It Is to Laugh

With the plethora of bad news these days—global warming accelerating and whole portions of the globe on fire; the Covid-19 Delta variant running rampant through the population of anti-vax states and overwhelming hospitals; Afghanistan being overrun by the Taliban, and threatening to become another Vietnam-evacuation fiasco (today’s news confirms this); Congress mostly in gridlock and unable to address most of the crises besetting the nation, including the rampant inequality keeping whole sectors of the public in poverty (to mention only the major calamities besetting us)—it is easy to sink into despair and outrage. But it’s also easy, and far more preferable for one’s health, to see the humor in all this; not that tragedy is laughable, but that the idiocy emanating from politicians making these tragedies worse, is nothing if not hilarious. We have major figures who might qualify as standup comics if they weren’t so serious, so oblivious of the absurd nature of what they’re saying—which only makes their pronouncements that much funnier. So let’s just start listing some of the commentary by these buffoons; or perhaps begin by listing the buffoons themselves. Beginning, of course, with the Buffoon-in-Chief, ex-President Donald Trump. Then the governor of Florida, Ron De Santis. Then the women who have come to the fore in numbers in recent years: Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, and Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota. And other idiots too numerous to name, but including stars like Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, and Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, and even the minority leader in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. But enough of the lists. Let’s get to the humor. 

            Pride of place must go to Gohmert, who recently tried to warn about Democrats’ attempts to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which, he said, would fund “dangerous” solar power plants. And wherefore dangerous? Because, said Gohmert in an interview on One America News, “when the birds fly through, if they survive the windmills, then they hit that magnified sun, explode in flame, and down they go, bird guts all over the mirrors.” An epidemic of exploding birds! Proving, vowed Gohmert, that this “green stuff is out of control” (rawstory.com, Aug. 12). The mind reels. 

Next up must be MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, an avid Trump supporter, who famously predicted that Donald Trump would soon be reinstated as President, because Americans would realize that he did win the 2020 election. Lindell actually predicted the glorious date of this ‘second coming’: (“By the morning of August 13, it will be the talk of the world”), though he tried to hedge his bets when August 13 came and went with Biden still President. Still, Lindell happily urged supporters not to despair, Reinstatement Day would surely happen sometime in September, once he finally submitted his (nonexistent) proof that the 2020 election was rigged to the U. S. Supreme Court! The people would thereupon be ecstatic, urging the government to “Hurry up! Let’s  get this election pulled down, let’s right the right. Let’s get these communists out.” One has to ask: Who are these people? Who opened the Nut House? 

It appears that someone with connections to the Republican Party did it, because a recent survey reveals that nearly half (49%) of all Republican voters believe, bizarrely and dangerously, that: “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” The same poll found that an even bigger group of Republicans (55%) say  that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast we may have to use force to save it.” And the same poll (by George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs) found that Republicans don’t trust elections, 82% of whom said it's “hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.”  In other words, those damn people of color! Such results are nothing but ominous in any polity, but in a so-called “democracy,” they seem near-fatal. As does, by the by, the apparent determination of Republican state legislatures to pass laws limiting the opportunities and rights of Americans, people of color mainly, to vote. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of this republic—to abide by the will of the people, which requires as many as possible to actually vote? Gee, I guess not. 

But I digress. Let’s get back to the idiot parade. I particularly like the humor, macabre though it may be, of official responses to Covid-19 and the mask mandates and vaccines associated with it. Masks (along with social distancing) have proved to be remarkably effective at limiting the spread of this killer virus. So have vaccines, the best of which have been tested rigorously to be 90% to 95% effective at either protecting the vaccinated from getting the virus at all, or rendering its seriousness and lethality minimal. And yet, the response to attempts to mandate mask-wearing in enclosed places like school classrooms has been absolutely mind-boggling. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida is probably the type case. In a NY Times Magazine article on Aug. 10, Gov. DeSantis’ rulings on mask wearing were summarized—to wit, that any school administrator or even school board that orders mask-wearing in his/their school, stands in violation of the Gov’s Executive Order of July 30, 2021 banning any such rules, and can and will have his/her salary withheld. While there are multiple lawsuits challenging the Gov’s order, he remained defiant, saying, “We can either have a free society or we can have a biomedical security state…And I can tell you, Florida, we’re a free state.” A ‘biomedical security state,’ and worse, one that seeks to save lives? Hilarious. His Executive Order is equally hilarious (and dangerous, especially in view of the fact that Florida is experiencing a surge in Covid cases, particularly from the lethally-transmissible Delta variant), insisting that masks have not been proven effective, and that they can cause serious breathing problems in children, not to mention “violating Floridians’ constitutional freedoms,” and “parents right under Florida law to make health care decisions of their minor children.” The stupidity and arrogance of this order is breathtaking, particularly in view of the Delta surge causing, in Florida, upwards of 20,000 cases a day and record numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, including among children. In short, this is hilarious but definitely not funny, constituting as it does a death sentence for many. 

