Musings at 2am.....

I just watched a horrible movie by M. Night Shaymalan called “The Happening”.  It seems there is some sort of natural biological phenomena that suddenly descends on the Northeast as a wind blowing through the cities and towns, stopping everyone in their tracks and making them simply commit suicide.  It is completely ridiculous and the dialog is even worse!  When it was over, however, it dawned on me that I was experiencing the same thing, only it was called Covid-19!

Maybe it’s just that I am beginning to go stir crazy, just marking time day after day, each day seeming the same with no end in sight.  I am unsettled because while I am trying to make sense out of each day and be rational about what our chances are of not catching the virus, the madness of the rest of the world is swirling around me!  Just watch the news!  See all the stupid things that people are doing: unhinged behavior where no one wears a mask and social distancing is a joke.  ‘Leaders’ seem unfazed by the danger, ignoring the science and simply

telling everyone that they’ll be fine.  “We have to open up”, they say! “No worries, we’ll all be fine—
and of course we are going to be saved by all the testing we are doing, which is more testing than has ever been done before in the history of the world!”  And the lemmings of America say, “OK!  I believe you-- science is a hoax and this virus stuff is not going to happen to me!”, they bray to each other!

The TV is filled with conflicting messages from those who know what is really happening and those who think they have all the answers-- and are fools!  And I sit here day after day listening to the endless blabber of opposing experts, trying to convince myself that I am not going mad!  I change the channel and I am listening to mini profiles of selected examples of the 100,000 dead ones, or first person accounts from the front line heroes.  The number of dead is hard to get my head wrapped around.  Each name is a mountain of grief for the individuals who agonize over their loss.  Multiply that circle of mourners by 100,000 and it boggles the mind!

Trump refers to them as ‘numbers’ of dead without any scintilla of empathy and it just amplifies the sense of disorientation that I feel.  I am living in a relative cocoon of safety while the world is spinning out of control around me with no one able to tame the chaos.   

What I always imagined was our organized and capable government turns out to be a myth!  I listen day after day as the evidence of our government’s impotence to organize and control this sickness relentlessly washes over us.  No one seems to be able to come up with a plan!  Lots of people talk about what we SHOULD be doing, but no one is doing it!  Our President is openly de-legitimizing the agencies that are supposed to create the solutions and offer guidance and advice.  He is using the sledgehammer of his apparently unstoppable powers to crumble our institutions day after day, while madly telling us what an incredible job he is doing, and no one seems to have a way to stop him.  His acolytes, the Republicans, are part of the swirl of madness that somehow keeps him in power.

Have I made YOU dizzy yet??

I wonder how many people sense this churning chaos that seems unstoppable.  I am embarrassed at

my agita when I realize that I am one of the lucky ones who is well off!  How many millions have no job; not enough food; can’t pay the rent or mortgage; are dealing with impending bankruptcy; are facing eviction; can’t get unemployment—and on and on?

On some level I know the end game is a vaccine if we can all make it to that seemingly unattainable day when we can get an injection and tame this beast.  But the distance between now and then seems to be a chasm of sickness and sorrow that I fear we all are going to have to face….and I know that until that time I must find a way to endure this feeling of helpless disorientation that makes me want to constantly pop a Xanax!

Maybe tomorrow I will watch a Doris Day or a Pee Wee Herman movie!

Deception, Stupidity, or Worse.....

We are dealing with a pandemic that has no cure, no treatment other than palliative treatment, and no vaccine.  Common sense tells all rational people that the only way to try to control it is to stay away from each other, constantly wash our hands, and take all physical precautions that minimize the risk of contact and transmission.  That is simply common sense!

And yet our reality is filled with people who are ignorant of the simple science involved here and are egged on by a cynical national government that is willing to sacrifice lives; personified by a President who openly encourages people to ‘open everything up’ in clear opposition to guidelines he himself presented to us just a few weeks ago for controlling the  pandemic.….a President who has marginalized the CDC, OSHA, law enforcement and the regulations that offered us clean water and air. 

Covid-19 is an airborne virus.  Masks make sense for whatever protection they afford.  And what does our President do?—He tells all of us that he doesn’t want to wear one; he doesn’t need it.  If you or I told someone that, we might affect 2-6 people who listen to us.  When he does it, he affects millions of people with bad advice.  Just another effort to marginalize scientific reason.....

Now he wants to use his ‘authority’ to open up all the churches of America.  If you look at the stats, most infectious hotspots started with congregant gatherings—in churches and other places of worship.  The numbers don’t lie.  Common sense would tell most rational people that encouraging this kind of behavior is counter intuitive and dangerous.   Makes no matter; for Trump it is all about misleading in the service of his own selfish gains—in this case mollifying his Evangelical supporters.  The thousands that will die as a result are not important.

