During these still early days of the biomedical pandemic, the President-America-has continues to show the federal buck goes directly to his political bank account without stopping at his desk. How else to explain the actions of his Treasury Secretary, an unrepentant private sector” foreclosure king on the backs of poor people and active duty veterans serving overseas, up-managing billions in special interest coronavirus stimulus set asides for elite hospitality and real estate industries?
What better proof of Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” principle than the federal government’s $349 BN “Paycheck Protection Program” awarding big “national hotel and restaurant chains (Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Potbelly and Shake Shack) millions of dollars in grants” while “thousands of traditional small businesses were unable to get funding from the program before it ran dry?” Impeached but clearly undaunted, the “wartime” President- America-has doubles down on his cumulative, sixteen-thousand-verified, Fog-of-War lies since assuming office better to wage partisan political warfare in the faces of frontline healthcare, homecare and emergency response workers unable to secure gloves, gowns and masks to de-risk their own lives while saving others.
In the land of the free, nationwide pandemic-prevention lockdown coincides with an Administration green card ban of the pitifully few, beyond desperate immigrants still willing to risk Stephen Miller throwing their brown babies into detention center cages. In the land of the brave, immigrant farmworkers surprisingly receive ticket-to-paradise, Department of Homeland Security letters anointing them newly indispensable pickers. Those stuck inside the world’s indispensable nation’s COVID-19 epicenters, the land of the freely mounting body count and dramatically so for domestic communities of color, wait for tests and vaccines that, like enduring voting rights or equal opportunity access, never sufficiently materialize.
Home on the raging range, Confederate flag-waving “Give me Pandemic or Give me Death” protestors led by the Matrix’s “Agent Smith,” spiritually sponsored by DeVos-Murdoch-Mercer invidious foundations from monied and power privilege-hell, incite self-identifying deplorables to deploy as ideological pre-electoral virus recovery fodder. During the 2016 campaign, the President-America-has, while candidate, predicted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” That spiritual thesis is about be tested in 2020: the bullet will be COVID-19 but the trigger will be November elections.
Meanwhile, rural America pandemic hotspots continue to emerge exacerbated by closing hospitals, medical staff scarcities and massive telemedicine through broadband gaps. Three red states volunteering as hybrid guinea pig/canaries in the coronavirus coal mine where respiratory extinction knows no borders, sequentially “self-deport” to re-open local markets. Like chicken hawks agitating for armed combat to spill other people’s blood and limbs, who goes first and comes in last plays according to embedded economic class script.
In these Disunited States mortally wounded by America’s “winner takes all,” preexisting inequality preconditioning, we have already seen the movie, sequels and reruns. Who wins and who loses against the backdrop of an attempted takedown and swift boating of an entire country by extreme respiratory failure. Counting coup, “or striking an enemy, was the highest honor earned by warriors participating in the intertribal wars of the Great Plains.” Now, as “E Pluribus Unum” collective survival by governing in unison downgrades to tactical partisan political correctness, it takes place on Twitter.
Conventional wisdom holds that social distancing Democrats live to govern while “liberated” Republicans live to win. Who wins determines who governs and who gets a better chance to stay alive. The President-America-has is described by conservative cultural warriors as their disruptive weapon of choice to destroy liberal elites, the ”deep state,” the post-World War II consensus starting with America’s enduring international alliances and called by higher authority to goose the prosperity gospel stock market and take the temperature of heaven.
With 22 million+ Americans already on the unemployment ropes, sang-froid econometrics modeling is religiously enjoying a social-distancing-free field day. A temporary lower than expected death count inspires a converging common denominator value by those in power on the relative price and trade of a disposable human life.
The President-America-has said the decision about whether to relax biomedical pandemic federal guidance will be the biggest of his life because so many lives and jobs depend on his judgement. “We want to get our country back and we’re going to do it soon,” the President-America-has informed the nation.
That same week, Bob Dylan’s handwritten lyrics for “The Times They Are A-Changin” went on sale for $2.2 million. How much more would the handwritten lyrics go for Dylan’s 1962 defiant and predictive, “Blowin in the Wind”, especially the question voters still alive are beginning to ask fifty-eight years later, “And how many deaths will it take ’till he knows that too many people have died?”
“The answer is blowin’ in the wind.” Literally.
-Michael A. Peck-
One Worker, One Vote blog
April 21st, 2020
