I am a difficult person to deal with. There is no modifier attached, not “sometimes difficult” or “I can be difficult,” as a rule I am more maintenance-intensive than the average person. Stubborn, strident, sometimes bellicose, often sarcastic and patronizing, a real know-it-all. If I feel particularly adamant about a subject, and believe the opposing view is superlatively inane, sometimes you won’t be able to agree with me enough, a frailty I despise in others and attack when I recognize it. Have I mentioned I can also be a hypocrite. Forget “not perfect,” I can effortlessly tax a Zen master’s patience.
How is it I’m not generally reviled and disdained by most, including a family intimately acquainted with my plethora of shortcomings? The answer to that question is the reason our species is capable of living together and organizing ourselves to survive, even prosper, despite competing viewpoints and even adversarial sensibilities.
It may actually be the best definition of sanity that someone is capable of both appreciating the pluses that outweigh the negatives of others, or that the others can innately exhibit those characteristics. Anybody fully deficient in getting past the frailties of peers, or offer intimates anything but their worst, and constantly carp there is nothing wrong with such malfeasance, or more unhinged, it actually should be commended, is in la la land, 20 cards short of a full deck. Which brings us to the Trump/MAGA phenomenon and the national ruin it foists.
The most recent outrage from the White House is as shocking as it is utterly predictable. According to several corroborated sources, it’s official: the Trump team is banking on THEIR BASE growing fully inured to 50K-100K cases of Covid per day and whatever death and health care chaos it creates. How most of the country digests such atrocity is not a concern, only that their messaging – read Fox/AM – convinces the wretched core to avert their eyes and focus on what’s really important, like the war on heritage. It’s a sure bet such indifference will soon be cited as a pre-requisite to proper patriotism. Covid p***ies can leave, real Americans don’t distance! Live maskless or die!!
There is zero doubt we are about to witness death on a breathtaking scale. It’s a mathematical certainty. The most optimistic figure relating to Covid-19 cases and deaths it causes is one percent. It’s been far more than that in America, but we discount the higher number with both fact – many more actually have the virus or have recovered than has been documented – and denial. Now that testing is ramping up – or as Trump often lies, “the best testing in the world and it’s not even close” – the denial component is going to be far harder to maintain.
It’s now clear 100K new cases a day is going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. Actually, incredible Fourth of July scenes of beaches with literally no place to lay a towel make it likely the 100K milestone may soon be wishful thinking. Regardless, thirty days of 100K cases equals 30,000 dead, ten 9/11s, at the very least. That’s not hyperbole…. it’s math most all will understand. Whether millions will care is another matter. We now know this White House will do whatever it can to make sure they don’t.
In Texas, Florida, Arizona and California – where a good portion of the carnage is going to take place – ICU capacity is strained to the breaking point, with videos of desperate ER personnel describing hell on Earth proliferating; and the surge really hasn’t even begun. It took from March to July for the US to reach 125,000 fatalities. What the toll would have been had we not locked the nation down for two months is anybody’s guess. That total stands to increase by near a third within six weeks but nobody is even considering a second shelter-in-place, least of all Trump or any of his GOP eunuchs at either the state or national level.
Should that pace continue through the election, Trump will have near half a million total dead to answer for. He not only plans to ignore that, but will also surely attack the veracity of those reporting the crisis. Of course, were he to act with even a sliver more of empathy, or offer a fractionally more constructive response THAT would be news, a hideous irony we can mark the depths of our descent by.
All of which circles back to mental health, or more appropriately collective insanity. About eight decades ago Germans and East Europeans, in what Hannah Arendt profoundly labeled the banality of evil, convinced themselves mass killing was but an unfortunate offshoot of war, an inevitable plight Jews were fated to suffer, something beyond their control and morally permissible to ignore.
Today we are at the precipice of a similar monstrous rationalization, and the exact same societal psychosis drives the thinking. This moment we suffer a shared acceptance by millions that the worst of people is not only tolerable, but admirable, courageously contrarian. What most others view as our better nature is now derided by this bloc as part and parcel of a “leftist agenda,” the trappings of progressive conspiracies. MAGA is a mob’s disdain for societal decency, a mass refutation of the bare minimum of citizenship necessary for a democracy to survive…. or at least deserve to. BC