Thread by @doctorow

Plutes are chartering private jets in the hopes of avoiding #coronavirus, assuming that if they only fly in fart-tubes that other wealthy people have farted in, they won't get sick.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

1/

To make this pay, you really need to fill that Gulfstream. NYC-London is $140k for a 12-seater -- flying those 12 buttery soft asses from JFK to Heathrow in BA First will run you $120K.

2/

So you're basically assuming that if you use the plute-only terminal at LAX (whose management company once threatened to sue me for criticizing it in print!), and LHR (originally royals-only, now open to any oligarch), you'll avoid covid.

3/

Presumably because the Better People have Better Masks and the Luxury Decontam Wipes and that will keep the bad stuff at bay. Nevermind that we're finding covid in people who've been in psych ward lockdown for TEN YEARS.

https://twitter.com/AskAKorean/status/1233046896719126533

4/

Elite Panic is definitely a killer. I mean, people have been pointing this out since Poe wrote "Masque of the Red Death" in 1842. You can't shoot germs.

poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-…

5/

Humanity has a shared microbial destiny. Crises get resolved by people running TOWARD the problem, not cowering in luxury bunkers while better people do the work. This is the point of my own take on "Masque."

us.macmillan.com/books/97812502…

6/

Public health crises show that reality has a well-known collectivist bias, and this challenges right wing orthodoxy, which is why the right has only two responses to epidemiology: "It's a hoax" and (later) "Exterminate the dirty poors!"

7/

"The Reactionary Mind," @CoreyRobin's magnificent 2011 book (updated 2017), traces the history of right-wing thought to find the factor that unites Dominionists, imperialists, white nationalists, libertarians and other strains of right-wing thought.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_React…

8/

Robin's conclusion: the thing that unites these different strains is a belief that humanity is naturally arrayed in hierarchies, with some people simply born better than the rest of us, and the world is best when the best people are in charge.

9/

It's an idea as old as Plato's Republic. Dominionists want Christian men in charge of women and children. Racists want white people in charge of racialized people. Libertarians want bosses in charge of workers. Imperialists want America in charge of the world.

10/

It explains why right-wing movements hang together (because they all agree that the "wrong people" are running things) and why they splinter (once they take power, they can't agree who the "right people" are).

11/

This "divine right of kings/bosses/America/whites/men/Christians" philosophy is coterminal with the idea of the natural leaders having special stuff that makes them better: just as the touch of a king will heal leprosy, so too can you expect that a plute won't have covid.

12/

It's wrong, of course -- lethally so.

/eof