At 8:00 last night we heard the howlers. In parts of the Bay Area residents howl for a few minutes to honor the first responders—the doctors, nurses, mailmen, “essential” workers (a security guard was shot and killed yesterday because the shoppers he insisted had to wear a mask felt he “disrespected” them). No insanity there. We missed the nightly dancers on Peralta Street. At 7:50 every night residents go out into the street and dance. Strange. We’re all in this together, and since we can’t touch or hug our neighbors we have our own ways of communicating, of sharing the very real, sad, and depressing news that thousands of us are dying every day, and that the “leader of the free world” isn’t leading.
He said, “Supposing you brought the light inside of the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. Sounds interesting. I see the disinfectant — where it knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?” Within hours the Poison Control Center had fielded thirty calls from people who had ingested bleach. Later, Trump insisted that he was being “sarcastic.” He wasn’t.
Trump’s entire platform for leading is lying. Before the pandemic his lies were probably less onerous because they didn’t cause people to die. Now they do. The lies, the behavior, the blame game, the denial of science, the embrace of authoritarianism and those that support it. The inevitable comparisons between the USA of 2020 and German ninety years ago are accurate and not overstated. Michael Godwin cultivated the popular notion that “whoever is the first to mention Hitler in an argument, loses the argument,” in a 1990s meme that grew in strength over the years, right up until Donald Trump was elected president.” it’s called Godwin’s Law, and it’s no longer valid. Trump is Hitleresque in so many ways that to deny the comparison is to understate its validity.
So, where does that leave us today on Cinco de Mayo? In the good ol’ USA we have 1,213,010 cases, 69,925 deaths, and because many states are reopening the promise of an increase. It was the government’s position, even touted by Trump, that before states could reopen they would show that deaths and new cases had either flattened or reduced over a two week period. But that all ended when Trump’s ignorant base complained. Now, these “very good people”, who won’t wear masks, who endanger the lives of everyone they see, are pressuring governors to reopen states, and the governors, fearing a backlash from the great unwashed, are doing that. “Speaker Nancy Pelosi dismissed the guidelines even as she pushed for more testing. “The White House’s vague and inconsistent document does nothing to make up for the president’s failure to listen to the scientists and produce and distribute national rapid testing,” she said in a statement.
Meanwhile we’re out of bleach. Drank too much of it a week ago.
