Coop Scoop #16: The Damn The Torpedoes Edition
The Damn The Torpedoes Edition
April 21
Issue 16
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A half dozen Republican-led states of the Old Confederacy (plus Ohio) are moving toward re-opening the economy this week. Among them, Georgia – home to one of the most virulent and concentrated C-19 infection clusters in the country—has leaped fearlessly into the future and announced a series of openings right away.
On this Friday he will open gyms, hair salons, tattoo, joints and manicure stores. On Monday, Georgia will also open movie theaters and restaurants. Governor Brian Kemp – a certified badge-carrying Trump Toady—however, has failed to announce when he will be re-opening backstreet bordellos, alleyway meth shooting galleries and rock houses. All of them clearly as essential as tattoo parlors.
In a week of astounding news, this early opening sweeps in the Darwin Awards and affords no rational explanation. Even Donald Trump on Wednesday opined that Kemp’s action might be coming “too early” but he refused to criticize his Georgia pal and he wished him good luck.
Maybe…just maybe… Governor Kemp is upset because The Walking Dead that is filmed in his state and wanting it to be extended, he is offering a state full of free cast members for a Fall production schedule.
Apparently, the Open Up America crew is buoyed by the good news that the “curve is flattening” in New York and that a number of sparsely populated patches in East Jesus are almost – I said almost—untouched by the pandemic.
Here are the counter-facts very very briefly. We are NOT on the downslope of the infection curve. We are on a plateu, a high plateu. Some two thousand people a day are still dying across the country. Hundreds if not thousands of new cases are still blossoming. Apart from all the president’s serial lies, there is an acute shortage of gear, testing materials and tests (and yet in the latest $350 “relief” bill passed this week, there are a few dollars for hospitals but not one red cent to shore up cities and states who the president claims have to lead on deployment of testing). Insane.
We still have no idea how many of us are carriers. While about a ridiculous Congo-level of 1.5% of the population has been tested, in the six southern states moving toward re-opening no more than one-tenth of one percent of their population has been tested to date.
The scene I picture of these guys is a half-dozen Good Old Boys sipping on RC Colas in the heat of a southern summer night, looking over a motel they own. They’re watching the fire department fight a blaze that has eaten half their property and they decide, hells bells, this is a good time to start repainting the rooms not yet on fire.
OK, that’s a graph full of stereotypes. Please forgive me. But what is this Open Up stuff really about? I think the answer comes on two levels. The superficial politics and the deep politics.
Superficially, these Republican officials and damn few of their constituents are any longer Republicans or, for that matter, conservatives. They are Trump Party militants and they believe in nothing but Trump. And if Trump’s critics are opposed to-reopening then godummit, they are for it! They can also easily sense that the pandemic will be a central issue in the November campaign, and they are helping to set the table for Trump who – while mildly critical of the Georgia Guv—has been openly inciting his base to defy the stay at home orders. And he apparently does not care that these demands to “open up” include demonstrations staff with loose nuts in body armor, combat helmet, and combat rifles
On a deeper level, it would be unfair to affirm that everybody who wants an early opening is some sort of Trump zombie. Hardly. People are an in increasing economic jam and the pain is real. And that’s where we get to the intersection of structural inequalities and IDEOLOGY.
This is hard to verbalize but I will give it a shot by outlining the factors that fuel the urge to open up and damn the consequences:
THE IMPATIENCE OF AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
How many times have you been in a 2 or 3 person line at the market or the bank and the person in front of you or in back of you lets out an audible sigh of frustration and then loudly mutters “this is ridiculous?” I mean, we are America, USA USA, the champions of the world, the one “indispensable nation,” the richest most advanced most efficient country in the world. Why in the hell do I have to wait in line for 10 minutes? Why don’t they open more cashiers?We have not had a war on our land since 1865. We had the Twin Towers attack but we have never lived through air raid, infantry campaigns, bloody dictatorships, and we have generally had the economic and industrial capacity to take on subsequent natural disasters.