Studies are confirming the facts that hydroxychloroquine is a dangerous therapy for this disease and there is not even anecdotal evidence that it has any prophylactic value at all.  And yet with no scientific basis at all, Trump has been recommending people take it.  Why?  The most logical and cynical reason is that “the use of the drug has become a benchmark in the political culture wars, with Trump allies echoing his calls for the drug as a sign of their confidence in his instincts and as a way of promoting what they see as an optimistic view of the pandemic. The president is probably also promoting the drug because it offers a big political upside — getting to say he was right and the experts were wrong — with a small downside.”, says the New York Times.  Forget that he has no experience as a researcher or any kind of authority to make these recommendations.

So why is he doing all this?  First of all, telling lies is like breathing for him.  His life is a lie.  He has no moral compass at all, so if lying furthers whatever his objectives are, then fine.  We have also affirmed that he is consummately stupid.  He doesn’t read and makes all decisions from his ‘gut’.  Facts and truth are fungible for Trump.  That is not to say that he is not brilliantly manipulating!  Look at the legions of his supporters who reject fact and truth to follow his cultish direction.  As to his motivation for all this counter-intuitive behavior, it should come as no surprise that it is in the service of his own re-election and self-aggrandizement.

Face it—we have the most horrible government we could have at one of the most perilous time we have had in the history of the Republic.  We must all rely on ourselves to weather this nightmare.

I was sitting at the breakfast table with my 30 year-old daughter this morning talking about the possibility of seeing Trump win the election in November.  She said simply that she would move out of the country.  I looked at her and said, “But sweetheart, you are the only hope for this country…you and your generation are the only ones who can save it.”  She looked at me and said, “But Dad, why would I try to save something that won’t offer me healthcare, that pays lip service to democracy, that does everything possible to prevent me from voting; that with his re-election raises the possibility of martial law, corruption of the courts, and disintegration of the foundations of the democracy?”

I couldn’t really answer her…..

Bizarro America

Do you remember the old Superman series of comics?  I loved them and never missed a new edition.  Then one day they introduced a new character—Bizarro Man.  He was spawned by a scientist that was demonstrating his new ‘duplicating ray’ to Superboy and inadvertently created a crude, angular mirror-image of Superboy.  This creation’s speech was flawed, as was his behavior.  He was the negative version of Superboy.  Lex Luthor in later years recreated the ‘duplicating ray’ and tried to use it on Superman in the hopes he could control the creation he made.The Bizarro man that resulted, however, was confused, stating: "Me not human... me not creature... me not even animal! Me unhappy! Me don't belong in world of living people! Me don't know difference between right and wrong — good and evil!"

Why do I bring this up?  I feel like I am now living in that reality, where my America has been transformed into a Bizarro America, where Donald Trump is the Bizarro President and everything that was good about America has been transformed by the ‘duplicating ray’ of the 2016 election.  Up is down, left is right and good is suddenly evil.  The certainty of the rule of law and the security of rational thought has been corrupted into a universe where facts don’t matter and people’s perception of what is right and wrong no longer exists.

Consider the current state of affairs concerning the pandemic.  Rational thought would suggest that the science of how the virus is transmitted is obvious to an educated and aware public.  What we see instead is the wholesale acceptance of Bizarro President’s premise that the pandemic is ‘over’.   “We’re back!”, he exclaims as he foments rejection of the very guidance his administration created on how to stop the spread of the virus two weeks ago! 

And now we find that his administration has been purposefully hiding that guidance and not making it available as he pushes for ‘opening up America’.   He claims testing is overrated and not necessary because “When you test, you find evidence of cases and so if you don’t test, you don’t have any cases!”  That is a statement from Bizarro America!

The CDC has been the envy of the world for its ability to analyze, strategize and manage outbreaks of new diseases around the globe.   Bizarro President does all he can to gaslight the world by denigrating the efforts of research scientists and their decades of advancement in fighting disease.  Bizarro President tells all of us that the scientists’ advice is ‘unacceptable’.  Rather, Covid-19 will just disappear, especially if you try injecting Clorox into your body.  He wants us to believe that if we just resume normal life as it was before the virus, we’ll be fine.  And in Bizarro America, apparently millions believe him.  During this past week in Bizarro Texas and Bizarro Wisconsin, the bars, restaurants and beaches were jammed.  And the rest of our states are following in lockstep, throwing caution to the wind.  Where do you think that will bring us?

The evidence of rapid spread of the virus in nursing homes, meat packing plants, and prisons is simply ignored by many governors who are fans of Bizarro President.  The management in these institutions want to abide by Bizarro President’s mantra that if you don’t test, you won’t see any cases of disease, so they hide their statistics from us to make us believe that we are ‘flattening the curve’.  In fact the governor of Georgia had his public health department create a graph showing the curve of disease and death flattening nicely over the past two weeks---until you look closely at the graph and see that the dates along the X axis that show progression of time are completely out of order, placed purposefully to create the image of a flattening curve when in fact the opposite is actually true!  Governor Kemp in Georgia has been replaced by Bizarro Governor Kemp!

