Coop Scoop June 1: The I Can't Breathe Edition

The I Can't Breathe Edition

Issue #20
June 1, 2020

Let’s review our state of play: This week we briskly crossed the border of 100,000 covid-19 deaths with no official day or even moment of mourning and/or reflection. Fuck ‘em, the whole lot of elderly unproductive leeches they were.

The dark day was marked by one TV anchor after another lip-syncing the cliché “a new grim milestone” while the President tried some sleight of hand, trying to distract us with a phony war against Twitter and social media.

Meanwhile, as unemployment numbers soared beyond 40 million (probably closer to 60 million), the nation was treated to the shocking 10 minute video spectacle of George Floyd being coldly, methodically and sadistically suffocated by a gang of four Minneapolis cops.

While Officer Derek Chauvin, who has a long record of acquiring civilian complaints with no punishment, held his knee down on Floyd’s neck and two of his uniformed accomplices pressed the rest of his body to the ground while a fourth cop stood around like a yo-yo with his hands in his pockets doing nothing. For another 3 minutes after the handcuffed Floyd had become unresponsive, the cops kept him and his neck pinned ignoring the pleas of bystanders to let up or at least check his pulse. That didn’t happen until the EMT’s arrived, touched his neck for two seconds, and then loaded his lifeless body onto an ambulance gurney as if he was a side of beef.

And then people wonder why from city to city across the United States, multi-racial crowds of protesters have taken to the streets, marched peacefully, clashed with cops, smashed some windows and in Minneapolis itself burned down a police station (after it was abandoned by the cops and inmates inside). The city of Portland, 10 minutes from where I sit, is under a state of emergency this weekend after similar violent clashes. Police are also on tactical alert in San Francisco, Los Angeles and numerous cities coast to coast and demonstrations continue this weekend.

In fact, police departments across the country are gearing up and readying for more social disorder this summer. Just too many people unemployed and too many people abandoned by a sinking economy and a dysfunctional government run by an erratic and vindictive and unstable authoritarian.

“The threads of our civic life could start unraveling, because everybody’s living in a tinderbox,” historian and Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley told The Washington Post.

Look, almost nobody “supports” or advocates such violent tactics, but can we please stop all the collective pearl-clutching over property crimes? As insidious as they might be, they still remain as mere symptoms of a much more serious underlying disease.

More specifically, there isn’t a place in the world where movements for social change or protest do not acquire some sort of violent edge to them – nothing new here. Social protest movements are born of injustice and repression and the frustration and anger that those stoke eventually overflows into public.

CAPITALISMO O MUERTE!

Against this bleak tapestry of mass disease, economic depression and growing social and racial disorder, we do have to concede that President Trump. – who has not hesitated one moment in stirring up the malaise—did win one important victory this week. If you have ever been to Cuba the most prominent official slogan you see on billboards and signs is “Socialismo o Muerte!” – socialism or death. It’s quite appropriate to say that Trump’s abiding principle navigating this crisis is the imperative of Capitalism or Death!

In the case of the Castro family, death is conceived as an honorable even romantic consequence of Cubans standing up to defend a system against foreign invaders. In Trump’s case, it means expiring alone in a diseased and infected rest home, but only after sucking on a respirator for a week and being barred from seeing your friends and families for a last goodbye. But, these deaths all serve the final goal, “reopening the economy” because the government sure has zero intention of providing for your welfare.

The only recompense here is understanding that this is a wholly Pyrrhic conquest for the President. Trump’s relentless campaign to put opening up over taking care has continued to hammer down his poll numbers with GOP leaders confessing to reporters (off the record) that they know fear a Democratic tidal wave in November that will cleanse the House, the Senate and the White House of any Republican control.

There’s another pernicious victory for Trump this week, though it will also cost him plenty in the end. He has actually succeeded in turning the wearing of masks into part of his ongoing kulturkampf. Natch, he was greatly aided in this effort by the usual squad of right-wing media gargoyles, from Rush Limbaugh to the truly deplorably Laura Ingraham – just to mention a few. Quite unfortunately, the mainstream media has pretty much bought into the Trumpian notion that America is deeply and bitterly divided over wearing masks (even though their own reporting data tells otherwise).

It’s a commercial, not ideological, agenda that drives the media and its addiction to looking for or if necessary exaggerating or even inventing a point of conflict. Typical of this mush is a CNN story from a few days ago whose headline reads “As Covid-19 cases rise in 17 states, Americans still divided on whether masks should be mandated”

This is the same he-said-she-said game played by the media a few weeks earlier when a very small percentage of loons showed up at the Michigan state legislature and stuck loaded AR-15’s in the noses of lawmakers demanding the state re-open – regardless of any subsequent casualties. To pick up a newspaper or, worse, to watch TV news during most of the month of the May you risked thinking we were but a few days away from all-out civil war in a country sharply divided over stay-at-home restrictions.

Bullshit. Both stories are bullshit. Starting with this trope about restless Americans ready to shoot their way to Burger King, it’s crystal clear now that much of the country has “opened” that Americans are smart enough to be very very wary and cautious. Contrary to selective images, lacking all context, of college imbeciles partying in Lake Ozark or crowding a bar in Huntington Beach, it remains a fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans support social distancing, reasonable restrictions and, yes, wearing face masks.

The data sings out loud and clear. There have been dozens, probably scores of polls over the last month on these and related issues. And no matter how the question is phrased, somewhere around 75% of the population is on the restrictions/wear-a-mask side. Inversely, those who think masks are for sissies, that they are a political ploy, that Trump is right not wearing one, consistently make up around 20% of the respondents. Most analysts agree that it’s something like 30% of Americans who will believe anything, so on the question of masks, we are running more rational than usual!

Do you have any idea how hard, nay, near impossible it is to get 75% of Americans to agree on anything (except maybe the very beginning of another war destined to become just as UN-popular down the road). We can probably thank Donald Trump’s despicable omissions, commissions and heartlessness in dealing with C-19 that has helped galvanize the American people to do better than he has.

If you read nothing else this week, you must check out Megan Garber’s wonderful piece in The Atlantic titled Refusing To Wear A Mask Is An Empty Act of Defiance in which she blows apart the media notion that Americans are at each other’s throats over masks. An excerpt: