisis -- you know, like freedom fries!

(Oh, and of course stage 2 is a Beijing Biden drive -- which has alliteration going for it, I'll grant, though given all the love Trump's shown the Chinese dictator, only his most brain-damaged troops will take it up.)

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

We had Perry Henzel's No Place Like Home on 

and this cover came up in a club scene:

In a million years I would not have guessed it was Etta James.

•  This fucking guy:

Fuck, next it’ll be Bach Flower Remedies. https://t.co/eBinZQIq2I

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) April 10, 2020

I think we underestimate how much of Trump's bullshit is based on his public speaking style, which is basically cribbed from Home Shopping Network pitchmen and old-fashioned carney barkers, and demands that one never stop talking and never stop pitching, no matter what. There's also his favored "people say" locution, which means he saw it, or maybe something like it, or maybe the opposite of what he's saying it said, or maybe he's just making it up on the spot but the main thing is you can't pin it on him it's what PEOPLE SAY. These days we're very focused on his criminal neglect and cynical manipulation of the crisis and the deaths attributable to it, but another long-term effect will be that if we ever get a coherent president again (Biden doesn't count, unless they lace him up with The Formula), people won't be able to follow what he or she is saying because formal sentence structure will have become an arcane mystery.

•  Speaking of pitchmen, rather than send you to my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I'm going to just pull a relevant section from a recent issue, about David Harsanyi's weird National Review article "The Left’s Ugly Reaction to Hydroxychloroquine," and paste it here:

Harsanyi is talking about liberals noticing that Trump has a small financial interest in the drug — which of course he does, as he has made clear from the beginning that he doesn’t intend to avoid conflicts of interest of any size.

Now, Trump’s direct pharma interest is not the big problem with his hucksterism — which is that MAGA people may be making a run on the stuff, creating a shortage that’s keeping it from the lupus sufferers and others for whom the drug has actually been approved and who need it. In fact some hospitals have been “hoarding” the drug for fear of such a shortage.

But even though big-time MSM outlets such as the Washington Post have been saying that “Trump’s promotion of hydroxychloroquine is almost certainly about politics, not profits,” Harsanyi pretends to be mortally offended not only that liberals would even consider that Trump may have a venal interest, but also that they would question his devotion to the welfare of his subjects:

For one thing, and I realize this might be difficult for some people to comprehend, it’s plausible, even likely, that Trump advocates for chloroquine because he is legitimately optimistic that a therapeutic answer might help Americans. Even if you feel he’s being reckless when speaking about the drug, you can accept that his intentions are good.

I have to admit: the weird weevils of the wingnut demimonde have a lot of crazy ideas, but I doubt any of them seriously believes that the Boss ever does anything out of fellow-feeling.

The funny/saddest thing in Harsanyi’s essay is its conclusion:

You don’t need to send me angry emails detailing all the downsides of championing potential drugs already in use for other diseases. One of my children takes hydroxychloroquine to help mitigate a dangerous autoimmune condition. I’ve already had to work hard to track down hydroxychloroquine because we live in a world with unethical hospitals and doctors who hoard it. Believe it or not, they’d still be doing it if the president hadn’t ever mentioned it, because they believe it holds promise.

See? Despite what you might think, chloroquine is not being hoarded by Trump fans because their God-Emperor has been hawking it like the ShamWow guy at press briefings — it’s because those damn hospitals and doctors have been hoarding it for their so-called patients, just like Trump says states are hoarding the ventilators!

And Harsanyi’s got a kid who needs the stuff. Greater love hath no man! Maybe if the Boss notices how much he’s willing to sacrifice to show fealty to him, he’ll share some his stash with him.

•  Update! Longtime readers especially will appreciate this Victor Davis Maximus Super Hanson sighting, by Muriel Volestrangler (not her real name) in comments:

You'll like this, Roy: after an article about a Stanford medical team doing coronavirus antibody testing, Victor Davis Hanson saw it, thought "Stanford - that's me!!!", and found a gullible reporter to whom he became a "Stanford researcher", and fed his "California got the virus last fall!!!" hallucination. 

This was then picked up by media outlets who ought to know better, such as SFGate - but who have since withdrawn it, realising it's an old man with an ancient Greek fixation trying to pass himself off as a researcher in some vaguely relevant discipline.

The SF Gate story has indeed been withdrawn though the Wayback Machine retains a copy. ("'Something is going on that we haven't quite found out yet,' said Victor Davis Hanson a senior fellow with Stanford's Hoover Institute," LOL). There's a more thorough examination by Jane Hu at Slate:

Hanson’s recent work, published in National Review, suggests he is eager to reopen the American economy. It would be quite convenient, then, to claim that the virus has already torn through the U.S. and granted us immunity. (In that article, Hanson also claims that “much of the virus modeling is nearly worthless” and refers to it as “science,” in scare quotes.) 

Hanson also (incorrectly) suggests that the virus’s spread in California came from “Chinese nationals” visiting California. Looking more closely at his recent work reveals a potential political motive for that claim; in a recent op-ed for Fox News, he argues that we already have too many Chinese nationals visiting, studying, or collaborating in the U.S., and that post-coronavirus America should “wake up” and make changes.

Hanson's Fox story is headlined, "After coronavirus — will America be a roaring giant or crying baby?" so you see he hasn't lost his sense of style. And he's spreading racist bullshit at a higher level than ever! Maybe Trump sent him a big enough reward to replace the chainsaw the Messicans stole from him.

JOHN PRINE, 1946-2020.

Goddamnit.

Like a lot of people my age, I got an earful of early John Prine early on, then didn't think about him much for years. When I finally swung my attention back I was shocked, dumbbell that I was, at how much great music had passed me by. Pretty much everyone knows "Hello In There," "Sam Stone," and "Illegal Smile" from that amazing first album, and they're wonderful, but that was Prine just starting to take his surreal, sublime gifts for a walk; over the years he got way out there but without ever (not once!) getting precious or pretentious. Head in the clouds, feet on the ground, as another songwriter put it. I don't believe there is any such a thing as a bad John Prine song.

Here's an example from "Christmas in Prison," a waltz that's as sad as its title but not maudlin because even sad people have poetry and humor, maybe more than happy people:

It was Christmas in prison
And the food was real good
We had turkey and pistols
Carved out of wood
And I dream of her always
Even when I don't dream
Her name's on my tongue
And her blood's in my stream...

The search light in the big yard
Swings round with the gun
And spotlights the snowflakes
Like the dust in the sun
It's Christmas in prison
There'll be music tonight
I'll probably get homesick
I love you
Goodnight

Prine's music not only sounds good, it is good, if you know what I mean; that is, beyond the immediate pleasure of his voice -- a plaintive voice that's so Chicago it sounds like Oklahoma, and that flips quickly (sometimes it takes a moment to catch on) from earnest to sly -- and even beyond the pleasure of his lovely tunes and lyric invention, his songs survive long attention; some of them I've been listening to every week for years and I'm in no way sick of them. They're whimsical, but they're damn sturdy.

I'm crazy about his ragged third album Sweet Revenge, which in addition to the classic "Dear Abby" has the purely joyous breakdowns "Onomatopoeia" ("Bang went the pistol, crash went the window, ouch went the son of a gun") and "Automobile," which is like a Jimmie Rodgers Ramones song:

I held a little bitty baby
I held a woman all night
Whenever I get the hiccups
I hold my breath 'til my head gets light
Then I drive my automobile, drive my automobile...

Later on in "Living in the Future" he wrote one of my all-time favorite choruses; it always feels fresh, like a statement on These Times no matter what times you're living in:

We are living in the future
I'll tell you how I know
I read it in the paper
Fifteen years ago
We're all riding rocket ships
And talking with our minds
We're wearing turquoise jewelry
And standing in soup lines

We could do this all day. I won't make recommendations as such because anywhere you look in you'll see something great. And he was still writing and playing and singing, and had beat death a few times already in the cancer wards when this fucking thing finally finally got him. I guess he had some idea that the next stage was in the wings (to put it Prinely), and he gave this lovely valedictory you see at the top of this post, at the end of his last album. We could feel cheated, but really we were blessed.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

"We're all ridin' rocket ships and talkin' with our minds/

We're wearin' turquoise jewelry and standin' in soup lines." Get well soon!

