Mask or no mask? Dem or GOP? Easy,
right? “Republicans, increasingly, refuse to wear masks, even where public
health officials say they should. Democrats wear them even in cases where
there’s no need, as illustrated by Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who wore a
bandanna that made him look like a stagecoach robber in an old western at a
Senate hearing last week in which no one else sat within three yards of his
chair. Folks at the protests tried to keep their masks on, but at least they
were fighting for a just cause. But in a
crowd, it is impossible to avoid risk. Masks help. Coughing and gagging at
pepper spray and tear gas didn’t.
“Last week [mid-May], three political
scientists — Tom Pepinsky of Cornell University, Shana Gadarian of Syracuse
University and Sara Goodman of UC Irvine — released an analysis of polling data
about which Americans say they wear masks in public. They found a gap of more
than 20 points along partisan lines: 75% of Democrats said they did, compared
with 53% of Republicans.
… The partisan gap was greatest among
city dwellers — people in rural areas are less likely to wear masks regardless
of party — and held true in most cases when researchers factored in the effects
of income and education. (There was little partisan gap among those who didn’t
graduate from high school, they found.)
“That’s consistent with other
surveys. Early in the pandemic, polls showed little difference in the behavior
of Democrats and Republicans, even though they had widely different views of
the illness and its causes. But as the political battling over the coronavirus
has intensified, that has changed… For both sides, masks have become a symbol:
of trust in scientific and medical expertise on the part of Democrats, and of
rejection of experts who tell others what to do on the part of Republicans.”
David
Lauter writing for the May 20th Los Angeles Times. It is indeed a
symbolic schism: rural vs urban, open the economy vs keep people safe, it’s
another flu vs you could die. Here’s how medical safety has become a political
football.
Notwithstanding
a firm, standing Ford Motors policy that all visitors to any Ford plant must
wear masks, and notwithstanding that the White House was fully informed of that
policy, “President Donald
Trump traveled on Thursday [5/21] to the crucial U.S. election battleground
state of Michigan to visit a Ford Motor Co. plant amid hostility with its
Democratic governor over how quickly to reopen its economy during the
coronavirus pandemic, opting not to wear a protective face mask.” Reuters, May
21st.
The mask has become a political symbol, no longer the medical
preventative that is still required in areas where the CV-19 virus is active or
potentially active. How not using a medical necessity became a political
statement, followed by millions many of whom remain in danger of infection
(some even in hot spots), is so American… and so incredibly stupid.
Following
a leader who completely dismissed the threat of the pending CV-19 pandemic for
so long, and delayed initiating appropriate governmental action by at least two
full months, seems inane, particularly when you consider the deaths that delay
caused: “If the United States had begun imposing social-distancing measures one
week earlier in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the
pandemic, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease
modelers… And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social
contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than when most people started staying
home, a vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have
been avoided, the researchers estimated.” New York Times, May 21st.
Yet emotions get hot when one group
believes the other is keeping them from earning a living and enjoying the
Constitutionally guaranteed right to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. Even though there is no such right. The other sees a selfish group
of people who do not care if their careless actions kill people or subject them
to medical horrors. We’re in a short-lived lull right now that almost always
happens with pandemics. It is an inflection point. Maintain strong distancing
and safety requirements until the virus really dies or can be prevented via a
vaccine or prepare for a second wave, probably more deadly than the first (a
virus almost always learns to grow stronger). Nature does not care what we
might want. No concern if you can’t work or if your mother is particularly
vulnerable. Bye, mom!
If morality is defined and justified
by “the ends justify the means,” then large aspects of both the Trump agenda
and the aspirations of so many in the evangelical right are true, moral and
God’s will. Of course, you have to accept that getting reelected at any cost
and imposing a minority will on a majority that is clearly opposed to that will
are admirable goals.
If watching footage of corpses being
stacked for delivery to makeshift mortuaries is troublesome, then some good
old-fashioned denial might be your cup of tea. Arizona stopped its two major
universities from tracking and modeling the pandemic, and Florida stopped its
medical examiners from releasing mortality statistics, hinting that they might
allow those numbers to resume as long as “COVID-19-related” was deleted from
the death certificates. Donald Trump just plain lies. Easier that way. As long
as the economy reopens, his constituency is happy. A few may die, but
fortunately for those red states, the casualties are likely going to continue
to take place in those nasty and Godless big blue cities. Except now it’s
spreading to rural communities too.
“Flagrant misuse of statistics has
been Trump’s pattern during the coronavirus pandemic too — beginning in
February, when he predicted that the number of confirmed cases in the country,
then 15, would be close to zero ‘within a couple of days.’… The number is now
over 1.5 million, but the president is still predicting good news ahead… ‘The
number of coronavirus cases is strongly trending downward throughout the United
States, with few exceptions,’ he tweeted this week. Actually, the number of new
cases is declining in the [big blue] Northeast, but there’s no strong downward
trend in most of the country.
“The president’s favorite statistic
this month [May] has been the number of tests given. ‘Over 11 million tests,
and going up fast. More than all countries in the world, combined,’ he tweeted
Monday… But Trump’s comparison was wildly wrong… His 11 million tests (now over
12 million) are not even close to the total for the rest of the world. Russia,
Germany and Italy combined have done more than 13 million tests; the rest of
the world has done at least 30 million… ‘We have more cases than anybody in the
world,’ he noted last week. ‘Why? Because we do more testing. When you test,
you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we
didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.’
