Dear America,
As Trump thrashes about trying to turn you-know-what into gold, the hole he is digging gets deeper and deeper. According to RealClearPolitics, Biden's lead over Trump nationwide has grown to a yawning gap of more than 9%. We can only hope that it holds. But in the interim, Trump continues his pernicious presidency unabated in its dedication to destruction of all things virtuous about Americanism. Today he is meeting with the recently elected president of Mexico, one of his kindred spirits on the world scene when it comes to science denial and disdain for the well-being of all those around them when it serves self-interest. Neither of them will be wearing a face mask, and no doubt they will ignore current conventions regarding social distancing. They will be celebrating the advent of the USMCA, or the U.S., Mexico and Canada Agreement, which is a retooling of NAFTA with significant changes only in the form of those insisted on by Congress. But Trump will ceremoniously declare it "another" of his glorious achievements, none of which have become apparent to me at least, and he will do it with great, self-serving flourishes. We've seen it all before, this obsession with self-congratulation, and it will leave what now seems to be a steady majority of us disgusted--to user one of the Trumper's favorite "d" words--and ruing the presence on the world stage of our own disgrace (another favorite "d" word; apparently he never got past d in the dictionary) of a leader. Still, with all the untoward conduct he eagerly indulges in there is still a percentage of American voters in the high thirties that love him. Woe is me.
But we should all have heart, I think. The pandemic and the cognate financial catastrophe that ensued upon Trump's dismissal of the virus as little more than the flu just won't yield to his incomprehensibly obtuse efforts to wrap himself in the flag and drag his supporters into harm's way in order to affirm his self-serving perfidy. The very people he is depending on for reelection are the most likely to get sick because of him, and unfortunately spread their disease to the rest of us who are wearing masks and keeping our distances from one another. The morbidity figure in the U.S. is now just about 3 million: 1% of the population. And the total of consequent deaths is about 130,000. Of those who have contracted Covid-19, including those who have died of it, scientific estimates are that over 80% of the carnage could have been avoided if Trump had just acknowledged the danger and shut down the economy two weeks earlier. But of course he couldn't do that because it would have entailed admission of his own error, and as we all know, the Trumpster never makes mistakes. He certainly never apologizes for them. Yet his fans keep on basking in the irrationality of their fandom.
So here we are in a race with those who have gotten sick due to their carelessness and that of their Trumper ilk while the rest of us have done our best to keep them from getting sick by wearing masks ourselves just in case we are. In effect then, we are nurturing the serpents in our bosom by doing the right thing, but we have to stay unified in that regard. We just have to hope that more of us survive than them. I know how vile that sounds. Really, I try to keep my baser instincts in check, but I was in a store yesterday looking for something we needed--that is the only circumstance in which we go out these days--and there was someone in work clothes without a mask in the store, which has a sign at the door stating that masks are required for entry. The workman was talking to the owner of the store, who also wasn't wearing a face mask as we, my wife and I, snaked through the aisle and waited for the workman to clear the register area so that we could proceed to check out while protecting them from a dangerous disease that they all-too-eagerly exposed us to. And as we wended our way out of the store, I started thinking about the injustice of it all. I think that patriotism demands that we wear masks in order to protect our fellow Americans, and to his credit, Joe Biden recently, and ardently, said so quite publicaly. Yet people like this workman drive around in their pickups with no masks on and with flags waving in the back and decals on the windows, effectively saying that as Americans, no one has the right to tell them to do anything that they don't like, even if their recalcitrance harms, or even kills, their fellow Americans. At least implicitly, their waving of the flag...their arrogation of the right to do so...is a vainglorious claim of patriotism in opposition to the actual patriotism of those who labor to breath behind masks for the benefit of their fellows.
I don't know about you, but it disgusts me. Itjust seems...disgraceful, doesn't it?
Your friend,
Mike
Leave a comment