"Trump pushes mask wearing, says he’ll resume COVID briefings
OPINION
As America tops 4 million COVID cases, the cult of Donald Trump has become a death cult
People who refuse to wear a mask are bolstering their sore egos. Their national motto is not ‘E Pluribus Unum,’ it’s ‘You’re not the boss of me.’
America has now passed the milestone of 4 million COVID cases, and we’re still arguing with doctors and epidemiologists about masks and school closures. I expected some of this, because I literally wrote the book over three years ago on why so many Americans think they’re smarter than experts. What I did not expect is that this resolute and childish opposition to expertise would be hijacked by the president of the United States and an entire American political party, and then turned into a suicide cult.
It did not take a lot of foresight to know, even before the coronavirus arrived, that the United States was leaving itself vulnerable to a crisis that would require the public to trust experts. We long ago became a narcissistic nation whose citizens believe they can become competent in almost any subject by watching enough television and spending enough time on the internet. But I was certain that a true national crisis — a war, a depression, or yes, a pandemic — would snap people back to reality.
I was wrong to be so optimistic.
Endangering others as empowerment
Some states (including Rhode Island, where I live) have had great success in asking their citizens to cooperate for the common good. Other communities, unfortunately, have had to endure shouting matches with bellowing ignoramuses who think it is intolerable that they be asked to wear a mask while shopping or ordering food — two things people in other countries would gladly do wrapped in aluminum foil and with prayers of thanks on their lips if they got to do it in the United States of America.
There is no one more responsible for this particular moment than President Donald Trump, but all he has done is play to a gallery whose seats were already full by the time he ran for office. Trump appealed to a powerful sense of narcissistic grievance among millions of Americans, nurturing it and feeding it. An entire claque of enablers joined in, knowing there was plenty of money to be made feeding this self-centered, anti-social nihilism.
When the pandemic arrived, these enablers in the conservative media and among the cowardly Republican political class took their cues — masks, no masks, closing, opening — from Trump, whose statements for months were a fusillade of nonsense that reflected only his own pouty anger that Mother Nature had the sheer brass to mess up his presidential grift.
Not all of those who have been reckless and irresponsible are Trump supporters. There are, as always, young people who believe they are invincible. And some experts inflicted a huge wound on themselves right in the middle of this crisis by blessing the Black Lives Matter protests rather than repeating stern warnings they gave to other Americans that such events are dangerous.
But the Americans who are now driving the pandemic are not sudden skeptics about masks or distancing or expert opinion because of street protests. Some of them reject expertise because of the previous “failures” of experts. This is always one of the reflexive explanations for the refusal to listen to the educated and experienced. Expert failures are real and happen every day, but the people who sullenly refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic are not doing so because the United States failed to find Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or because the housing market crashed in 2008.
Rather, they are doing so because they see endangering others as empowerment, a way of telling people whom they believe look down on them that no one, no matter how smart or accomplished, can tell them what to do. For these people, our national motto is not “In God We Trust” or “E Pluribus Unum,” but rather: “You’re Not the Boss of Me.”
Reject expertise and trust Trump
So committed are these Americans to assuaging their sore egos over their imagined lack of status that they are literally willing to die for it. Unfortunately, they seem all too willing to take many of us with them. This is not Jonestown or Heaven’s Gate, whose cult members fled society to go and die together. This is worse. This is an attempt to create a Jonestown in every American city and town and then invite the rest of us over for a cool drink.
The irony here is that the same people who reject expertise because they believe they are smart and clued in to the mistakes of experts will accept the word of Donald Trump — a man who has obliterated most of the projects he’s ever been involved with and who stands as the uncontested champion of American public liars — as the gospel truth.
A resolution: After appalling Roger Stone commutation, don’t let Donald Trump break us, America.
But that is how cults work, and woe to anyone who crosses them. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for over 35 years, has endured attacks from the White House and some members of Congress because some Republicans believe that he is somehow trying to use the pandemic against the president. Worse, Fauci now has to travel with security, as Americans treat the rest of the world to the shameful sight of one of the most accomplished scientists in one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world having to be guarded against unhinged cultists in his own country.
On the same day that America hit a grisly new record, President Trump went on television to explain both that he must cancel his cherished plans for a political convention while insisting that children be sent back to school in the coming weeks. Millions of Americans nodded along with him, secure in the knowledge that scientists are quacks and that no one understands viruses like Donald Trump. They will likely still believe that even as they lie in a hospital bed and are given last rites with a ventilator down their throats.
If only the rest of us did not have to risk being in the bed next to them."
© Copyright Gannett 2020
The double faceted political arena has never been more brazen and offensive, with political, and psychological reality
struggling for dominance in a field of thorns wrought with pain and mortality.
Where is truth found Nowedays, where claims and counterclaims clamor for attention and seeks relevance from every nook and cranny?
Jas all rationality been usurped for the sake of the loaded and expedient brazen call for for the lowest common denominator that intelligence could glean?
The sad fact is, that such utterly paradoxical absurd logic does speak out of two tongues,l.
The geopolitical certainty of capital splits national capitalism and national socialism , ( oops here goes that word again) - and so I am realism can not as yet support an internationally equivocal vale system, as yet.
The idea of extending marketability to the advantage either of particular national interests, OR toward the furtherance of a classless universal population-with equitable market and labor interchange, is truly, and literally a trumped up (forgive the slip) reason for it’s primal cause.
It would like that impression, but at least in the foreseeable future, it means to sustain and leverage international differences , that favor conglomerate economic behemoths , to the disadvantage of labor.
Further , labor in the advanced societies have to sustain in some measure the traditional socially adapted levels of accustomed standards, and this parallels somewhat the way international models need to be sustained.
Which model will attain superior models down the line, I believe has already been decided, regardless of the clever inter-party clamor for an attention that could signify substantial undertones with dynamic latencythat could actually turn things this way or that, toward national or international objectives.
The party unity or it’s negative is mostly rhetoric to advance the jobs of two camps of lawyers, who need such division to propel faux objectives, to fuel the political process.
The pipette masters hold Biden and Teump dangling in a show that need to describe a complex ground foreground interplay, that really has no depth, that Main Street can really understand.
And social unrest in the U.S. escalating: