As Heather Cox Richardson has noted in yesterday’s edition of her excellent blog, “We have lost almost 185,000 people to Covid-19. That number is a 9-11 attack every day for two months. It is flying a full 737 airplane into a mountain every single day for more than two years. I cannot fathom why combatting this disease is not an all-hands-on-deck national emergency.”
Why, indeed!
And, more to the point, how can anyone find this acceptable???
Look at the furor that resulted from the 911 attack! The wars, the unravelling of the tenuous balance that once kept the middle east from bursting wide open at its seams, the enormous toll in human suffering that continues to this day!
And yet, this administration glosses over the facts or, more accurately, attempts to hide them from the American public, in a cruel attempt to pin a happy face on a human tragedy of enormous proportions. And for what? So a pitiably empty shell of a man can retain control of a governmental apparatus he openly despises yet cannot even begin to comprehend!
How can this be okay?
The coronavirus may not be trump’s fault, nor is it China’s, but what is clear and beyond dispute is the responsibility he bears for the fact that the epidemic continues to remain unchecked on his watch.
And yet this president—the same person who, prior to becoming president, tweeted, on November 8, 2013, “Leadership: Whatever happens, you’re responsible. If it doesn’t happen, you’re responsible,”—said this past March, when asked about the lack of Covid-19 testing in the United States, said “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
And now, as evidenced by the mind-numbing messaging of the RNC’s recent convention, we are to believe the pandemic has passed, that the president’s admirable leadership has all but vanquished the plague from our shores, and that, soon, the economy will be surging back like runoff from snowmelt following a heavier-than-usual winter’s snowfall.
And the vice-president, a much-publicized deeply religious man, belies his true intentions by repeating the indecencies of the president—a man to whom religious piety is as foreign as a bacterium is to the immune system.
And their supporters, loyal followers all, believers who persist in their beliefs without question, consume, like good soldiers, their daily doses of soma—the drug given people in Aldous Huxley’s prescient novel ‘Brave New World’ to create an “impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds,” to “make people avoid reality.” And, all the while, more and more families grieve the loss of loved ones whose funerals, thanks to Covid, they’re barred from attending.
One thing is clear: As long as the president denies any responsibility whatsoever for the epidemic ravaging the country on his watch, his hopes for the return of a vibrant economy will remain just that—hopes.
Or, as David Byron writes in Rolling Stone, “there’s no way to overcome the virus with a country at war with itself.”
Tim Konrad
2020.09.02
sonora2sonoma 
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