Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Just so we understand each other here

It's becoming increasingly obvious that:

1. The Trump Administration has no "plan" for dealing with The Plague. There has been no serious work put in on increasing the volume of testing, there is no interest in any form of contact tracing. There is not even a pretense of the sort of WW2-level fiscal mobilization we'd need to "freeze" the country in place to preserve people's lives and fortunes until there is, at least, a promising form of treatment for this pathogen.
2. Trump and the GOP are terrified of arriving in November with the country still locked down. They will force open the gates to the city regardless of the Mongols because they see the alternative as electoral suicide.

So the inescapable conclusion is that the GOP "plan", such as it is, is to "take the punch"; force people out into contact with each other, spread the disease, and let the corpses pile up until those who are going to die are dead and the survivors are, hopefully, immune. Paul Campos sums it up:
The coronavirus is obviously highly infectious, and in addition many people are contagious when they’re completely asymptomatic. As Frum says, testing lots of people — and we’re not even doing that yet, not really — is just a first step toward doing a bunch of other things. But those other things are really hard and expensive and unpleasant, and we (meaning the American ruling class) don’t do hard and expensive and unpleasant.

So you get lots of stuff like this article from the president of Brown, about how colleges and universities have to open in the fall because otherwise there will be no money to pay for things, so they have to do X Y and Z, except even doing X Y and Z in the context of a university campus almost certainly wouldn’t be adequate, and in any case there is as far as I can tell no actual movement toward doing X Y and Z.

The real “plan,” such as it is, is to let a lot of people die.
And that's it.

We are ruled by men who, faced with a pandemic disease, are eager to benefit themselves at the cost of other people's lives.

Not because there's no alternative.

But because the alternative is "really hard and expensive and unpleasant" and they'd rather us proles die than they have to do that.

Are we clear on that?

We're going to be sacrificed on the altar of political and economic power. Primarily - though, infuriatingly, not exclusively - Republican political power.

I don't know about you, but that makes me furiously, incandescently, ragingly angry. Angry as in "hang every fucking MAGAt traitor I can lay my hands on" angry. Angry as in "take you bastards with me" angry.

And yet, here I am, stuck in my little house in Portland with only 100 rounds of .303 British and fucking Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump are all the way across the continent. I'm a decent shot, with my old Lee-Enfield. But not THAT good a shot.
To hit even Trump's ginormous lardass would take a lot of windage and elevation at that range, more's the pity.

Well.

Fuck.

3 comments:

Ael said...

The only (small) comfort I can offer is to point out that the virus is especially hard on fat old men and the oligarchy is full of fat old men. Furthermore, at this point in time, there is no effective treatment, no matter how much money you have.

The prime minister of the UK came within chatting distance of the grim reaper. And he is only in his 50's. America's lordships are mostly in their 70s and 80s.

Ael said...

Well, it did kill Senator Warren's brother. But from what little I know about him, he wasn't part of the ruling class.

Still, hope springs eternal.

Brian Train said...

I'm glad you're a Lee-Enfield man; good choice.