At what point does typical American selfishness become callous and premeditated negligence? That’s the question the New Yorker posed last month when it published one of its famous long articles on the struggle of the city council in Minot, North Dakota, to implement a commonsense precaution against COVID, a mask mandate.
The article takes an in-depth look at how the city council tried to deal with what should have been a straightforward decision. It’s a snapshot of the United States’ failure throughout the past year to 1) Take the pandemic seriously and understand that we were responsible for dealing with it regardless of where it came from. And 2) reign in the characteristic American selfishness and stupidity that prevents us from doing what other nations freely understood had to be done.
And the results now are proving how selfish we really were. Australia and New Zealand are very much back to normal internally, even if they can’t yet travel internationally. Singapore will start a travel “bubble” with Australia this coming July. Taiwan is doing well, and Thailand is getting back to normal, although they still are making foreign travelers go through quarantines when coming into the country.
Meanwhile, in America, the country is recovering from the effects of cruel criminal malfeasance:
There’s a really stupid discussion happening on Twitter and in political analysis about whether Biden really did inherit a vaccine mess from Trump. Here’s the ultimate refutation from TPM, which points out that Trump’s vaccine distribution plan was to basically mail it to the states and let them figure it out. Not to mention that he and his group of dopes didn’t order enough vaccine.
As usual, the wankers who think the obvious fact of Trump’s gross COVID incompetence needs a re-think can only make an argument if they ignore the whole picture. Let’s go beyond the question of what a merely competent response from Trump would have looked like. What if we had decided that we were really going to slay the virus and show the world what we can do? What would that have looked like?
Of course Trump and his band of hacks did nothing that they should have done and even the correct measures that they took , they had to be beaten into taking. The reason they didn’t is the basic selfish stupidity outlined in the New Yorker article.
In an even, unemotional tone, she said, “We will follow the Governor’s guidelines. . . . We have not restricted or endorsed any large group gatherings.” Still, she told the council, personal and collective choices could make a difference. “The Governor has made it clear that it is up to local jurisdictions to determine what policies should be enforced,” Clute said. “There’s a whole host of things that you can do.” She mentioned some of them—reducing seating capacity in bars and restaurants, restricting large group gatherings. “It really boils down to what the communities want to do.” There weren’t many people in the room, and they didn’t respond audibly. But an incendiary dialogue was taking place in the anonymous chat that accompanied the live feed of the meeting on YouTube:
“This bish can put her muzzle back on.”
“Only 277 total have died since the beginning in a state of 667K people.”
“Sorry but grandma’s die and babies are born so goes the cycle of life.”
“277 is not a pandemic.”
“#scamdemic.”
There are replicas of this kind of blatant stupidity throughout the United States. This last week, Gregg Abbott announced that Texas was lifting all restrictions, even though experts repeatedly told him it was a stupid thing to do.
And in Florida, Ron “Death” Santis has pretended that everything was fine all along.
Even as he figuratively contributed to the murder of over 32,000 of his own constituents.
Over 530,000 people are dead, and we could go as high as 750,000. Most of those deaths were avoidable if the country had followed mask precautions and taken the pandemic seriously early on.
Behind Trump’s bluster and weakness in the face of the virus is a neoliberal ideology that shapes our health care system and sets the U.S. apart from other nations, he said. It’s an ideology that values corporate profits over the lives of the vulnerable and sees health care as a commodity to be bought and sold rather than a human right. In such an environment, public health measures such as masking in public and providing health care to immigrants are subject to polarizing debate, even though they benefit everyone.
The Lancet’s commission concludes that simply returning to pre-Trump era policies will not be enough to protect health. Grumbach said the entire system needs an “overhaul.”
An exceptional nation? Hardly. A selfish nation to be sure.
@hopjuiceipa Another gem from @dannykbernstein #greenscreen #gregabbott #texas #covid19 #pandemic #wearamask #republicans #gop #comedy #fyp
Well Skippy, we all got to watch stupidity on parade at the so-called Biden press conference where only hand picked friends were allowed to ask questions, really simple, stupid, doofus type questions and they were all submitted well in advance so his answers could be written out for him on index cards which he then read back to the “reporters” asking him stupid pointless inane questions and then his answers took stupidity to a whole new point on the presidential stupid scale.
Yeah, the whole world watched that press conference; our enemies and our friends and I suspect our friends are shivering in terror at the reality that this is now the head of state/head of government of their guarantor of record.
Sucks to be them, doesn’t it.