(Trigger warning for more delicate readers. The following screed may include occasional outbursts of profanity.)
I wish I did, but I don’t own any Berkshire Hathaway stock. And while I tend to take the nostrums and bromides of billionaires with a 50 lb. block of salt, I find I pay more attention when Warren Buffett is quoted. Like recently, when he said, ” … there will be another pandemic. We know that there is a nuclear, chemical, biological and now cyber threat. Each of them has dire possibilities…It doesn’t seem like it’s something that society is fully prepared to deal with”.
His concerns didn’t stop at insufficient financial or technological wherewithall. That exists. What doesn’t exist in sufficient quantity is the matter of getting conservative public officials, “thought leaders” and the general public to take such things as seriously as, well, football play-offs, beach raves and motorcycle rallies.
Buffett, who credits his success as an investor to thousands of hours of reading of a wide spectrum of information, has every reason to be pessimistic about the U.S. and the world coping with a truly ravenous pandemic — a medieval-style disease with faster and more lethal rates of transmission than COVID-19. No one who has done any reading (or something other than Facebook posts) can look at this latest fourth surge of COVID-19 and fail to accept that this all but entirely due to an epidemic of stupidity … in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet.
I’m sure Buffett would agree that this literally death-dealing imbecility, doesn’t stop with COVID. The same bone-numbing ignorance applies to two other existential thrwats, namely, climate change and authoritarian violence against democracy.
Here in Minnesota we’re well into our second month of yellow, LA-in-the-Seventies-style, crud-filled skies, with daily records being set for the worst air quality … ever. You’d be just as healthy sucking down a pack of Camel straights as spending a day breathing in the air from wildfires. Fires stemming from drought that is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change. A crisis thoroughly researched and scientifically validated but yet still one that essentially the same 25-40% of Americans prefer to see as “liberal fear-mongering”, if not a plot by Silicon Valley elites and radical socialists to somehow deprive them of their freedoms.
That same percentage — and I’m confident a Venn diagram of the COVID “hesitant”, climate deniers and Trump worshippers would have near perfect overlap — sees no reason to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot, convinced by the echoes of their cult that it was something other than what everyone saw and was recorded for eternity.
So if you’re keeping score at home, that’s (1.) A pandemic that has already killed 640,000 and is revving back up again to re-cripple the economy, (2.) Climate change that is now routinely turning summers into bone-dry, smoky, crop-killing hellscapes, like something out of “Blade Runner: 2049” and (3.) A complete indifference to violent insurrection inspired by failed government leaders.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the connective tissue to all this is reckless, wretched stupidity, inspired and validated by a startling minority of players for their self-interest, be that commercial, ego or both.
COVID is resurging, spawned by the Trump base and the chronically alienated. Climate mayhem will only get worse, thanks to the ignorance and indifference of conservative leaders. (Do NOT read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells if you want to believe otherwise. Stick with whatever Laura Ingraham is selling this week.) And then there’s violent insurrection, (which would aggravate both of those two). Violence egged on by elected Republican officials will happen again and likely repeat itself in worse ways in the absence of investigation and public punishment.
There isn’t just one grand solution to the “unpreparedness”. But permit me to suggest that we’ve reached a tipping point where coddling, and “reaching out” to those who don’t/won’t understand and pretending that global pandemics, global climate disaster and violent (not to mention racist) attempts to overthrow the American government are no more serious threats to our existence than quarrels over tax policy and school prayer.
What’s to be done? In the COVID context: Mandates. French style.
No vaccine? No walking into a bar. No getting on public transportation. No returning to work. Your kids stay home from school. Let the deniers rage. Let Ron DeSantis and Josh Hawley fund-raise off their voters’ dumb-as-a-stump petulance. Protestors in France made headlines, but 76% of the population agreed with the government’s vaccine mandate. Only fools want to prolong this idiocy.
Obviously the Biden administration would benefit from some back-up from private industry, which it is getting in a halting way. But we’d be snuffing out this fourth wave a lot faster if mega-coporations like Delta Airlines for example, denied service to the unvaccinated. (Might cut down on some of their “disruptive customers” problems, too.) Likewise, the Minnesota State Fair. No vaccination? No entrance.
Fair-minded Christian coddling of the stupid, the perpetually reckless (i.e. sociopathic) and the “historically suspicious” has become lethal enabling. So … remove their choice to be stupid and selfish. Give them the goddam culture war they always seem to want.
If that’s the same as saying, “Fuck them and the fucking horses of galloping stupidity they rode in on,” well, there you have it. Nothing else is working.
I’m constitutionally (no pun intended but feel free) inclined to seek compromise and am hesitant to throw anyone off the island because we disagree on something but…damn, sometimes my fellow citizens make it hard to stick to my guns. I am, however, more angry at the people deliberately provoking this behavior (of whom there are actors both foreign and domestic) and in particular those cynically profiting off it. I suspect the Venn diagram intersection of “Fox News hosts and executives promoting stupidity in one or more areas” and “Fox News hosts and executives who believe in and act on the bullshit they promote” is zero.
Well, as we know, Tucker won’t say if hes been vaccinated, and as I understand it, Hannity has done his show from his Long Island home for years. That “special place in hell” we often refer to is pretty overbooked.
AMEN. Enough is enough.
But sadly … there’s always more.
I couldn’t agree more. No shirt, no shoes, no vaccine, no entry. There has been an outbreak of Delta variant in vaccinated people in Provincetown on Cape Cod right after 4th of July. They had almost no cases for the entire winter. I live at the other end of the Cape and my town is having the Falmouth Road Race in two weeks. The big concession is 8,000 runners instead of the usual 12,000. Plus all their friends. The area has been at full capacity all summer. A local restaurant closed for a day of kindness to their employees because they had been so horribly treated by customers. I’ve had it.