Truth is, most Americans don’t know what real and prolonged and uncertain sacrifice even means. And the 40-50% of the population that has had to sacrifice every day just to get by –before the pandemic—is essentially invisible and irrelevant to our national politics and our popular culture.
FREE ENTERPRISE AS A CIVIC RELIGION
Think how many lives were lost in the Soviet Union thanks to the obtuseness and mentality of so many of its manages. Yes, the Communist system was rife with gross hypocrisy, growing 3 or 4 generations of people with a double morality – a public one of mutual solidarity and a private one of self-serving greed.
But there was also a sizeable percentage of the Soviet managerial class that actually believed in the system. Even when a shoe factory would produce 50,000 pair of blue shoes, but all of them left footed, this did not shake their belief in what they called central planning of the economy.
Belief systems are a formidable force. Here in the U.S., a whole lot of people BELIEVE in the free enterprise system, especially if they own an enterprise or two. Indeed, last week Indiana Republican Re, Trey Hollingsworth (himself a millionaire), affirmed it’s more pressing to guarantee the American “way of life” than it is to prevent more pandemic deaths. Well, why not? The congressman is going to be just fine and well protected so why not send the drones into the heat of the disease so he and others will continue to make money.
The American “way of life” is the catch-all euphemism for the dog-eat-dog free market system. You know the one where, according to Mitt Romney, 43% of the population are leaches who weigh down the ambitious. I don’t think it an overstatement to say that large American corporations and certainly small business owners believe, deep in their hearts, they have a God-give right to go out and make money no matter what the cost to others. Covid-19 sharply disagrees.
THE CURSE OF WAGE SLAVERY
Some guy arrives on my doorstep from Mars. He got lost on his way to Venus. He asks me over lunch to explain how this country works, especially during a pandemic.
So, I make it short and sweet: In this society the overwhelming majority of people are forced to give their labor to others in order to survive. If you want to eat, if you want a roof over your head, if you want to survive, you must sell your labor and skills on a market (where the real wages for that labor has been more or less frozen since 1974).
You are guaranteed nothing. No work. No food. No health care. No housing. Though both the rich and the poor have an equal right to sleep under a bridge. This “free market” is anything but freedom as you must give half your waking life over to doing something you probably don’t want to do for a boss making money off of you and who holds you very existence in his or her hands.
I can never blame anybody for hating their work. The same way I cannot blame those who work for being very angry and very worried, as they are now, when they losetheir job. They pay a lot of taxes and apart from some tanks and planes they don’t get much in return. We are facing an economic apocalypse and the best the govt can come up with is a one time $1200 payment and a bit of extra unemployment. What about 3 months from now Or a year from now? How many families will be driven into ruin while the President continues to advocate for food stamp cuts, for cuts for ag workers, banning immigrant workers, arguing in court to do away with Obamacare.
Basically, a big FUCK YOU to the people while govt bureaucrats labor all night to make sure large companies and banks are bailed out with our tax dollars.
So sad, that some of those workers whose lives are being protected by the restrictive measures employed by the governors are now Satanizing the governors in an irrational flailing out. They don’t blame the guy who sat with his arms crossed and did nothing for months and now is on the TV every day telling us he is the Best of the Best and there’s nothing to worry about.
This is the dark side of wage slavery. It is humiliating to think of oneself as a slave, for sure. Also, too many people have been conditioned to not only not expect any substantial help from the government, but it would be immoral to get any!
TOO MUCH TRUMP TOO MUCH OF THE TIME
I have changed my view of the president’s five’o clock follies daily reality show. I now believe they should be broadcast in full, daily and live.
Why? Because the more he talks, the more it becomes obvious to more people that even when their lives are at stake, the president only lies and self congratulates. The five’o’clock follies broadcast daily are starting to back fire.
Trump’s numbers are finally starting to plummet. And he’s bleeding support from those over 65, losing more than 20 points among this, one of his most supportive cohorts had had. According to a Reuters poll this week: “72% of adults in the United States said people should stay at home ‘until the doctors and public health officials say it is safe.”
Most Americans are tired of Trump’s BS and his feel good show. Come November, they will have the chance to permanently cancel it. --+--
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