Lounging Around the House - for Victory!

Here’s the deal. The closest analogy to the Plague Year is World War 2.

Except instead of getting drafted or building Liberty ships and B-24s that huge part of the public that was "the war effort" in the Forties in the Twenties is going to have to close their shops, lose their jobs, and stay the fuck home.

Now...B-24s were a dead loss to the public weal. Made nobody, everybody, every single American absolutely zero in terms of building the gross domestic product. They were crucially important for the job at hand - winning the war - but basically nothing but a huge metal hole in the sky into which the government threw money.

So the U.S. government’s job right now - right now, right fucking now - is to treat every restaurant the way it treated Consolidated in 1944, and treat every laid-off busboy and bookstore clerk like it treated a welder at Kaiser shipyards and turret lathe operator at Springfield Armory.

Pay them. They’re fighting a war. Pay them for their fight. Pay them for their sacrifices.

That means, no, Republicans, goddamnit, you don't get a goddamn payroll tax cut. That pays for Grandma and Grandpa to stay in their home and not be out under a fucking bridge catching the fucking plague. No, Trump, fuck no, you don't get a massive bailout for the damn fracking outfits or your CEO buddies. They can borrow at zero interest using their assets for collateral.

No, this goes to the troops; the baristas and librarians and truck drivers and (ahem) geologists who are idled in order to prevent this plague from wrecking the economy by getting people tossed out of their homes, gutting their savings, and destroying their lives.

Pay them...or this epidemic will wreck this country as thoroughly as any Nazi could have.

(And don't even get me started about how we're not but we should be cranking out medical supplies - everything from masks and gloves to ICU beds and ventilators - like Sherman tanks and B-24s thundering off the assembly lines in 1944.

The complete and utter clusterfuck that has been the Fraudulency Adminstration's "response" on this one would be legitimate cause for summary execution in any sane polity.)

Update 3/18 p.m.: Trump says he's going to do what he should have done several weeks ago and what I ranted about just above; activate national-defense-level production of essential medical materials under the authority of the "Defense Production Act". So the orange monkey gets "credit" for finally not flinging his poop, I guess, since that seems to be the low bar set for this dingus.

Mind you, this is Trump, so the clueless chucklefuck and his minions have no idea what to DO with this authority:

"Trump declined to say how, precisely, the Defense Production Act would be used and he suggested that the administration is still deciding. He said the administration had “targets” for equipment it wanted but did not say what those targets were."

Christ, what a maroon.

Update 3/20: So here we are, two days after I posted the first update...and Emperor Dumbfuckius Maximus still hasn't actually begun to use the DPA to, y'know, actually produce anything useful. States are still scrambling to find medical necessities like masks and ventilators. My guess? He and his gang can't figure out a way to make a profit out of it. They know if they order their CEO buddy at PharmaCorp to start cranking out masks, and their buddy follows his instincts (which will be to charge $6.95 for a mask that costs fifty cents to produce) they'll get found out and hammered for price gouging (which, in their minds, is just "being smart"; chiseling the suckers while they can which is, y'know, how it works...).

And the rest of the GOP just doesn't want to do anything to suggest that government isn't the problem.

So, yeah...we're still kinda fucked.

Update 3/24: Oh, for fuck's sake!

"From the start, the administration* has treated the DPA as though it were some sort of Damoclean weapon by which it can force compliance from American industries. "Watch out, Ford. Make them ventilators or the DPA’ll gitcha!” This is because, for politicians like Pence, a product of a Republican Party that married itself to supply-side snake oil and disdain for self-government, it is inconceivable to imagine that the federal government’s demanding that industries respond to a worldwide crisis cannot be more effective and efficient than waiting for those corporations to engage their civic consciences to do so. And they will adhere to that faith over your grandmother’s dead body."

These fucking people.

Honestly.

If I was a company commander in the 3rd US Infantry, I swear to God; I'd go through this White House and Senate like a dose of fucking salts. And after every last one of them; Dimwit Donnie and Moscow Mitch and Javanka and all the other rats had been put up against the wall I'd then surrender myself, plead guilty at the court-martial, and happily spend the rest of my natural life as the oldest private E-1 in Leavenworth knowing I had done a damn fine piece of work.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Back in February I wrote this:

"The autumn flu of 1918, on the other hand, killed apparently healthy young adults. Millions of them. It ran around the globe doing the same. A third, less-lethal-but-still-pretty-lethal wave ran from the winter of 1918 to the spring of 1919 before finally petering out.

Could this sort of mutation occur to the Wuhan coronavirus?

Of course it could. We won't know until it happens, just like we had no idea that the 1918 flu season would turn lethal until it did.

"Well.

Now we know.

My state, Oregon, has been fairly quick about responding in the only real way that a republic can; closing things like theaters and sports stadia, and - finally - schools. But that's because our government is in the hands of the relatively sane (i.e., not Republicans) and who are dealing with this new plague as it is, not as Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump want them to think it is.

I won't pretend I'm not frightened. At 62 I'm in the gunsights of this fucking thing. I'm relatively healthy, but I'm old, and this kills old people.

I'll tell you what, though.

If this thing is killing me, I promise you this; I will personally do my damndest to escape my deathbed, steal a jetliner, fly to Mar-a-Fucking-Lago, break into the clubhouse, tear off my clothes, and rub my naked dying ass all over that moronic orange chucklefuck. I'll take the stupid sonofabitch with me if it's humanly possible. To think that this country wasted weeks while the dingus played with his phone and claimed that all was well?

Goddamn him.

I haven't words to describe how furious that makes me. While this is a global pandemic, and it is unlikely that ANY President could have prevented it from becoming a national tragedy, it's going to be worse than it needed to be, and purely because this fucking simpleton and his cult members refused to listen to the people ringing the alarm bells in the night.

As of now Oregon is fairly quiet. The usual morons are flooding the grocery stores, but the streets and parks and public spaces are quiet. We're all hunkering down, most of us, which is really all we can do, no different from some 14th Century villein in his cotte and hose, desperately praying to St. Jude that the White Horseman will pass over his house and leave him and his by.

There is no defense against this illness; all the wire and mines and interlocking fields of fire will not save us. If it comes in to us then we simply have to hope that we are not the unlucky few whose bodies betray them in a "cytokine storm", and hope that we will not end up flung namelessly into the plague pit.

Will that happen?

I have no idea.

But it could. And I will simply have to go on, as you will all have to go on, doing what I can to prevent that, and hoping against hope that it will not.

We are all now living in the Plague Year.