“What a repugnant spectacle our country has become! Falsehood, cruelty, and madness everywhere, and brute force in the wings waiting to finish us off.” Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
Numbers: more than 1,000,000 cases of Covid-19 in America, with the death toll pushing past 60,000 souls, and both numbers very likely underreported. In Santa Barbara County, 485 confirmed cases, with the federal prison in Lompoc functioning as an epicenter. Unemployment claims across the nation are moving toward 30 million, but again, those are new claims and don’t include people who were unemployed or out of the workforce before the pandemic hit.
But Trump & Co. are moving on as if the pandemic has peaked. Leaving the scene of an accident as quickly as possible, as they were taught to do by their fathers. Jared Kushner pumped a gob of hand sanitizer on his delicate fingers, rubbed them together, and basically declared victory over the virus. “Back to work, everybody, back to school, children. My father-in-law needs to juice the economy and he’s willing to sacrifice your miserable lives to meet that end. Kindly move along.”
The full-throated chorus to open the economy is a cynical election year gambit. Trump is trying to wrest prosperity from the hands of an impending depression. If the gambit fails and we experience a resurgence of Covid-19, Trump & Co. will turn the page in their perverse hymnal and claim that it’s the fault of individual governors; they will sing in unison that Trump never told governors to reopen or even encouraged them to reopen. (Roll the tape of Trump pressuring governors to reopen their states.)
Trump still believes he can outrun the pandemic, remain a step ahead of a merciless beast that wants to feast on his flesh. A TV creation, a true believer in make-believe, Trump is always creating his next illusion. It’s over, we won. We’re number one in testing. We built a billion ventilators in a week. Every American who needs a Coronavirus test can have one. Hydroxychloroquine. UV light. Disinfect the lungs by injection. Fake news. It’s just a flu. It will magically disappear. We have it under total control. Nobody could have seen this coming. We inherited a broken system. It’s all China’s fault.
It’s government by spectacle, by stunt, by lie. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama sliced the truth with the skill of a top surgeon; Trump dynamites the truth as it suits him, heedless of collateral damage.
What if, as the journalist Chris Hedges said in an interview recently, these days will be remembered as the “good” times?
The tale is all-too-familiar. Powerful white man, younger female subordinate, a culture of male impunity.
Where are the Democrats? Why aren’t Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer using their voices to counter Trump’s propoganda? Joe Biden is holed up in his basement, trying to square his story about one of his former aides, Tara Reade, whose allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her back in the early 90’s has resurfaced with renewed purchase. As if Biden needed another woman problem. The Democratic Party establishment and corporate media are reluctant to give Reade’s allegations any air, opting instead to see if the storm blows out. But you don’t think Trump and his people will let Tara Reade fade into obscurity, do you? Even though it’s rather ironic for Donald Trump, with his closetful of sexual skeletons, to accuse any man of being a sleazy, groping creep. You don’t think the Trump camp stopped searching for dirt on Joe Biden after Ukraine, do you? Deep down Trump’s a mobster and using scandal to advance his interests is second nature, part of normal operations. “Hey, Gino, I need you to dig me up some dirt on a guy.”
Is Tara Reade telling the truth? I don’t know enough about the case to say, though I’m not prepared to dismiss her allegation out of hand. What would make a woman make such an allegation public in the midst of a pandemic and a critical election year? Would a woman make the allegation public knowing the backlash and media scrutiny that would follow? Reade had to know she would be panned, downplayed and dismissed, and that her motives and character judged. For me the tale is all-too-familiar: Powerful white man, younger female subordinate, a culture of male impunity.
We’re all Joads now.
What a country we have! The most important election, possibly in America’s history, may very well come down to two old, decrepit white men, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden, both gropers of females, both with blood on their hands, Biden from his Head Senate Cheerleader role in the run-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, and Trump, whose singular stupidity, incompetence, and laziness cost precious preparation time and almost certainly contributed to thousands of deaths from Covid-19.
I pull The Grapes of Wrath from my bookshelf and open it at random. “But -- you see, a bank or a company can’t do that, because those creatures don’t breathe air, don’t eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don’t get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat.”
Yes, Mr. Steinbeck, it’s as true now as it was then. We’re all Joads now.
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