“In any case, the real measure of any
country’s success at quelling the pandemic is its death rate — the number of
people who die per 100,000 in the population… Trump has claimed falsely that
the United States is winning by that benchmark, too… ‘Germany and the United
States are the two best in deaths per 100,000 people,’ he said last week. ‘To
me, that’s perhaps the most important number there is.’… But he’s wrong.
Germany and the United States aren’t ‘the two best’ on any list of countries… In
the Group of 7 advanced democracies, the United States is in fourth place,
behind Japan, Germany and Canada. Plenty of smaller countries have lower per
capita death rates.
“So what’s Trump going to say when
the number of U.S. deaths exceeds 100,000? [It did, obviously!]... He may
question the number. Conservative pundits including Tucker Carlson and Rush
Limbaugh have suggested that the casualty toll has been inflated to make the
president look bad… But there’s no data to suggest that’s true. Dr. Anthony
Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious-disease scientist, says it’s a
‘conspiracy theory.’… If anything, most evidence suggests that the current
tally is probably an undercount. Medical officials in New York and California
say some deaths early in the pandemic weren’t attributed to COVID-19 because there
weren’t enough testing kits to spare on victims who had expired.
“Instead, the president has already
tried out a newly invented statistic: the number of lives he claims to have ‘saved’
because the terrible death toll is still below early worst-case forecasts. ‘We
would have lost 2 million, 2 1/2 million, maybe more than that,’ he said.
‘We’ll be at 100,000, 110,000 … the lower level of what was projected.’… Never
mind that the worst-case forecast, from Imperial College London, assumed that
nobody would practice any social distancing at all. And never mind that Trump
has frequently said all such models are bunk… He’s finding that forecast useful
now because it helps him move the goalpost.
“Here’s the problem: Our death tally
is still the highest in the world. Even if China and other authoritarian
countries are fudging their figures, the U.S. death rate compares badly to
other democracies from Japan to Canada… ‘America is first in the world in
deaths, first in the world in infection,’ William J. Burns, the president of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told the Financial Times last
week. ‘We stand out as an emblem of global incompetence.’” Doyle McManus, Los
Angeles Times, May 20th. We are heading toward 200,000 deaths by the
election… or more.
The virus is exploding now in Texas
and Florida, states that opened way too fast. Houston is actually turning a
major sports arena into a makeshift hospital to handle the expected overload. Utah
and Oregon paused their reopening efforts… but Donald… Yeah. The rallies are
back, some timed for racially incentive days, with the first one scheduled for
June 19th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. An indoor function, expected to gather
15 thousand people yelling and screaming (read the CDC guidelines on that!) and
most probably not wearing masks. Did I mention that attendees must waive the
right to sue the arena or the GOP if the contract COVID-19 at the event?
But so many evangelicals
believe passionately in Trump’s presentation of the world. God is on his side
in their minds. So what if the President embellishes now and again; his
direction is true and obviously correct. Confirmed by their pastors and the
news services they choose to follow. And if there is a little hyperbole in
Trump’s patois, evangelicals themselves follow those Ten Commandments, never
veering, never themselves bearing false witness. Really.
I saw this little story,
now wending its way across many media. It was a piece in the BBC.com (May 20th)
that presented the deathbed confession from Norma McCorvey, known as Jane Roe
in the US Supreme Court's 1973 decision on Roe v Wade, who shocked the country
in 1995 when she came out against abortion. The writers had just previewed a
documentary, soon to air on FX:
“But in new footage, McCorvey alleges
she was paid to switch sides… ‘In her ‘deathbed
confession’, as she calls it, a visibly ailing McCorvey says she only became an
anti-abortion activist because she was paid by evangelical groups… ‘I was the
big fish,’ she said. ‘I think it was a mutual thing. I took their money and
they'd put me out in front of the cameras and tell me what to say… That's what
I'd say. It was all an act. I did it well too. I am a good actress. Of course,
I'm not acting now…. If a young woman wants to have an abortion, that's no skin
off my ass. That's why they call it choice.’…
“The Reverend Robert Schenck, one of
the evangelical pastors who worked with McCorvey after her conversion to
Christianity in the mid-1990s, also features in the documentary… The minister
acknowledges McCorvey was paid for her appearances on the movement's behalf.
The programme says it was as much $500,000 (£407,000, in current figures)… ‘I
knew what we were doing,’ Mr Schenck says. ‘And there were times when I was
sure she knew…. And I wondered: 'Is she playing us?' What I didn't have the
guts to say was: 'Because I know damn well we're playing her.'" Just good
old God-fearing folks, the same good Christians who gerrymander, find ways to
deny minorities the right to vote, think COVID-19 is totally exaggerated (hey,
it only kills blue people!) and don’t flinch when they watch little terrified
children sleeping under foil blankets in ICE detention centers.
I’m
Peter Dekom, and for those skeptics who believe that lies catch up to the
perpetrators sooner or later, history teaches us that the “sooner” often leads
to dictators and horrific consequences.
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