Nurse the Hate: This Will Never End

I am fairly certain that the United States will never get out of this pandemic nightmare until some hard working scientists in a country like Germany find a vaccine.  The United States is now incapable of following even the most simple prevention measures, something we used to look down at in "Third World" countries like Brazil and India.  The photo above is from Kid Rock's bar in Nashville LAST WEEK.  Ah, another reason to dislike Kid Rock...  Do you think we are going to lead the way on getting out of the pandemic?  No way.  Not when there's chicken wings and Jason Aldean on the jukebox.  It's impossible.  How in the world can our nation discover and then deliver a vaccine to our citizens?  We can't even get a basic plan together on how to minimize the spread of the disease.

It is tantalizing to blame Trump and only Trump.  He is a perfect target.  He is utterly incompetent and that dangerous kind of fool that believes himself to be the smartest man in the room.  In fact, it is hard to come up with a scenario where Trump fucked it up more badly short of loading the virus onto crop dusters and spraying major population centers.  Yes, it is very bad that he thought inaction was action, and then focused on denying that this inaction was his fault, but is it really ALL his fault?  We knew he was stupid.  We knew he doesn't like believing in nasty facts like science that don't support him "winning" whatever monstrous plan he has cooked up.  That is on us.  We should have ignored him much earlier.  It's hard to believe but his assertion that leaving 50 states to go it alone might actually be better than having him directly in the mix.  It's better when he is concerned about what people said about how he walked down a plank like a fragile grandmother as opposed to trying to concentrate long enough to find empathy and come up with a plan for the common good.  He's a buffoonish reality TV star.  How the fuck could he handle this?  His forte is tweeting racist shit about the Grammy Awards.  He had no chance.

I think some blame should go to Fox News and their ilk.  In the odd chicken-and-egg world of Fox News, it's hard to say if they lovingly report on policy disasters from Trump and Co., or if they come up with the monstrous ideas that Trump and Co. embrace as their own.  I'm a guy that works in communications.  Take it from me.  If you have a bunch of Communications Majors setting policy for the nation, you're in Big Trouble.  The only reason we were all in Communications is because we failed math and science.  That's the reason so much of the coronavirus reporting is sketchy.  You have dumb shits like me trying to figure out how to convey complicated scientific ideas.  We don't know how science works.  Do you think Tucker Carlson knows anything about science?  Do you think Tucker Carlson knows anything about anything?  He's a rich kid from La Jolla CA that couldn't get into Yale so had to go to Trinity probably because his geometry grades were as bad as mine.  His brother's name is "Buckley" by the way.

 "Tucker?  Would you fetch Buckley from the pool?"  Tucker and Buckley aren't a couple of guys that I picture being focused on the needs of others.  "Tucker, like I was telling your mother, the problem with The Mexicans is they just refuse to work hard which is why we live in this villa by the seaside and they live wherever it is that they live.  Excuse me.  I need to go yell at that gardener!  After ten hours of digging up those cactus, you would think he'd be done by now!"  Cut to show young Tucker in bathing trunks watching his father scream at a tired Mexican gardener.  Here's a fun fact.  Tucker's father married an heiress after his mother left to pursue a more "bohemian lifestyle".  There might be some things in those boyhood years for Tucker to unpack on the psychiatrist's couch...

The problem with a TV channel focusing on covering up for a buffoon's bungling a public heath crisis is that TV is VERY persuasive.  It's why the cigarette companies aren't allowed to run TV ads.  It worked too well.  If you run enough TV content saying something crazy like, I don't know, "building a wall on the Mexican border will solve illegal immigration", people will start to believe it.  If you have the same people suggesting that the virus is some sort of nefarious hoax cooked up by The Villians and wearing a mask is a show of weakness, my guess is that those old folks and hillbillies you see at the grocery store won't wear masks or do anything to prevent the spread of this disease.  Are media outlets that are knowingly speading public health disinformation "evil"?  I think so but I know what they are doing and why, so I'm judgemental like that.

However, when you get down to it, the problem is really with "us".  The American People are shockingly stupid.  I have been fortunate to travel around a bit.  Let me tell you, that idea that we are "The Greatest Nation In The World" that keeps Wal Mart Nation puffed up with pride?  It's a myth.  Look around when you leave your bunker.  It's grim out here.  Hell, we might not even be the greatest nation in North America.  The USA is now on a short list of nations that includes Brazil and Russia (also with strong men virus denier leaders) that the EU is going to ban from being to enter because we can't get the virus under control.  We are fat and stupid and think we are exceptional.  We elected someone incompetent as leader because we liked that he sounded like us.  We reject science when it doesn't fit with our needs of convience.  We are never getting out of this pandemic.

I was reading about how Germany is re-opening.  They have 25% the number of people living there as the US has under much more dense living conditions.  They had 900 deaths.  We are at 125,000+.  How did they do it?  One of their leaders on the pandemic response team said "we took the information from the studies that were done in the United States and applied it."  That's all we had to do.  Follow our own science.  Not here.  We had hillbillies with guns declaring their "freedoms" were being violated.  We had 50 different governers executing 50 different plans all with different agendas.  We have scientists telling the South "don't open up yet" to then get ignored and have the virus spike up to the highest levels of the pandemic.  Meanwhile I still see hillbillies and Propaganda TV consumers continuing to ignore even the smallest precautions as I death defyingly enter Home Depot.  These people see themselves as tough guys or warriors to their cause.  They are 100% convinced that they are right despite all evidence to the contrary.  I see them as the reason I will be locked up in my house unable to do anything I like to do until 2022.

So to get out of this, all we need to do is not congregate in large groups and wear a mask.  Can anything be easier?  Yet there is still pushback.  The great example is something my associate Mr. Lanphier told me he had heard.  The virus is carried via droplets from our mouths.  Think of the virus as being piss.  If you come across another guy, neither of you are wearing pants and he just starts pissing all over the place, you get covered in piss.  If that scenario repeats and you are wearing pants, you'll still get some piss on you but not as much.  If he has pants on AND you have pants on, well then you don't get any piss on you, do you?  It's not that difficult. 

We'll never do it.

See you in 2022.