A Breather

In the last week, America has endured even more protests (often marred by aggressive cops and/or right-wing lunatics), a surge in Covid-19, and allegations that the president is so corrupt that the House articles of impeachment were penny ante compared to his actual malfeasance.

On a personal note, I’m exhausted from overwork, an old friend abruptly begin spewing Soros conspiracy nonsense, and I think I’m catching a cold.

Yes, there was a major victory for LGBTQ rights, and a narrow win for the Dreamers. So that’s ending the week on a high note. But let’s not push it.

Yeah, I’m taking a break. 

I will be back next week with (hopefully) more astute and coherent points to make.

Until then, I will leave you with this quirky factoid:

A couple of weeks ago, Irene Triplett died at the age of 90 in a North Carolina nursing home. Her father was teenage soldier in the Civil War, and as his only surviving child, Ms. Triplett was the last person to receive a pension from a veteran's Civil War service.

Every month, the Veterans Administration paid Irene Triplett $73.13. By the time of her death, the family had been collecting the pension for 155 years. One has to wonder about the VA employee tasked with cutting Ms. Triplett’s check each month. He now has a little more free time.

In any case, Irene Triplett was the last living link to the Civil War. Her demise is ironic, considering that it comes at a time when all of us are primed to become living links to the Second Civil War.

So there’s that to consider.

See you next week.

A Tale of Two Walls

And then everybody made the exact same joke at the same time.

You see, the timing was too good, the irony too evident, and the metaphor too glaring for us to help ourselves.

So that’s why half of Facebook, most of Twitter, and all of the headline writers in America shouted the following:

“Trump finally got his wall. But it’s at the White House!”

And then we all laughed, or at least chuckled as much as we could while coughing up tear gas or choking down existential angst.

Yes, the president who is so popular with his nation’s citizens that he has to hide in the basement now has a riot fence to protect him from America. As many have pointed out, only despots ruling over troubled lands construct barriers to keep the populace at bay. A wall around the presidential residence is what “authoritarian rulers in third-world countries build to protect themselves from the passions of their own aggrieved people, and a far cry from the ‘people’s house’ that has for centuries symbolized a president accountable to the citizens who elected him.”

Furthermore, “as Trump tries to project strength, he instead appears weaker than ever.” After all, Mr. Law and Order can “bluster about force and domination” but the new multilayered black fencing “around the executive mansion reveals the reality that he is operating not from strength but from fear.”

Seriously, can you imagine anything that petrifies Trump more than thousands of black people massed outside his bedroom window? The only way it would be scarier for him is if they all waved around copies of his tax returns.

To add insult to — well, insult — those protesters who terrify the president so much are now marching right up to White House wall and plastering it with Black Lives Matter slogans. So the administration has given the demonstrators an even bigger platform.

With such a heavy-handed symbol of Trump’s ineptitude and cowardice encircling the White House, it’s a good time to ask, “Hey, whatever happened to the original wall?” 

You know, the one that Mexico was going to pay for? The Trump campaign’s chief selling point to xenophobes? The central promise of his presidency that inspired racists to taunt Latino kids with chants of “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Yeah, that one.

Well, I’m glad you asked.

It turns out that the administration’s goal of blocking Latin America behind 2,000 miles of towering concrete has fallen just a little short.

The Customs and Border Protection has acknowledged that a mere 194 miles of border barriers has been constructed since Trump took office. Furthermore, 191 of those miles “already had barriers in place.” This means that the president has placed fresh obstacles on a grand total of three miles of borderland. Once again, the number of miles with new barriers is… three.

You can walk that distance in an hour or so. It amounts to less than a mile per year that Trump has been in office.

This is even more pathetic when you consider that the president has pulled billions of dollars from other military projects, and engaged in blatant cronyism while doing it.

Of course, it’s not just about length (ahem). It’s about strength.

Which makes it all the more laughable — or tragic, who can tell the difference anymore — that the new barriers have been easily climbed, hacked through, carted off, and toppled over by heavy breezes.

Yes, the president “wants Americans to believe he's built hundreds of miles of impenetrable wall that cannot be climbed.” But in truth, his half-assed engineering project is “not a wall; it's not hundreds of miles; it can be climbed; it's penetrable, and in one instance, it failed to withstand wind gusts.”

