Dear Posterity:

You won’t believe this when you read about it in the history books, so let me assure you, it actually happened.

Trump created a false dichotomy and ordered churches open today, as “essential” — just like meat packing plants and their workers. Yes, it was pandering to the evangelical “base.”

Behind Trump’s demand to reopen churches: Slipping poll numbers and alarm inside his campaign
Gabby Orr / Politico

—  A sudden shift in support for Donald Trump among religious conservatives is triggering alarm bells inside his reelection campaign, where top aides have long banked on expanding the president’s evangelical base …

To safeguard his relationship with religious conservatives, Trump on Friday demanded that America‘s governors permit houses of worship to immediately reopen, and threatened to “override“ state leaders who decline to obey his directive ….“Some governors have deemed liquor stores and abortion clinics as essential, but have left out churches and other houses of worship. It’s not right. So, I’m correcting this injustice and calling houses of worship essential,“ Trump said.

“Essential“?

Hold that  thought a minute.

There’s a classic film noir movie that I keep thinking of entitled “D.O.A.”

The lead character has been poisoned and has a few days before he dies.  He has to untangle the mystery of his own murder — D.O.A. meaning “Dead On Arrival.”

No more plot is needed. Amazing film if you want to watch it. My point being:

In every crowd protest, every crowded bar, every beach, every church, and every senseless packing together what I see is a whole lot of DOA. Dead men and women walking, they just don’t know it yet.

And leave it to the GOP to POLITICIZE a virus and how science is apprehended and comprehended. Sophistry works well for policy debates, like, say, trickle down economics, which DEMONSTRABLY don’t work, but are touted as having worked and as a reason to vote for said candidate. Nobody cares. Science, though, is a different matter, since the death sentence on those who foolishly exposed themselves to a virus for which there is no cure because they got …. BORED is not subject to appeal. They will be dead in a couple of weeks and wonder WHY.

This has always been clearly warned, and has always been clearly understood. Some specifics about transmissability are still coming into focus (e.g. the CDC’s latest finding that surface deposits of the virus are DIFFICULT to transmit) but we have ALWAYS KNOWN that this is an air-borne virus and that it is mostly spread via droplets.

Got that? The nuances might be in flux, but the general outlines have been known from the beginning.

But America decided that we were too super duper to get it, so we ignored it.

And the Combover at the Top downplayed it extensively, worried more about stock market averages literally, than human life. No one wants to say it, but there it is: he cares more about the “economy” than those human beings who, to recall Lincoln’s firm belief are the ENTIRETY of that economy!

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.”

~Abraham Lincoln, message to the U.S. Congress, 3 December 1861.

America is the nation that was too timid to order shelter in place because not enough people were dead. And the nation that got too bored with not dying and has decided, this week to “reopen” even though only nine states meet the CDC criteria for so doing.

And since the bloodbaths in Florida and Georgia have not yet happened (a lot of DOA folks wandering around, however) the Right Wing media is demanding apologies from silly scientists who understand what DOA actually means.

Seriously, we got too bored of NOT dying to do anything other than yawn, claim “false alarm” and return to the world, picking sometimes fatal squabbles over having to wear a mask or opening a bar or a beach.

It is not exactly enough to make one feel salutary about the future of this “homo sapiens” crowd, given that every country has the SCIENCE, and the understanding, whether resources are available or not, BUT the leadership of nation after nation has chosen, instead, to engage in petty ego struggles, posturings and attempts to gain some rhetorical advantage  while people die because of it.

A stupid, silly governor in Nebraska decides to make test results secret so as not to upset meat packing moguls, who care, evidently, more for profits than workers’ lives.

(Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was written in 1906, or 114 years ago, coincidentally, depicting the horrific conditions and sometimes fatal working conditions in Chicago’s meat packing houses).

And here we are.

The self-quarantining was SUPPOSED to give us a cushion during which to roll out mitigating and curative measures (hopefully) to fight the common enemy: a miniscule parasitic packet of RNA that re-engineers our cellular DNA into replicating the parasite and ofttimes, in so doing, kills the host. Us.

No virus yet known to humankind has been successfully fought with semi-automatic rifles, but certain “freedom” protesters in Michigan have operated under the misapprehension that this approach might yet bear fruit.

And so, taking both sides of the question, Mr. Trump has both helmed a government that issues pandemic protocols and reopening procedures and has OPPOSED that same government’s protocols and reopening procedures. Having it both ways has rarely seemed to schizophrenic.

So, to protect the rights of the religious, we demand that they be allowed to congregate in clots certain to spread the fatal virus.

Faux Nooz maundered on all day about this ridiculous reading of the First Amendment.

Forbidding large gatherings in the name of fighting plague wasn’t even controversial in the Dark Ages during the Black Death.

But in Idiot America, it is a controversy and a puzzlement to them what have never used they brains for anything beyond a hat rack. [sic]

Just because you have freedom of religion does NOT give you license to break ANY civil law.

You can’t claim that your religion doesn’t believe in crosswalks and stop signs and not still be ticketed.

You can’t claim that your religion forbids you from paying your garbage bill and let your trash sit in a heap outside the back door of your church.

Your church can’t suddenly decide that paying mortgages is “usury” and forbidden by the Holy Word and NOT have sheriffs show up to assist you in your eviction from the premises.

So, too, your First Amendment rights do not extend to the right to clot together in a public health emergency. Sorry.

Besides, the New Testament says:

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
[MATTHEW 18:20 King James version]

So, even biblically, there isn’t much of a problem.  Jesus promised to be with you in pandemics, so no rights are being trampled.

The point being this: knowing full well what the issues were and with a century and more of public health experience in isolating and quarantining disease vectors, America decided to hunker down, got bored, didn’t come up with any mitigation or treatment techniques and then ‘reopened for business’ because we got bored and weren’t receiving any of the money that congress appropriated to take care of just this very problem.

The astonishing display of anti-Darwinian idiocy thus far expended in killing off as many Americans as possible beggars the imagination and leaves the conscious mind to adopt the jaw agape status of utter astonishment.

It’s one thing to hear about lemmings (which don’t actually do what is claimed they do) and quite another to watch humans aping the legendary kind.

Are we REALLY too stupid to live?

Has NETFLIX really gotten so boring that death is preferable to bingeing one more original series?

Unbelievable.

And all those folks walking around DOA.

If you’ve been watching the numbers, you’d notice that we’d just about hit plateau,  nationally.  But that was, evidently, not exciting enough for us.

Let’s all watch grannie die.

Whether we ever achieve herd immunity, we have most assuredly  reached herd inanity.

And, is it just me, or does Trump seem, increasingly, like a bad QVC host?

Courage.

Cross posted from his vorpal sword