Now let’s look at that champion of morons, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (whom I call Mrs. Pruneface, of Dick Tracy fame). On July 19, she tweeted this:   

“The controversial #COVID19 vaccines should not be forced on our military for a virus that is not dangerous for non-obese people and those under 65. With 6,000 vax related deaths and many concerning side effects reported, the vax should be a choice not a mandate for everyone.” 

Controversial vaccines? A virus  that is not dangerous? 6,000 vax-related deaths? Where do these people come from? Twitter apparently wondered  the same thing, and promptly banned Greene from its platform for 12 hours for “misleading statements.” Not long afterwards, in an August interview on the right-wing “Real America’s Voice,” as reported in Rolling Stone on August 13, Greene went full-on wackadoo. She predicted that “Once the vaccines are approved by the FDA, we’re going to see the mandates for vaccines ramp up far more than they are right now,” and, “I fear they’ll become law in some cities and some states. Biden would love to make it the law of the land.” Not content with this paranoid idiocy, she went on to claim that if hospital waiting rooms were full, it was not because of Covid but also because the waiting rooms are full of all kinds of other things like “car accidents” and “cancer,” as if somehow the government had an interest in hyping up fear of this harmless virus (over 600,00 deaths in the U.S. alone). And anyway, she ended, “we all have to die sometime.” Ah such wisdom.  

One could go on citing Greene’s moron-isms—In May, she claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to maintain the mask mandate on the House floor was “exactly the type of abuse” that Nazis inflicted on Jews; exactly, saith the prophet. And she later compared the President’s campaign to encourage all Americans to get vaccinated to “brownshirts.” Our Mrs. Pruneface seems to have a liking for Hitlerian imagery. Her attack on Nancy Pelosi started much earlier, as well, when she ‘liked’ a Facebook post that suggested taking out Pelosi with a “bullet to her head.” And finally (the mind wearies of this madness), in arguing against what she called “the Anti-Police bill” she tweeted in January that “The FBI won’t be able to tweet pics like this or of teenagers they are pursuing, who walked through the Capitol on 1/6.” Oh, so that’s all it was: the January 6 invasion was really just a bunch of teenagers walking through the Capitol. On a school tour, no doubt. 

Does anyone actually take such ridiculous statements seriously? Are there real people who actually vote for such a moron? Apparently, in Georgia, there are. Again, the mind reels. 

I will end this tour with that great Representative from Colorado, Lauren Boebert, she of the gun-lovers lobby (who has tried several times to enter Congress with her pistol; pistol-packin’ mama indeed.) In  that regard, Newsweek on August 15 reported that Boebert, on Twitter, had written—just hours before a shooting in Orange County, CA that resulted in four people dead, including a child—that Gun control was ‘anti-woman.’ She wrote, among other things: “The only way I'm safe to walk around any dangerous liberal city is with an equalizer. Gun control is anti-woman.” Oh, those gun-toting, woman-hating liberals! And Boebert, who mouths off every chance she gets, started supporting gun-toters even before she formally entered Congress this year. The Congresswoman-elect actually led a tour of the Congress Building (she said it was to show her family where she worked), which some believe was a reconnaissance tour in preparation for the Jan. 6 invasion. The tour actually happened (as videotape proves) on December 12, 2020, in conjunction with a “Stop the Steal” rally in DC which Boebert attended. She is also seen with her mother in another video taken the morning of Jan. 6, beforethe invasion. According to Zachary Petrizzo of salon.com, January 6 organizer Ali Alexander can be “seen directly behind Boebert in the clip.” Moreover, at about 8:30 a.m. on that fateful day, Boebert went on Twitter to announce: “Today is 1776.” Did she actually think, and does she still think, that the January 6 invasion was some sort of Independence Day? i.e. the day to re-impose on America, by force of the arms she so loves, its rightful president, Donald Trump? And I keep having to ask: where do these people come from? And who in their right mind votes for them? 