•   This grimly hilarious thing of Elon Musk, having promised to get hundreds of "ventilators" to needful New York to treat coronavirus, sending in their place dozens of BPAP sleep apnea devices, has had the added humorous result of showing me how many tech-biz journals out there are dedicated to kissing Musks' ass. Here's one from something called CleanTechnica:

Some critics believe that this whole thing is actually a fiasco and have criticized Elon Musk for helping out. One has even stated that the devices are five years old, when in fact it is the platform that is five years old, not necessarily the machines. It would seem that these critics have focused entirely too much on supposed faults Elon Musk and Tesla, who are trying to help, and not the larger issue at hand here: the coronavirus and the fact that hospitals are running out of supplies. Another critic has claimed that these machines don’t have any functionality in dealing with COVID-19 and questions as to why Tesla would provide them. 

Dr. Jonathon Richards, a member of the Louisiana Tesla Owners and Dreamers Facebook group and an ICU doctor treating COVID-19 patients right here in Baton Rouge...

Yeeeesh. My favorite is from "Teslarati":

Some recognized tesla’s good deeds to donate these machines as just one of his many generous acts during the crisis. However, some critics were quick to point out the fact that the ventilators sent to the hospital in Queens were CPAP/BiPAP machines, speculating that they would not assist patients in need of breathing normally.,, 

Musk clarified that it was “very important to provide C/BiPap devices to *prevent* cases from becoming severe. Once severe (intratracheal intubation), survival rates are low.”

I know I said I was paying for chemotherapy, but this program of diet and exercise I actually gave you is an important way to *prevent* cancer. I'm beginning to think Musk will be President of the United States some day. Sure, he's not a citizen, but the GOP has made clear that our laws mean nothing anyway.

•   Just in case you've been wondering how Rod Dreher is taking it, he's been hysterical for weeks; it's all coronavirus all the time. There's an occasional retreat to the classics ("If Orwell were alive today and writing with his superlative critical pen about [SJWs], he would struggle to find publication in one of our major liberal journals" -- just like Kevin D. Williamson!). And he continues to swell his collection of JustTheTip Trumper essays ("Let me further stipulate that unlike the Never Trumpers, I am glad that the galoot from Queens demolished the old Republican Party, which had grown decadent...") but mostly it's Get Ready The World is a-Comin' To An End.

Today's entry is a Lulu:

This pandemic will not finally end, most likely, until there is a coronavirus vaccine. Who knows when that will happen? What kind of America will be left when this pandemic recedes? 

So: I closed the laptop, then went to brush my teeth.

[It's these homey touches that really make his writing.]

I was thinking about the news I had just read, and the movie I had just seen, then I remembered the story of the torn flag. I’ve told it in this space before, but man, in light of this sudden horror that has overtaken our nation, it really stands out in a different light.

I'll spare you: Years before 9/11, someone had an old flag, and on the first 9/11iversary it was suddenly discovered RIPPED IN TWO. Right up there with Peggy Noonan's Face Of The Evil One!

Like I said, make of it what you will. We will never really know if it was a coincidence, or a meaningful coincidence. No question, though, but that the United States has not had a good 21st century — and it just got unimaginably worse.

One of the tragicomic aspects of Dreher is, he doesn't know this difference between a shitty metaphor and a Sign From Above.

Question to the room: have you ever had precognition of the future, or witnessed something you consider to have been a portent, a sign of things to come? If so, tell the story.

It's early yet but I look forward to the Signs and Portents his readers may bring. "When men like bats do fly, the world’s end then is nigh!" Sim sim sala bim! Mayhap it will lead to the world's first online snake-handling service.

LET'S NOT BICKER AND ARGUE ABOUT WHO KILLED WHO, PART INFINITY.

I've unlocked a newsletter issue on the latest propaganda gambit from the brethren: That it was actually the Democrats (and experts quoted in health stories) who were downplaying the virus at a critical time, probably in an attempt to kill innocent honkies -- look at all clips of de Blasio and Pelosi telling them to go to Chinatown! Chinatown, Mandrake!

This is meant to exonerate Trump, not by an actual comparison with his actual actions (which from the dismissal of the U.S. pandemic team onwards is pretty clearly disastrously inept), but by making it look as if no one was calling for quick, decisive action -- even though Trump was on TV for weeks insulting and bitching about the people who were calling for quick, decisive action.

They've been dishing out the talking points on Reddit, leading to various idiots on Twitter trying to disseminate them. (Many use the "I'm not defending Trump" shtick; you go to their feeds, and they either have four tweets or it's full of rightwing retweets.)

It's always interesting to see them launch a new product, particularly when it's an obvious Edsel. It will be even more interesting to see who falls for it.