Then there is the evolution of the United States Department of Justice which has become the US Bizarro Department of Justice headed up by Bizarro Attorney General Barr.  In Bizarro America, criminals who are friends of Bizarro President Trump are released from jail (Manafort) or their prosecutions are aborted even though they pleaded guilty to crimes (Flynn).  Just like Bizarro Superman, Bizarro AG Barr and Bizarro President can’t discriminate right from wrong; good from evil.  In Bizarro America now, the rule of law does not apply.

I don’t know what to do about this.  I don’t want to live in Bizarro America….neither do a majority of Americans!  But somehow we are trapped in this place without an apparent escape route.

Now, Bizarro President Trump wants to jail his predecessor President Obama; his last political opponent Hillary Clinton; and his next political opponent Joe Biden.  He claims there is irrefutable evidence that they are all part of the ‘Deep State’ and have been nefariously working for years to undermine and discredit him.  They are guilty of disgraceful crimes (for which he can’t even articulate what the crime is, or present any evidence to support his claims) and therefore members of the Bizarro Senate should haul them all before investigating committees to ‘expose their crimes’ and then Bizarro AG Barr will send them off to prison for at least 50 years!

In answer to all this rubbish, Obama tweets, “Vote!”  True, that is the antidote to Bizarro America, but what are the odds that somehow Bizarro President and Bizarro AG will find a way to turn our federal election into a Bizarro Election?

I guess I will have to wait for the next comic book edition of the “New Adventures in Bizarro Land!”

  

                                                                    God help us.

Darkness in America

With the release of the new Covid-19 projections for the number of cases and the number of deaths from the CDC, we are faced with the realization that what many had hoped was a return to ‘normal’ is not going to happen.  We are now living the new normal.  What is so inconceivable is that so many in our country cannot understand the inverse relationship between reduced reliance on social distancing and the increased spread of the corona virus.  This pandemic is not fake news!  The science is clear, and yet all those who scream for ‘freedom’ in fomented demonstrations simply don’t get it.

If there were even the most minimal coherent leadership in America, we might stand a chance of reducing the effects of this pandemic.  But the people in charge have rejected the science of this public health emergency.  Yesterday we learned that the Trump administration has muzzled Anthony Fauci and will not permit him to testify before the House sub-committee investigating the corona virus outbreak and response.  Why not?  It seems that the President and his administration reject scientific facts and reject transparency.

Hey Dr. Fauci!  This is America!  You have your own voice, don’t you??  Get off your ass and tell us what happened and testify.  Don’t be cowed by people who reject you as a scientific authority!  We must understand where we went wrong so we can be prepared for the next similar threat.  In the words of Donald Trump, “What do you (and we) have to lose?”  Certainly it wouldn’t be your credibility!

Our immediate future is completely reliant on each of us assessing what is best for us individually.  We cannot rely on our government mobilizing to combat this threat.  We each must evaluate our own character values and do what is right.  For me, that means remaining as tightly insulated from others as possible.  There is no one to protect me and my family from the darkness that surrounds us.

I heard a quote from former Governor Chris Christie this morning that gave me chills.  His view is that opening up the country is just so important because we can’t sacrifice our ‘American way of life’.  Oh well, if that means that we should accept the deaths of 3000 people a week because it is important to go to the park or the beach, or eat out at a restaurant, or go to the gym, or buy clothes at the mall, I guess that is ok with him.  That kind of quote is symptomatic of Republican thought that espouses the view that the economy is more important than life.  That is why I called the Republican party the ‘party of death’ in my blogpost a few weeks ago.

What is so hard to integrate into my concept of reality is that a huge number of my fellow citizens either are too ignorant to see the relationship between an ‘opening up’ of America and the prospect of increasing sickness and death all around them, or they simply don’t care.  I guess it will only become real to them about a month from now when scientific projections that they have ignored appear to come true.  And even then, they will reject the clear scientific truth as well as the fact that they might have been wrong.  After all, Donald Trump said it wouldn’t happen, so maybe it really hasn’t happened.  Undoubtedly he will call it fake news.

Our economy will not get better.  In fact, it will get worse.  As the sickness rises again in about three weeks, no one will want to go anywhere.  Stores will have no customers.  Fear again will stalk the land as our health systems get crushed with desperately sick people.   More small businesses will fail and more unemployed will tax the state systems for unemployment insurance.  We are entering a period of prolonged economic suffering and social upheaval.  The lines of cars stretched out to receive food at the local food banks will echo the bread lines of the 1930s.

There is no federal plan for how to deal with any of this.  The Trump plan is to simply ignore it and give up.  “Let the states figure it out for themselves!”, says our President.  “But, haven't we done a magnificent job of recognizing our own shortcomings and persuading all of you citizens that it isn’t my fault?”, he says.  “Don’t worry, it will eventually go away.  We will only lose 250,000 people, which isn’t so bad, is it?  They were all old or infirm anyway….and besides, we don’t want to sacrifice our American way of life!”

                                                       There is darkness in America.