I’m reading Steve Benen’s book, “The Imposters”. It doesn’t address the Pandemic because it was written too early. But it is highly relevant to the federal decision to simply declare the catastrophe nonexistent and none of their business.
Last night I watched the Maddow Show, about the excruciating battle to save too many lives too suddenly with not enough supplies, time or beds. In city after city the revels of ignoring the safety measures have led to a medieval scene of death. The reason there are not rows of corpses on the sidewalks is that we can at least afford refrigerator trucks to be morgues. We are a civilization of suppression, frozen.
People keep saying, “Only four more months of this” but we’re already a week into July and I still haven’t found anyone to fix my roof. First blizzard is usually on Memorial Day.
No one has said anything about overpopulation as a connecting cause, though I’ve always been impressed by the experiments where rats were confined to a “rat ranch” too small for their proliferating, where they grew crowded, competitive, delinquent, criminal, and murderous. The Aesop tale about the dog that wouldn’t let any of the livestock eat their hay does not include the part where the dog dies of starvation because he can’t eat hay.
The media is loving the whole drama of it, how it can be fitted into their versions of mass ball-games with winner and losers and lots of beer at the tailgate parties. No news goes untweaked and even unhinged.
So far Benen’s book is not proposing malice or complicity with Russia, but rather pig-ignorance and bog-stubbornness of people standing in the trough barking, full of not-knowing — neither how it all works nor why it is raw cruelty, to say nothing of the treason it amounts to. Because people, when they suffer enough, will want revenge.
When I was working in the Portland Bureau of Buildings there was a strong impulse to preserve secrets. An intelligent, attractive divorcée, formerly a doctor’s wife skillful at soothing and distracting people, was hired specifically to deflect the contractors and planners who wanted the right permissions to what they wanted to do and wanted those answers fast because there was money at stake. She hated her job but had to have the income. She spoke of this frankly.
In fact, my experience with Montana is that they keep the medical ethics standards low because otherwise doctors — or maybe it’s their wives— won’t come here. Because being a doc is the same as having enough money to live the good life and if you’re the only doc, no one asks questions. Of course, the Maddow vids of medical people desperate to save lives, even their own, argues against that. Maybe that’s why so many of those dedicated people have roots in countries where people have dark skins and high ideals, different cultures. Their educations show in their eloquence. The contrast with legislative hearings is stark.
Mike was the guy in the Bureau of Buildings who made decisions about building in flood plains where there had to be an assurance of safety in emergencies. He struggled with the task because Portland was growing and the pressure to use every bit of land was intensifying. Developers looked at the land cleared of homes by the Vanport Flood and wanted to build there again, arguing that if the buildings were prisons, no one would care if the inmates were drowned. He was also a free speech sort of guy.
But when I prepared a flyer and put at the top the law summary the part that said every building and planner had the right to know what and why decisions were being made, he urged me to destroy it. “Do you realize how under attack we will be? The political consequences?”
He was right. The builders who came to my counter were determined to do what they wanted and when logic, emotion, and so on interfered, they could become violent. I kept a can of bear spray in my desk. We were threatened with bombs.
Even in peaceful little Valier the mayor and council are constantly telephoned or visited by irate citizens demanding that pot holes or derelict cars be addressed. No explanation would satisfy them and even the oldest could become violent. At one point there was a flurry of activity on the lot at the intersection by the lone traffic light. Men were driving test bores into the ground and measuring something. I asked the mayor. Told something bogus about possible sale, none of my business, I walked over and asked the men what they were doing.
The land had been a service station that developed a leak in the underground gas tank that contaminated the land. The state said no one could build there until the levels went down far enough, so that’s what they were measuring. It had not gone down enough. No one said anything about contaminating the water aquifer. When I asked, they said it was tested and was okay. It was a lie. But that brought up the next cause for citizen irate attitudes: distrust of government. But they lied to protect themselves and their investments from citizen attacks.
Revelations now come daily about how the Republican party has kept secrets and lied. If there were safeguards — and there were — the Repubs simply ignored them. When a horse can no longer be guided, it is said to have “taken the bit between its teeth.” Sometimes race horses go crazy, jump the fences, dump the jockeys and speed towards the horizon. The newly elected in the US Congress were so ignorant that they didn’t even realize there was a bit in their mouth, so unruly that they bucked, all but starting fistfights on the floor, never recognizing the idiocy of what they were doing as anything bad. When people criticized them, they just went hidden. The hundreds of thousands of deaths and impact of Covid-19 were ignored. It’s all unreal.
My cat-bitten thumb is healing but still sore. My diabetic feet are stinging. The aging of my joints and need for sleep betray my years. I have not forgotten that my brother has died estranged years ago and his death was not even relayed to me by his distraught wife. What does death have to offer except relief/not-knowing and escaping what begins to be an international whirlwind before we get to the hard work of rebuilding with people who are uneducated about government because they grew up in a world where merchandize and profit were the only things that worked. Should we be watching “Startrek” and taking notes on Quark?
This scary story is about the state of the “manger” in the Aesop story.
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/a-historian-explains-how-america-will-collapse-by-2025-using-4-different-scenarios/?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4927&recip_id=483833&list_id=1
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