The un-funny fact is that these sample cases (which by no means exhausts a very large list) indicate something very serious going on, something as serious as death. Which brings me to just one more example. CNN reported on August 13, that the very week before school opens, three educators “have died within about 24 hours of each other from Covid-19 complications.” Not surprisingly, all three were unvaccinated. All three were teachers in elementary schools, where large numbers of parents and teachers are still unvaccinated. This in a district where the school board, trying to prevent exactly this (to no avail it seems), had voted to maintain its mask mandate, approved last month. School board chair Rosalind Osgood said, about the Board’s reasons for defying Gov. DeSantis’ executive order banning such mandates, that “the eight of us on our board are adamant that we cannot have people in school without masks, because we are living a backlash of people dying of Covid.” She added, “We strongly feel  that the lives of our students and staff are invaluable, and we’re not willing to play Russian roulette with their lives.” 

That a governor could see this stance as violating some bizarre concept of freedom is laughable, on one level, but ultimately deadly serious. Because this is actually about elected officials in this nation playing “Russian roulette” with the lives of children. As Greta Thunberg is fond of asking, “How dare they?”

 

Lawrence DiStasi 

Vaccines and Resistance

Like many others, I have been fascinated, and often horrified, by the resistance of large percentages of Americans to being vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus. Though this resistance seems to be most widespread in rural areas—especially in the South and Midwest, so-called ‘Trump country’ dominated by white, rural conservatives and Fundamentalist Christians—it is by no means limited to those areas. I have family members living in Vermont and Colorado who have so far refused to get the vaccine. There are pockets of resistance in urban areas as well, especially in minority communities. As for me, I am in the high-risk age group, and was vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine as soon as I could get it in late January. The decision seemed elementary to me, and even to most people I know, including my children. After all, this virus is deadly, especially to older people, but it has also begun to infect and kill younger Americans, including some children, once thought to be essentially immune. Now, with the spread of the very dangerous and highly transmissible Delta variant, the danger is even greater for the pandemic to become a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” So why would anyone fortunate enough to live in America, where the vaccine is readily available, refuse this protection?

My sense is that too many people have no idea what the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines consist of, and so are wary of getting infected from the very medication meant to protect them. That is, they think that the mRNA vaccines used against Covid-19 employ the same technology as the original vaccine developed in the nineteenth century to immunize people against smallpox, or later against polio. That is, those vaccines normally inserted a weakened or inactivated disease germ into our bodies to stimulate the immune system, which then created antibodies to fight off the invader. Effective, yes, but for some people, the idea of actually injecting the germ into their bodies conjured up terrifying images and fears of getting diseased by the very injection meant to protect them. 

However, a quick research hunt on the web would reveal that mRNA vaccines do NOT use this method—that’s why they are considered much safer. That is, the mRNA vaccines actually “teach” our cells to make a protein (teaching cells to make proteins is the basic function of mRNA, where the “m” stands for messenger) that mimics the so-called ‘spike’ on the surface of the Covid-19 virus. That harmless protein, or piece of protein, then triggers your immune system (which recognizes that the protein is an invader that does not belong) to create specific antibodies to fight the virus. And those antibodies protect you from getting the virus if it later enters your body. Importantly, after the protein piece is made, the cells break down the instructions and discard the spike protein. 

The vaccinated body, its cells, in this way are taught how to make antibodies to fight off future infections from Covid-19. And these vaccines have been proven to be very effective—not 100% to be sure, but close—against the virus, especially against the dire outcomes and deaths typical of Covid-19, and its new variants as well. And again, the great advantage of mRNA vaccines is that no potentially harmful germs need be injected into the body. This last advantage should be of critical importance to those who oppose vaccinations in general. This is because one key and historical objection to vaccines is that, by using a deactivated portion of the actual germ, there is a perceived risk of mistakenly infecting the vaccinated body, rather than protecting it. This is simply not an issue with mRNA vaccines. Nor is the objection about mixing animal and human bodily ‘fluids,’ that once formed the basis of objections to the smallpox vaccine (which was made from deactivated cowpox from cattle.)

