A Reckoning

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth." - Rev. 11:18, KJV

I'm not a religious man. Not even close.

    That's not to say I'm not a man of faith. I just think humanity would be best served in placing its trust in secular hands when dealing with secular matters such as the survival of our species. And the best way to go about doing that would be to effect real world solutions, to achieve perhaps some parochial heroism. And that starts with the cessation of groveling before one sky wizard or another. So perhaps it's fitting that the world's churches, mosques and synagogues are closing in droves all over the globe. 

    Outside of our televisions and DVD players and, as always, the internet, we're denied even the entertainment that we've taken for granted. There's no more basketball. There's no more hockey, There's no NCAA March Madness. And even baseball's fast-approaching Opening Day and the Tokyo Olympics are looking shaky. As is also fitting, this is the time when we hunker down in our respective quarantine spaces, our homes, and think and rethink of how we as a species have ended up here. 

    But that is also not to say that I am a man of great faith. Because how can one confidently place their faith in secular leaders when they apparently have no solutions beyond the enrichment of themselves and their friends in the corporate sector? When religion fails to provide solutions besides anodynes of maintaining blind faith, when the world's leaders are either standing in the way of progress, merely avoid shaking hands and have taken to rubbing elbows (until the WHO told them, No, you can't do that, either), hiding from the problem while the rest of us die or being diagnosed with the coronavirus themselves, what then?

    We haven't any choice, then, but to fall back upon our own resources. But that's not to say we should adopt a purely parochial attitude and to not help our fellow man when and where we can. One needn't be a philosopher or economist to know that the Randian nightmare of selfishness would merely make this latest global crisis infinitely worse. We can be separated and still serenade each other through our windows.

     But at some point in our silent prayers for absolution and salvation, we have to also prepare to atone for our decisions and actions. We Americans should be especially mindful of that considering that, as usual, we insist on putting the wrong people in charge of our affairs and keeping out those who should be. Because, as Charles Bukowski once pungently and accurately put it, the most intelligent of us are full of doubt while the stupidest are full of confidence.

     But there is a reckoning that is coming, if it already hasn't. As the lead graphic shows, 48 of our 50 states now have confirmed cases of coronavirus. Only Idaho and West Virginia are exempt and their day, too, will come. Between March 11th and yesterday, the United States health services had announced another 450+ cases of the novel coronavirus or COVID19. At 42 fatalities, 31 of them confined to Washington State, we should consider ourselves lucky in comparison to nations such as China, Italy, Spain and Iran.

     This very large roosting chicken, this reckoning, is the price we're paying for putting this squatter in the White House. In 2016, coronavirus was on no one's radar. Obama had left us a strong economy, with a low unemployment rate, we weren't actively at war with anyone and we "elected" Donald John Trump on November 8th 2016 with the mindset that this relative tranquility would continue forever.

     Because we elect presidents, senators, and congresspeople without considering, "How good will they be in a national, or international, crisis?" On that basis alone, Republicans should never be elected to any public office. In the first half of the 20th century, between Teddy Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, say, conservatism was a valid and working political school of thought. Strong national defense, good, pragmatic foreign policy, lower taxes. Who doesn't love those things?

    But latter-day conservatism since Nixon has turned rancid and putrid, some diseased form of tribalism that calls to mind less the palmy post-war years of Eisenhower and more Lord of the Flies. Donald Trump didn't just appear suddenly like some flabby parody of Botticelli's Venus appearing on a giant clamshell. Trump is a reverse apotheosis, the logical yet illogical conclusion of the American voter, through our actions and inactions, letting the latter-day Republican Party hijack everything only to hand it to Wall Street, which is also having its own reckoning.

    The good news if you're an investor is Trump's marbled-mouthed declaration of a national emergency, just five weeks after he'd declared coronavirus a Democrat hoax, gave the Dow Jones a short-term sugar rush and it gained back almost 2000 of the thousands more points it lost just yesterday and Wednesday. Hooray. When the fortunes of billionaires on Wall Street translate to relief for those of us on Main Street, let me know.

     But the man who'd given Wall Street that adrenaline rush that will not be replicated when trading resumes on Monday morning is the one most responsible for the famously twitchy Wall Street seeing historic losses of trillions just in the last fortnight. Trump has been shockingly lax in his own personal precautions especially when he prides himself on being a germophobe. He had rejected test kits proffered by the WHO, perhaps so his buddies in a certain pharmaceutical company could get a slice of that $50,000,000,000 pie that Trump served up today.

    The testing kits we did have were woefully inadequate. We have become an object of charity to the point where Jack Ma, the richest man in Asia, authorized his foundation to send us a half a million testing kits and one million face masks. It remains to be seen if Trump refuses those, too. He has contradicted his experts on live television and spouted lies and fables about the virus. He had made this information classified and muzzles his best experts.

     But as we hunker down and weather this still-gathering storm, this perfect storm of arrogance and incompetence, we need to accept the consequences of our actions. No one deserves the coronavirus, a stealthy, highly communicable disease that can be passed from one person to another within two meters and against which our immune systems can do little if anything. But we need to accept responsibility for our feckless government's criminally shameful response to this pandemic.

     We don't have enough testing kits. We don't have enough masks. We're still a year-year and a half away from a working vaccine. And the apathetic oaf shambling through the West Wing and Mar a Lago... Well, he'll have his own reckoning on Election Day this November 3rd. But in the meantime, we're having our own. These are the consequences of our actions. In Trump, 63,000,000 of us thought what we were planting would be a glorious bumper crop that turned out to be the Irish Potato Famine.

     And the even vastly greater number of us who didn't vote four years ago are just as responsible. And as we bunker and hunker ourselves praying ineffectually to one disinterested deity or another, perhaps we ought to spare a prayer, an afterthought, for a nation that used to lead the world in virtually everything and is now reduced to accepting handouts from the very nation on which we're blaming this pandemic.