Athenae, COVID-19

I Don’t Know What To Tell You if You Are Still Surprised

Roger Cohen, who like most of the New York Times has come to the conclusion that the president enjoys stirring shit and encouraging violence:

Nobody foresaw what a pathogen about one-thousandth the width of an eyelash could trigger in a society where truth itself has been obliterated by President Trump, day after lying day. If he could deny the visible, like the number of people at his inauguration, imagine what he could do with the invisible. Or don’t imagine it, just look around.

Trump, in a tweet last month, urges his tens of millions of followers to “LIBERATE” Virginia from the lockdown and “save your great 2nd Amendment,” which is “under siege.” Or, roughly translated, grab your guns while you can to fight the liberal virus conspiracy, just the latest attempt after climate change and all the rest to emasculate America.

His languidness, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and go-to person for every known problem on the planet, is asked by Time magazine whether he is willing to commit to the holding of the Nov. 3 election. “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan,” he says.

Good to know. Right now, there’s a plan to hold an election. Gun up, dude, before it’s too late.

I mean, I’m not trying to be a dick, but whenever somebody’s like “he’s encouraging his followers to shoot politicians!” all I have is:

“Yeah.”

“He thinks the virus is a hoax! A conspiracy! He’s lying to keep the numbers down!”

“Yeah.”

“There are thousands of people dead and he doesn’t have a plan!”

“Yeah.”

“How can he –”

Look.

This is who he’s been since that Bund rally of a convention back in the summer of 2016. I remember sitting in a hotel room (I was organizing a conference, already one of the dumbest and most frustrating experiences of my entire life) watching on the C-SPAN feed and arguing with men online that “lock her up” meant something different to women than it did to them.

You spend enough time in crowds, you understand there’s a feel to them, an undercurrent, and you learn to listen to it. There was always something raw and ugly about Trump’s. Most people would see that, see the “she’s a cunt” T-shirts and hear the chants, and leave, knowing this was leading nowhere good.

We elected it instead.

And at the time I said it was all performance, and I didn’t mean for him: I meant for his people, from whom he feeds like some science-fiction monster wrapped around its host’s brain stem. The performance is FUCK YOU, that’s all it is, SUCK ON THIS, that’s all it’s been for decades in the Republican party, and it’s the same today, and I’m just so tired.

So yeah, he doesn’t have a plan. And thousands are dead. And he thinks it’s an excuse to get his people, “tactical” vests and all, riled up because that’s all he knows how to do. And he can count on somebody to write editorials that are basically “both sides” memes and talk about how “Washington” is broken, as if Joe Biden is out here telling the Black Panthers to take over the Alabama statehouse. Christ, sometimes I wish he would.

If you are coming to this NOW, if the virus was your thing, I mean, congratulations I guess, but don’t expect me to share your shock and outrage. “He’s a monster!”

Yeah.

A.

 

5 thoughts on “I Don’t Know What To Tell You if You Are Still Surprised”

  1. I’ve been trying to figure out a non-insulting explanation for this, best I can get is “normalcy bias is a hell of a drug”.

    Of course, it’s also normalcy bias to expect better from the New York Times.

    1. “I thought that the ‘Leopards Eating Peoples Faces’ party had some interesting ideas, but never thought they they’d eat MY face”, Cohen should have said, through the mangled remnants of his face.

  2. ~ arguing with men online that “lock her up” meant something different to women than it did to them ~

    I’ve been waiting a long time to hear that. Indeed, it has been upon me that I never would.

    This thing is far more serious than anyone is giving it. It is time to bust bully’s heads.

  3. In fairness, we didn’t elect him. He lost by three million votes. And his electoral college “victory” amounted to 70, 000+ plus distributed between three states, and when the history of this shit is written — assuming we still have a planet — it will come out that those votes were hacked by the Russians.

    I should add that why there weren’t automatic recounts in those three states — DEMANDED by the Democrats — is a mystery that may never be solved.

    1. In PA, the deciding votes were in a few deep-red areas that had touchscreen voting machines with no paper trail.

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