John Nolte has a theory:
They are deaths caused by the Culture War. Nolte is wrong about all kinds of things--but he isn't wrong about that. Today "Evangelical" (or White Evangelical, if you will) is really more of a political designation than a religious one. Not surprisingly, then, they are the least vaccinated of all the polled religious groups. Just like Jesus would want.
On the flip side, Nolte's shriveled little heart would be delighted to learn about the Herman Cain Award subreddit where people post the story of various anti-vax meme posts on social media followed, inevitably, by the death announcement of the poster. The "Finding Out" part of the Fucking-Around equation, as it were.
On the subreddit itself, the posters are angry--and, in the case of actual ICU and other medical workers, exhausted. They are (by their own telling) emotionally drained and appalled. The deaths by COVID are horrible, stark, and preventable. In many cases the people dying--now skewing younger--some children--leave behind not just grieving relatives but giant messes of a life only partly lived and then thrown into chaos and destruction by a death, preventable, if not for Tucker Carlson's need for ratings.
While it is certain that there are people cheering these deaths as the destruction of the enemy, the litany of Facebook posts--smug, accusatory, often depressingly identical (there are only so many memes to go around) and, themselves, vicious towards the "libs" (BIDEN-20 is scarier than COVID-19, y'know?) shows that there is plenty of bile on both sides.
If the right's rhetoric of the Great Replacement brought us stochastic terrorism, COVID and the lamestream media has given us stochastic bio-warfare.
Now, to be clear: a LOT of the people dying are POC who aren't Republican (but just don't trust the government) and the idea that Trump voters are dying off while "ironic" is not "good." It doesn't actually help anything: elections will not tip because 100k Republicans die off spread across the United States. Even a million, evenly distributed wouldn't move electoral votes. This death spate doesn't help--it just does damage.
But what that damage shows is is how deep the cultural rot goes. Religion--white, mainstream, mega-church Christianity, anyway has been steam-rolled under the culture war. Political Policy evaporated in the explosion of ideological mortar shells. Today there is little that exists in politics (on the right, anyway: the Left has a huge raft of things they want to pass) that isn't a broadside against The Other.
The Republicans are significantly worse off here than the Democrats for a number of reasons (for starters, the Democrats trust traditional media which isn't as corrupt as alternative media) and as such, the damage is asymmetric. The allegation that if Trump had won, Dems would be refusing the vaccine is absurd. Harris said she wouldn't take a vaccine because Trump told her to (any more than she would drink bleach for the same reason) but would if the medical doctors said it worked.
That's consistent: Just as Democrats trust CNN to mostly get things right (and they do, mostly, get things right) they would, likely, trust doctors. The problem is that Republicans--even the "smart" ones--all too easily believe that if the shoe were on the other foot, it would fit.
That perspective is part of the culture war--part of the belief that just as THEY would claim Trump-really-won-the-election because it is politically powerful, so too would the Dems claim that vaccines developed under Operation Warp Speed were tainted by Trumpiness. The projection of political expediency onto the other side justifies everything--even letting your followers die horribly because everything, it turns out, is justified.
The asymmetries don’t end there. If the metaphorical shoe was on the other foot, so to speak, there would be no end of gloating self-congratulation about “owning the libs”. Fine, whatever; whatever makes them happy.
ReplyDeleteBut who’s talking about “owning the cons”? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
Crickets. That’s what I thought.
Leave the rest of us out of your insane conspiracy theories, Trumpanzees. You’re “owning” yourselves on this one, no thanks to “liberals”, “the media”, or anyone else. It’s the archetypal “own goal”, and you lot simply refuse to admit it.
That’s because to do that would be to admit that you’ve been had by a narcissistic two-bit grifter whose one and only talent is ripping people off (and not giving a rat’s ass about the consequences). This is the crook who’s apparently sued his own niece this morning for violating some sort of phony-baloney NDA concerning his taxes and finances (three NYT reporters have also been named as defendants, reportedly for “pressuring” Mary Trump into cooperating somehow).
And where COVID-19 is concerned, my suspicion is that a lot of the anti-vax idiocy would evaporate in the face of a more graphically horrifying disease presentation. That is, the current pandemic is regrettably easy to ignore or deny since it doesn’t resemble the zombie apocalypse we’ve all been primed to expect (at least not until the end stage, where victims mostly die out of sight, in hospital isolation wards). But if COVID-19 featured the disfiguring lesions of leprosy or the terrifying hemorrhagic fevers associated with viruses like Marburg, Ebola, Dengue, and Lassa — that’s a different story! I’m pretty sure that people would be climbing over each other to get vaccinated against anything like that.
It’s said that you can tell someone that our galaxy contains 100 billion stars and they’ll believe you; but if you tell them that a chair has wet paint on it, they’ll have to touch it, just to make sure...
-- Ω