And it bears repeating that “Mexico isn't paying for any of it, the Republican's campaign promises notwithstanding.”

At this point, let me remind everyone that I repeatedly said, back in 2016, that there would never be a huge wall on the Mexican border, and to think otherwise was just racist, delusional nonsense.

I should have bet money on that statement.

So maybe the wall around the White House is as good as it gets for our beleaguered, doltish commander in chief. Yes, it’s true that “apresident who needs to take shelter behind fences and barriers because he feels threatened by his own citizens is not their leader.” More accurately, “he is their prisoner.”

But give the guy a break. It’s the closest he’s come to fulfilling a campaign promise, and it won’t matter to his dead-eyed worshippers anyway

No matter what, they will all keep chanting to “Build the wall! Build that wall!” — in denial to the very end.

All In

If you could time travel back to 2016 and issue dire warnings about the Trump Administration, as soon as you mentioned the president tear-gassing peaceful protesters in order to engineer a photo op in front of a church while waving a bible around… well, your listeners would dismiss you as a deranged liberal spewing heavy-handed metaphors that defy belief.

And yet, here we are, in the clutches of a fascist Snidely Whiplash who is so comically corrupt, idiotically inept, and grotesquely authoritarian that he’s morphed into a human parody. Except nobody is laughing.

There is some comfort, however, in the fact that American society has deteriorated so far and so quickly that subtlety, subtext, and irony have all been trampled under the leaden heels of conservative fear-mongering and white nationalism. And that sliver of a silver lining is this:

We all know exactly where we stand.

There is no more justifying tortured syntaxes, misogynistic insults, or racist asides with mutterings of “What the president really meant to say is…”

There is no more dismissing neo-Nazis on parade as potentially good people in disguise, or claiming that the GOP is going along with high-caliber insanity in exchange for tax cuts.

There is no more shadowboxing the truth, rationalizing praise for dictators, or dismissing the fetishization of violence. 

There is not a conservative or a liberal who is confused about this president.  

You say that Trump wants to censor social media — a blatant kneecapping of free speech — solely because Twitter fact-checked one of countless lies? That sounds about right.

You say the president has “mused” (now there’s a quaint word!) about unleashing American military might on American citizens on American soil? Not a shocker.

Similarly, we cannot be too taken aback at the state of this country, and the morass of shameless, vile behavior that erupts forth every day.

So there’s a white woman in Central Park who calls the cops on a black man, knowing full well he could be killed because of her false accusation, because he dared to ask her to follow the rules? Yes, we could have predicted that.

And a homicidal cop in Minneapolis kneeled on a black man’s neck for several minutes, for no reason other than to inflict critical physical pain, without even the slightest concern that people were watching and videotaping for minutes on end? Hey, the only surprise is that it doesn’t happen more often.

And you shout that we now have nationwide — and even worldwide — protests against America’s systemic racism that have turned hundreds of city streets into rolling street battles? Honestly, who couldn’t have seen that one coming?

Yes, perhaps there is yet one sad, stupendously delusional Trump fan who is muttering, mostly to himself, that our jabbering chief executive is not as power-hungry as he seems to be, and that our nation is actually on the right track. 

Well, I’m sorry, my friend, but when it comes to this president and this country, plausible deniability died long ago, brutality and decisively. Its essence was cremated, and then the ashes were scattered over cages holding migrant children. 

The benefit of the doubt has been executed, and conservative “principles” have been revealed as the pathetic façade they always were. 

Those moderate Republicans who still believe Trump will magically become a unifying leader? They are as real as Bigfoot. 

And journalists who still believe that Trump won the votes of rural whites because of “economic anxiety”? They are some strange fairy tale or a half-forgotten urban myth.

Nobody truly believes any of those absurd ideas anymore.

Instead, we believe in the undeniable, the clear-cut and the perfectly obvious. We believe in rage and malicious motives and unquenchable greed. We believe in irrational fear and shrieking and the banging of heads against walls. We believe in those things because we see them every day.

It's all out in the open now. 

African Americans are sick of being targets. Progressives are tired of being polite. And racists aren't even hiding it anymore. Everyone knows where one another stands.

And everyone is poised.

The End of All Conspiracies

Over the past few months, I’ve learned a number of interesting things from conservative media.

For example, I’ve learned that Covid-19 is no worse than the flu --- wait, check that --- it is no worse than a really bad cold. So we should all stop cowering in fear, jam ourselves into a crowded bar (without a face mask of course), and inhale a big old lungful of freedom. It’s all a hoax!

Also, I’ve learned that coronavirus is a highly lethal weapon that was created in a lab, then unleashed on America as an insidious plot to kill millions and destroy the country. 

Now, you might think that those beliefs are completely contradictory. 

But that’s just what they want you to think.

Yes, these are the golden days for people who love a good conspiracy theory. Or for people who have a soft spot for full-on lunacy. Or for sociopaths who want to undermine society and turn us all into babbling, paranoid freaks. For any of these people, these are the good times.

For the rest of us, these days suck.

You see, it’s bad enough that we are all preoccupied with the thought of ending up unemployed and hooked into a ventilator. The real world is sufficiently horrifying, thank you.

But no, we have C-level celebrities and right-wing demagogues overruling medical professionals because doctors are, you know, in on it. 

Meanwhile, across all social media, we hear shouts to “stop being a sheep and think for yourself,” a phrase usually screeched by people who have formed their entire worldview based on one YouTube video from a disgraced scientist and forwarded emails from acquaintances who barely graduated high school.

And of course, there is Q, an amalgamation of madness so twisted that it is difficult to believe that its adherents are not enacting some bizarro performance-art piece.

As we know, people who worship Q are proud of seeking the truth, which is odd in that they believe literally anything that an unknown person with unknown motivations and unknown credibility says on the internet. If this Q individual -- who again they know absolutely nothing about and has not called a single thing correctly -- told them that ducks were secretly cows, they would believe it.

This is what thinking for yourself looks like.

Keep in mind that there is no liberal equivalent to the Q movement. It is yet another odd manifestation of the right-wing mindset that conspiracies are more prevalent among conservatives (along with their tendencies to be more fearful and to possess absolutely no sense of humor).

In any case, Q fans and Plandemic believers and 5G truthers and others of their tribe all insist that their beliefs are true because they cannot be disproven.

Indeed, can you definitely prove that lizard people are not running the post office? I didn’t think so.

However, what these lovers of speculation and heresy forget is that “there are no good conspiracy theories, because they are attractive precisely because they’re unproven, imprecise and non-falsifiable.”

Science, in contrast, rests on the assumption that theories can be verified, or replicated, or dismissed based on the evidence. 

But that’s damn dull in a world that thrives on “confusion to create a sense of comfort and control when it’s in short supply,” such as when a killer virus arrives, apparently out of nowhere, to decimate society.

Instead of acknowledging that viral pandemics are part of the natural course of civilization (which they are), many Americans declare that it’s all the fault of Bill Gates, so if we can somehow stop him, everything will return to normal.

So then we enter a vicious loop where “you can’t productively question someone’s superstition, because they never really thought it was an actual explanation of how the world is.”

In this way, conspiracy theories aren’t theories at all. They aren’t hypothesis about how the world works. 

They are desperate, illogical, and pathetic attempts to gain control of an uncontrollable narrative.

The result is that we now have millions of Americans who believe the government has engineered a fake crisis in order to… what exactly? Keep us at home for a few months? Exert power over our lives (and then inexplicably relinquish that power over several weeks)? Or groom us for nefarious ends that are conveniently never identified?

No, I’m pretty sure that the number of people who are petrified of being microchipped far exceeds the number of people who actively want to microchip them. I mean, nobody gives a fuck about tracking your every movement, because your every movement is boring.

But in the spirit of reaching out to my conspiratorial brothers and sisters, I propose a friendly wager. Let’s assume that coronavirus is indeed a manmade plot. Now please note that Covid-19 is the worst pandemic in a century, has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and pulverized almost every country on Earth. That can’t be easy to pull off, so this shit is not a test. This is the final gambit of the Bavarian Illuminati or the New World Order or the UN black helicopter dudes --- whoever you like. 

That means it’s time to put up or shut up. Five years from now, if people are no longer dying by the thousands, a malicious government has not imprisoned you, and you have not been microchipped, will you lunatics shut the fuck up permanently? Will you admit that you were wrong, and your nonsense did nothing but terrify people and poison the nation? Will you see that Covid-19 was not a means to a totalitarian end, but a horrific plague made worse by governmental incompetence?

