Neu-Hohenschönhausen And take your QAnoning, anti-vaxxing, election-hoaxing, lace curtain country bumpkin bullshit with you out of our state. I hear Texas and Florida are buying.
Recall This
Category Archives: The Contrarian
The Lesson of Afghanistan
Crotone It’s hard to avoid newscaster parallels between our mad scramble to get out of Afghanistan and our mad scramble to get out of Vietnam.
After all, troops are sprinting to helicopters. Residents are clinging to departing aircraft — and dying in the plunge down. A country curses our name for promising safety in the face of tyranny.
But any comparisons of war strategy, troop movement or foreign presence need to stop with the period of this sentence. Because the lesson of Afghanistan is not the lesson of Vietnam (assuming either can be reduced to a singular moral).
Ken Burns’ 10-part series on Vietnam underscored the threat of exporting morality. Namely, the American lifestyle.
Afghanistan is a lesson on importing morality. Namely, religion.
Theists will cry in protest, I know. I think I can hear them now, just under the shrill din of anti-vaxers. Those are Muslims, not Christians, I hear them caterwaul. And what about Hindus and Buddhists, you ignorant slut?
To which I say, good question. But did you have to ask it so rudely? Asshole.
What was I saying? Oh yeah! Lesson.
This is the lesson. Religion poisons everything. Everything.
Those people beating down the doors of Kabul? They are believers, like Christians. Those people enforcing their own mask mandate (in the form of burkas)? They think they know the word of God, like Jews. What we’re seeing are just jersey and coaching changes on Team Abraham.
And as for the Buddhists, the Hindus, and anyone else who believes the universe has your best interest in mind: You are part of the problem. That reasoning is why the the Earth overheats and why beatable diseases linger and grow. The debate is no longer about accountability; it’s about degree of complicity.
We are the lesson of Afghanistan.
COVID-19: The New Smoking
Only in a Trump America would curing a disease widen ts spread.
I call it a Trump America because his presidency, like herpes, was apparently a permanent infection that could return at any time. His slackwittery continues to echo in the halls of Congress and the backwaters of the nation’s collective intellect.
Need proof? Just look at the country’s COVID numbers. Despite a vaccine, conservatives treat the cure like the metric system: ‘Not in my school or home, smartass college boy.”
This is what that thinking looks like.
The reaction to four million dead worldwide (two-thirds to legit genocide!) has given news outlets the vapors. Fox News suggests wrapping yourself in a flag and punching a tree for symptoms of a pandemic. CNN and MSNBC recommend fucking a celebrity.
I propose something simpler: treating COVID for what it has become, America’s new smoking.
Need proof? That, too, is in the numbers. According to the CDC, 480,000 Americans still die from smoking every year. Another 42,000 die annually from second-hand smoke.
Yet, is there an American alive today who does not know that smoking is a deadly behavior? This despite the advent of vaping, which has led to a total of 60 deaths since its creation. It suggests that people are addicted to the ritual of smoking, not the nicotine.
We are choosing to die.
It’s what this country is great at. Suicides outpace homicides every year three-to-one (about 45,000 suicides a year compared to about 15,000 murders). Approximately 100,000 people die annually in drunk driving crashes. One in 10 Americans has adult-onset diabetes.
Welcome to the Actuarial Club, COVID. You join some heavy hitters.
So let’s start treating the pandemic like other American killers: as a matter of choice, a macabre decision exacerbated by political charlatans and medical hucksters who know the cash in conspiracy. Those who roundly reject the vaccine — and the science behind it — are telling us clearly they’d rather live in flavor country.
You got it. You have that right, just as you have the right to smoke in the car with your infant strapped down. And, like your smoking, you’ll have to practice breathing in your own space. Just as we bar smokers from theaters, hospitals and nursery schools, we’ll have to separate the unvaccinated from the vaccinated.
And that couldn’t be easier. It won’t require banning a soul, castigating a fool, or suffering a moron.
Simply treat vaccinations like organ donation. Just as you can indicate that you want to be an organ donor on your driver’s license, we need the option to indicate we’ve taken the vaccine. The government needs to formally recognize vaccinations beyond the record you received that somehow is not wallet sized. Corporate America would welcome and enforce it: Unless you’re a gun shop, lethal stupidity is bad for business.
To placate critics, you’d have an opt-out choice identical to organ donation: do nothing. That’s what you’re doing anyway.
More importantly, there is an opt-in clause, which is really the only option for clarity in a Trump America, where you have the god-given right to be wrong.
So don’t worry, Gov. Ron DeSantis. No one is going to Fauci your Florida.
We have a new medical expert for you. One even Dr. Fauci would admit is more qualified to speak on the pandemic.
Say hello Dr. Charles Darwin.