So then, why, in the United States, are we nowhere close to ending this pandemic (though whether pandemics are ever truly over, is another question; apparently, the 1918 flu continued to infect people for years after it disappeared from most people’s consciousness)? And even less so the effects of so-called “long covid,” or “post-acute sequelae of COVID-19,”—a condition that most often affects younger people, and can  involve long term damage to the heart (increased chance of heart failure), the lungs (breathing difficulties), the brain (strokes etc.), and usually involves persistent symptoms or new symptoms that develop, generally speaking, at least four to eight weeks after the initial infection with COVID-19.  The truth is that, even in the face of such critical outcomes, vast numbers of people resist vaccination. So, with large pockets of resistance to the vaccine, achieving ‘herd immunity’ with 75 or 80 percent of Americans vaccinated, will be extremely difficult since, at this point, we are perhaps at 60 percent, and worse, large areas of the nation have concluded that the crisis is over, and they can get back to “normal.” Hence crowds of people are again gathering in crowded bars, restaurants, and other enclosed areas. But the crisis, driven anew by the Delta variant, seems to be revving up for another round, another huge surge—especially in states like Missouri and Florida where resistance to any measures, especially vaccines, to stop the spread is very high. So the question becomes, what is the basis of that vaccine resistance? 

A look at why people have been resisting shots is both hilarious, and deeply disturbing about what Americans of all sorts will believe. Much of the vaccine resistance seems to come from posts on Internet sites like Facebook and Twitter and TikTok, or right-wing media outlets like Fox News, Newsmax and others. This is not to say that reasonable concerns about the gross profit motives of pharmaceutical companies aren’t at issue; nor concerns about the rush to certify vaccines without time to properly test outcomes. But more resistance, it seems, derives from lunatic beliefs and social pressures. An article from the July 31 Washington Post, for example, notes that in Arkansas, Governor Asa Hutchinson “has traveled the state to combat the widespread idea that the shots are a “bioweapon.” A bioweapon! Even more specifically, 12-year old Shanuana Alcantar of Los Angeles, when interviewed, said her hesitancy about the vaccine had to do with reports she saw online that “it would make her arm magnetic: ‘I was really scared seeing all of those TikToks of the metal spoons and the magnets hanging from people’s arms, she said.’ Good grief! If this kind of nonsense weren’t so dangerous, it would be the stuff of laugh-out-loud comedy. Then there’s 25-year-old Chelsah Skaggs of Arkansas, who said she feared reports that the vaccine would make her infertile. And 18-year-old Tyler Sprenkle, who worried, once he got the vaccine, that his friends “would look down on me, say I was turning into a liberal or a raging Democrat” (this illustrates the widespread community-approval type of resistance.) Not to be outdone, 57-year-old welder Tim Boover, hesitated for months both about Facebook posts claiming that the vaccines had “bad side effects,” and also reports that “vaccines contained microchips that could be used to track people.”  Vaccines with microchips? I suppose all these might be considered within the realm of possibility, but really? People actually believe this nonsense?

The good news, however, is that all of these people eventually decided to get the vaccine. The above-mentioned Chelsah Skaggs finally decided to do her own research, and concluded that though “skepticism is a good thing…to be ignorant is a different issue.”  Well, thank god. For Boover, it was the Delta variant, which killed his childhood friend, that has scared him, like many others, into getting the shot’s protection. In Boover’s case, too, designing and forging the urn for his friend’s ashes, helped turn the tide for him: “This morning, I had to seal her in a box, weld that shut over her ashes,” he said. “It was rough. Then I made my mind up: I’m gonna get that shot.” 

That fear-driven action pattern seems to be a major hope now. Vaccine resisters, who have been virtually impervious to reason or evidence or appeals from government officials, or public health and contagious-disease experts, are now responding to death—the possible death of their parents or grandparents, or even themselves. Accordingly, the same July 31 Washington Post report noted that “More than 856,000 doses were administered Friday, the highest daily figure since July 3” and that “This was the third week that states with the highest numbers of coronavirus cases also had the highest vaccination numbers.” 

Though we would prefer it if people came to see that getting vaccinated actually helps everyone (because without “herd immunity,” the virus simply keeps finding new bodies to infect, and hence the numbers to evolve new variants, meaning no one is safe until everyone is), death will do. When all else fails, that is, good old Dr. Death can and does do the trick. And though it is terrifying to reflect that this—people dying in large numbers—is the only way to convince skeptics that they may be wrong, it at least comforts us to know that something can cut through the long trail of bullshit that has prevailed in right-wing enclaves up till now. Perhaps it will even succeed in saving a few lives, and, ultimately, the lives of us all. 

Lawrence DiStasi