UPDATE: Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner: "No institution has failed the public worse than the news media during the COVID-19 pandemic." Unsurprisingly, a huge part of his story is actually about China, with Adams condemning the press for writing about "whether it is racist to use terms such as 'Wuhan virus' and 'Kung flu'" -- as if noticing that Asian-American people are getting physically attacked by racists over the virus somehow impedes the fight against the virus. (It's becoming conservative orthodoxy that racism is actually an important weapon against COVID-19.)

But the smaller part of Adams' story accusing the press of telling people "the virus was not as dangerous or serious as it sounded" (evidence: A Vox tweet in January!) is even dumber. For decades, wingnuts have been telling people not to believe the Lamestream Media, and to listen only to authorities like Fox News and Republican office-holders -- who have been spectacularly stepping on their dicks over this (here's the latest example from Brian Kemp in Georgia). That these hucksters would now turn around and ask the same media why they didn't override conservative propaganda to warn the populace is really in parent-murderer-cries-for-mercy-because-he's-an-orphan territory.

I SHALL KEEP YOU, BORTAI, IN RESPONSE TO MY PASSION. YOUR HATRED WILL KINDLE INTO LOVE.

The latest trend in conservatism: throne 'n' altar fascism! In The Atlantic Adrian Vermeule says that originalism, the rightwing judicial scam that says most of us were never meant to have any more rights than an 18th-century bondservant, has "outlived its utility" and the hip wingnuts are getting into "common-good constitutionalism," which is

based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate.

And the "common good" is what's good for you, as judged by your betters -- "officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges)" who, in opposition to the "relentless expansion of individualistic autonomy" championed by godless libs, will read "principles" into ""the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution" and make you live by them:

Finally, unlike legal liberalism, common-good constitutionalism does not suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy, because it sees that law is parental, a wise teacher and an inculcator of good habits. Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them—perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Readers of a certain age will remember being taught in school that one of the signal differences between America and Great Britain, and why we kicked them out, was that here we had no "subjects." I guess we don't teach that anymore. I'll go this far with Vermeule: In the interest of the common good, authorities should be permitted to check his basement and crawlspaces for captives.

IF PIGS HAD WINGS.

The Wall Street Journal's Daniel Henninger, always shit, has surpassed himself today:

I like to think the WSJ art department, if there is one, had some fun putting FDR and Churchill out of scale with Trump. It looks as if the shades of these great men are sharing a laugh -- "Can you believe they're comparing this cheap crook to us?" (Hope the layout people don't get in trouble for this -- WSJ editors can be extremely shitty to the help.)

You can read the whole wretched thing if you like but you probably already get the picture -- The Democrats are puny Lilliputians trying to tie down the Orange Colossus, but destiny beckons:

No national leader plans to be in a position like this—not Roosevelt, Lincoln or Churchill. Mr. Trump will emerge from this crisis either as just another president or a president who led his entire country through a great battle. 

Or, option 3: As a sociopathic con man who blundered into a job far too big for his meager talents and yammered on TV about how mean everyone was to him while thousands needlessly died.

If Democrats choose to be the opposition in this battle, voters will judge that choice.

I thought in this "battle" the opposition was the virus. Isn't it a little early to go full Nazi on one's political opponents?

Some will say, from experience, that asking Mr. Trump to rise to presidential greatness is quixotic. He’ll never adjust no matter the circumstance. And yes, on Tuesday he was in a cat fight over ventilators with New York’s Democratic governor, Andrew Cuomo.

Ironically, Mr. Trump’s path to presidential greatness may begin by doing something small but desired by virtually all Americans: Separate himself from the pettiness of our politics.

If Henninger had an editor and that person didn't flag "Ironically" and ask "Do you mean 'in an alternate universe'?" -- well, who am I kidding, no one edits his stuff.

Mr. Cuomo is a governor with a job to do. Help him. If he wants to kvetch, let him.

This may be the most absurd part of Henninger's column -- between the famously self-pitying Trump and a governor begging for help in an exploding medical crisis, portraying the latter as the kvetch.

Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer have self-isolated from what the American people want from Washington now. With the rescue package finished, if they choose to stay small, let them.

I take it back. Saying the Democrats "have self-isolated from what the American people want from Washington now" when Mitch McConnell, having done everything he could to poison the Senate coronavirus bill that Bernie Sanders had to come in and unfuck, then actually recessed the Senate for a goddamn month, is bullshit of the lowest ordure.