Based entirely on conversations with my wife and friends, restaurants and businesses that required proof of vaccination wouyld get MORE business, not less, Might even get more people to work for them, too.
My word, what a concept; the rule of law to benefit all. The grunting ignoramuses and the pious dolts would burn you on a stake. Chances of the mandated necessity actually working would require courage, integrity and wisdom. Where are we to find the leaders ?
The mind boggles.
And, I wish I hadn’t said that over and over again for the past half decade.
But thank you for saying it … .
Regarding two good points — your air quotes around vaccine “hesitancy” is right on. I say it should be called vaccine “stubbornness.” Also true, your air quotes on the word “freedom.” Paul Krugman has a great article today about this, calling this right-wing freedom: “defense of privilege.” He writes: “if you go back to the roots of modern conservatism, you find people like Barry Goldwater defending the right of businesses to discriminate against Black Americans. In the name of freedom, of course. A lot, though not all, of the recent panic about “cancel culture” is about protecting the right of powerful men to mistreat women. And so on.”
Could this be right? Has the GOP become the “counter-culture”? Has the world turned upside down?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/03/republicans-arent-conservatives-theyre-nihilists/
Opinion: Republicans aren’t conservatives. They’re nihilists.
Vernon Jones, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, speaks during an “Unmask Our Children” protest last month in Suwanee, Ga. (Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg)
Image without a caption
Opinion by
Max Boot
Columnist
August 3, 2021 at 11:19 a.m. EDT
2.2k
The most benign spin you can put on the Trumpified Republican Party is that the American right has entered its “hippie phase,” as Kevin D. Williamson suggests in National Review. In the 1960s, he points out, the liberal counterculture attacked the establishment, while the GOP stood for order and authority. Today the roles are reversed: Liberals are the ones who respect the authority of institutions such as the federal government, the scientific community, universities and schools, the media, big business, the military and the FBI, while the right subjects them all to “ridicule and scorn.”
A less kind but more accurate characterization is to argue, as Edward Luce did in the Financial Times, that “Republicans have become the party of nihilism.” Like the Joker, a lot of Republicans just like “to watch the world burn” — quite literally, in the case of their climate denialism. Republican anarchism is also on full display with regard to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the covid-19 pandemic.
On July 27, four police officers delivered harrowing testimony before a House select committee about how they had been assaulted by insurrectionists. In the past, these heroes might have been championed by the party of “law and order.” But it turns out that Republicans only “back the blue” when officers are accused of employing excessive force against minorities. When officers try to stop a Trumpist lynch mob, Republicans bash the blue.
Newsmax’s most popular host, Greg Kelly (son of a former New York City police commissioner), accused one of the officers of being “wrapped too tight.” Fox’s top host, Tucker Carlson, said they were “lying” and literally snickered at their testimony. Also giggling was professional provocateur Dinesh D’Souza. Fox host Laura Ingraham sneered that the officers deserved acting awards for their “third-rate theatrics.”
The only thing missing was to have these right-wingers call the officers “pigs,” as 1960s radicals did. Oh, wait — Carlson earlier employed that very epithet to describe Gen. Mark A. Milley after the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff dared to defend the teaching of critical race theory at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Of course, that’s almost mild compared with the vituperation then-President Donald Trump directed at the FBI for investigating his ties to Russia — he called FBI agents sleazebags, traitors and a “disgrace to our country.”
The right these days bashes not only the military and law enforcement but also every other institution that it accuses of having been taken over by “the left” — which means almost every national institution except the Supreme Court and, heaven help us, Fox “News” Channel.
Corporations earned the right’s ire for condemning Georgia’s voter suppression law and for deleting right-wing social media accounts that incite violence. Schools and universities have become objects of rightist wrath for teaching about America’s history of slavery, segregation and continuing racism — which conservatives denounce as “critical race theory.” The media establishment has long been an object of hatred but all the more now for exposing Trump’s lies — the “enemy of the people,”Trump called us. Scientists have faced threats and harassment for showing that global warming is real and needs to be addressed.
Most sinister of all, the medical establishment has become a target for attempting to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 613,000 Americans. The night after Tucker Carlson mocked the officers who defended the Capitol, he accused Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, of having “helped to create covid in the first place.” It’s a lunatic charge, but one that has become popular on the right. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called Fauci an “enemy to our nation” and said he “deserves to go to jail.”
Why demonize Fauci? In part to absolve Trump of responsibility for mishandling the pandemic. But this is also part of a wider attempt to delegitimize the medical community’s guidance on how to fight the outbreak. In the name of “medical freedom,” Republicans are protecting the freedom to spread the plague.
In Florida, which on Friday broke its one-day record for new covid-19 cases and on Sunday broke its record for hospitalizations, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) just issued an executive order to stop school districts from mandating masks. This comes after he signed legislation banning “vaccine passports” — and started selling anti-Fauci merchandise.
Of course, a mask mandate wouldn’t be necessary if more people were vaccinated. A large part of the reason they’re not is the right’s bizarre anti-vaccine animus. Religious-right commentator Eric Metaxas sounded very much like a 1960s radical when he explained why people shouldn’t get vaccinated: “If the government or everybody is telling you you have to do something … if only to be a rebel, you need to say, ‘I’m not going to do this.’”
There are many ways to describe this attitude — childish, irresponsible, destructive, nihilistic — but “conservative” isn’t one of them. Republicans, who once upheld authority, are now tearing it down. They give no indication of caring about the fate of American democracy, or about the fate of individual Americans. Their slogan might as well be “Burn, baby, burn.”
Jennifer Rubin also agrees with you, Brian!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/08/how-democrats-win-culture-war/