Missed this a few days ago, but @adamjohnsonNYC pretty much captures my current Covid thoughts. thecolumn.substack.com/p/covid-isnt-a…
The thought I keep coming back to is that Covid put the US under stress & basically exposed what a sad-sack crumbling empire we are. Failing institutions, weak leaders, selfishness, ignorance, denial, scapegoating, and whining, whining, whining, whining, whining.
Over & over again, the usual suspects try to do what they do -- blame everything on vague soft distant meddling "elites" & their immigrant armies -- only to find that the virus is just a virus & doesn't give a shit who owned who on cable & just keeps killing people.
And we just can't process that. We picked teams, owned the other side, turned the channel on our reality TV, & the virus ... is still there. We don't know how to solve real problems any more; we don't even know how to conceive or discuss them. We've disappeared up our own ass.
To say "this does not bode well for dealing with climate change" is the understatement of the epoch.
Anyway, Adam said all this in a more articulate way; read his post.
Anyway, Adam said all this in a more articulate way; read his post.
One additional thought: I think the right-wing media blob has some to see everything like Benghazi or the migrant caravan, which is to say, reality puts no barriers on the discourse. You hype it when necessary, make it play whatever rhetorical role you need, and ...
... when you don't need it, you stop discussing it, & it vanishes. It has no reality of its own; it is created by you talking about it. You get accustomed to this & you start thinking reality itself is just whatever you need it to be for your tribe to win ongoing battles.
And then comes the virus. You talk about it one way; it's still there. You talk about it a different way; it's still there. You hold a rally, get tons of coverage on Fox, come up with the *perfect* anti-Fauci slogan ... it's still there. It has its own stubborn reality.
What does the right do in that situation? Winning media fights is all it knows how to do any more. If you've delivered your zingers & memes & the problem is still there, what then? They have no idea. They have no real problem solvers, no ideas about governance, only sick burns.
You already see them approaching climate change the same way, as if the problem is, "we're losing the cable-news battle on this; we need better things to say." Zero signs of awareness that the problem is an *actually existing phenomenon in the world*, not a comms challenge.
But like ... McCarthy? Gaetz? MTG? Today's Republicans have succeeded because they win cable-news rhetorical fights. They give good soundbite. They know fuck all about the real world or how to solve real problems. Unclear they know the world beyond media exists!
And so, on Covid, we get from them what we get from them on everything else: whining, playing the victim, blaming libs. None of those tactics have the slightest effect on Covid whatsoever, but they literally have no other tools.
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