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.