I’m still mad. I was playing Super Smash Brothers Melee rather than looking for work as usual when I suddenly thought about Trump’s messed up presidency again. I recalled a distinct discussion I had with a friend of mine in which he argued that Trump had little to do with the intensity of the pandemic. In his eyes, the stupid bastards that weren’t going to maintain social distancing or wear masks were going to screw everything up anyway. To an extent, there is merit to this idea. Keeping Americans tied down to common sense rules is about as easy as getting a knife on a rabid eel. The thing is, we could have started preparing for the pandemic and closing international travel MONTHS in advance.
I remember a distant spring when the Democratic primaries and the impeachment were the things I was most concerned about. I was reading the newspaper every day, keeping up with politics, and generally being a really put together person. You know what made it on the NY Times front page multiple times in January? Yes, the coronavirus. As the confirmed cases in China mounted, the sense of urgency within these articles grew. When it came out that Trump was briefed about the severity of the virus back in January, I wasn’t particularly surprised. If you read or even watched the news at any point leading up to March, you probably would have gotten some idea about this thing (though Fox News was calling it a hoax at the time, big surprise). Of course, since the government was doing fuck all to prepare for the thing, I assumed corona would just be another swine flu, something that made the news but didn’t actually affect me in any way.
Want to see propaganda in action? Fox News watchers across the nation are losing their shit because of a federal investigation into the origins of the coronavirus. The lab escape theory, which we had no reason to give any attention to a year ago when we were literally trying not to die by going to the grocery store, is now very popular, and Fox News fans are now using it as a corona-gotcha. They are patting each other on the back, giving each other reach-arounds and shit. Well, guess what buddy. Conspiracy or not, we still knew about the virus for months and didn’t do anything to prepare for it. Our production was totally caught off guard, and thousands died for it. The conspiracy theory I want investigated is whether or not Trump was sucking Xi Jinping’s dick when he was told to ignore the manufactured virus and let America crumble in its wake.
Our nation should be better than this. While a pandemic-tier virus was brewing in China, our popular TV news networks were manufacturing outrage and political discord. It’s literally killing us. People die when we twiddle our thumbs and turn every important issue into a Dem VS. Repubby screaming match.
Folks like to debate whether Orwell or Huxley’s vision of the future is more accurate. They are too sophisticated. I think Idiocracy is probably the winner. That’s not a particularly innovative take, I know.
Ayep, that’s just the state of things. I have no idea how we are going to resuscitate a broken media culture in this nation. Guilty Zoomers like to argue that individual responsibility is worthless and large scale legislation is the only way to fix anything, but I think making individual efforts to change habits and continuously fight the zombies is important too. Even if it doesn’t matter in the end, at least you can say you were awake to the last breath.