Or will you just make up some new insanity about the ceaseless quest to destroy your freedom, even though that war never seems to actually get waged?

How will you possibly justify the next conspiracy?

A Bad Time to Be Brown

A majority of Americans now say they would sooner trust a one-eyed, rabid hyena to lead our country than Trump.

OK, they didn’t actually say that. But they might as well have, because the fact is that most Americans disapprove of our bleach-guzzling chief executive’s response to Covid-19, and the percentage who recognize the president’s bumbling ineptitude is steadily rising.

Foremost among the president’s critics are Latinos, which is only fair, considering that he is highly critical of our very right to exist. You see, we have a new reason to dislike the Trump Administration — yes, an additional reason for our continued antipathy to the most powerful racist in modern American history.

It turns out that Hispanics are “disproportionately dying” because of the coronavirus.

For example, in New York, Latinos make up 29% of the population but are 39% of those who have died. In San Francisco, Hispanics make up 16% of the population but constitute 80% of those hospitalized for Covid-19. Or look at Austin, Texas, which is 34% Hispanic, but where Latinos make up 53% of all Covid-19 patients. And then there is the whole state of Illinois, where “Latinos are testing positive to coronavirus at higher rates than any other demographic group.”

Across the country, “a combination of factors — including working in low-paying front-line jobs and a lack of savings and health insurance,” plus systemic racism and institutionalized poverty, means that “Latinos are shouldering a disproportionate burden of the pandemic.”

But wait, it gets even grimmer. On the economic front, the country’s “widening income inequality gap has led to many minority groups paying a higher price” during this pandemic. About 40% of Latinos, compared to 27% of all Americans, have taken a pay cut, and 29% have lost their jobs, as opposed to 20% of the overall population. 

The Hispanic Consumer Sentiment Index (a real thing) is way down, and many Latinos don’t have enough money to send remittances to Latin America, which affects “the well-being of families and cripples the economies of developing countries.”

Also, Latinos often have worse health insurance and tend to have less money saved. Here is where I will mention that “for every $1 of liquid assets of a white family, the median Hispanic family has 47 cents.”

As one final insult, keep in mind that if Latinos dare to go out for a walk, we are more likely to get ticketed for violating social distancing orders, even while white Americans “in privileged neighborhoods flout mask-wearing and distance rules.”

In essence, this crisis has increased the odds that we will die early, fall into poverty, or get cuffed by the cops, all of which is ironic considering that Latinos are more likely to be deemed “essential workers” and are a huge reason that this country hasn’t totally collapsed.

So yeah, it’s a bit irksome.

Now, you might ask what our president is doing to alleviate this grossly imbalanced suffering. Well, considering that he himself is grossly imbalanced, the answer is clear: A whole lotta nothing.

For example, although 86% of Latino small-business owners “reported significant negative impact on their businesses by the pandemic,” a survey of Latino small-business owners who applied for coronavirus relief loans found that fewer than 20% of them received money.

The government’s mislabeled, mishandled Paycheck Protection Program money “went to Wall Street billionaires” and banks, with the result that “Lupita’s taqueria or Juana’s quinceañera shop didn’t get money while Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse and major hotel chains are getting millions of dollars.”

Sounds about right.

Now, it seems odd that this depressing cavalcade of information is not influencing the Trump Administration’s response to the pandemic. After all, the president is charged with ensuring the safety of our country’s residents. There is really nothing in the job description more important than that.

But of course, you just forgot that the Trump Administration is nothing more than thugs, cronies, morons, zealots, con men, hypocrites, xenophobes, and straight-up lunatics.

And that’s on their best day.

No, the orange man with the tiny fingers and the big temper will not save us. Nor will his lickspittle flunkies in Congress come to the rescue. Keep in mind that “because the disease is disproportionately killing black and brown people in cities, Republican powerbrokers simply don't care about it as much as they would if it were disproportionately killing their supporters.”

So conservatives will not plug in until the virus hits the heartland. By the way, this is already happening.

But even then, Latinos will not be considered “the regular folks,” or have their sacrifices acknowledged or their pain relieved.

As long as this administration is in power, it simply will not happen.