Trump surprised me the other day. Was it yesterday? Last month? No one can really keep a time-line anymore. Probably doesn’t matter since everything changes every day and nothing that happens seems connected to any of the other things that happened.
Anyway, he surprised me by announcing that he was going to allow the sun to make its own decisions about whether to rise and set each day, while providing guidance and support from his office. He added that he strongly encouraged more daylight, though – good for the economy. He said that his administration had been very tough on the sun and had set a fantastic record, with the sun rising and setting on an unbelievably great 35 days in February, resulting in higher ratings for the sun than it had under the Obama administration.
Wait. Just kidding. That wasn’t it.
What did happen was that Tweety announced that he would give the governors permission to decide on their own whether and when to “re-open” their states. This surprised me because I knew he wanted everything to go back to the way it was as soon as possible and to declare victory over Covid-19, and maybe have a parade of tanks or something down Pennsylvania Ave. to celebrate. And I knew he doesn’t like any inference that someone might have some authority that he doesn’t have.
I had been expecting him to make some stupid declaration about how everyone should just stop with the masks already and Make America Great Again. I even jumped the gun on the morning of his speech by writing about how he was actually going to murder people on 5th Ave., like he said he could a couple of years ago.
Instead, it was one of those very few occasions where Trump appeared “presidential”, struck a somber tone, and delivered a message that was appropriate and apparently based on the advice of experts, even though that advice went counter to his own infallible instincts and infantile desires.
So of course he couldn’t just let it be. It wasn’t broken, so he had to fix it. It only took a couple of hours for him to burst. In a perfect tweet-storm, he contradicted his own newly-minted policy, attacked everyone who seemed not to be worshiping him, re-established his hatred of facts and science and reality, and endangered the lives of millions.
To no one’s real surprise, the tweets came just minutes after Fox News aired a segment featuring coverage of a Facebook event called “Liberate Minnesota.” Although only a few hundred people expressed interest in the event on Facebook, local news sites and conservative blogs drove attention to the event Thursday, one day before the president’s tweets.
Of course, by now you’ve all read that these three states were hand-picked for the Tweety-treatment because they all have democratic governors running for re-election, and they all have a small number of understandably desperate but misguided people carrying signs in protest of the whole lock-down thing. Neighboring states with the same problems, demographics, and contagion, but with Republican governors, were spared this treatment.
The above picture is interesting. First, it isn’t much of a “movement” – only a handful of people with signs and a couple of dozen listening. Second, everyone is voluntarily maintaining social distance, despite their objection to the “tyranny”. And last, there seems to be as many people with masks on as not. Bottom line is this really isn’t something that calls for the President of the United States to go nuts over. I suppose it does make for a decent episode of the highly-rated reality show “The POTUS”, which probably is all the explanation anyone needs.
But the recklessness of Trump’s behavior is really unforgivable. Never mind the blatant politicization of the most serious public health crisis we’ve faced since the polio epidemic of the 1950’s. Never mind that Trump is again purposely turning citizen against citizen and neighbor against neighbor for his own perceived benefit. This stupidity is going to unnecessarily cost more lives. Just when we all agreed to stay in to keep the carnage down, this Manbaby-In-Chief tells us it’s not necessary and not to give in to those democrats and their partners in the lame-stream media that want to ruin our country with their socialist agenda.
And then there’s the whole dog-whistle to the extreme right, anti-vaxxers, and the QAnon conspiracy nuts. This NBC News article talks about it:
“We the people should open up America with civil disobedience and lots of BOOGALOO. Who’s with me?” one QAnon conspiracy theorist on Twitter with over 50,000 followers asked.
“Boogaloo” is a term used by extremists to refer to armed insurrection, a shortened version of “Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo,” which was coined on the extremist message board 4chan.
The saner voices among us, e.g. Governor Jay Inslee of Washington have it right, but who’s listening to them that hasn’t already figured it out?
The president’s statements this morning encourage illegal and dangerous acts. He is putting millions of people in danger of contracting COVID-19.
His unhinged rantings and calls for people to “liberate” states could also lead to violence. We’ve seen it before. 1/7
— Governor Jay Inslee (@GovInslee) April 17, 2020
Anyway, the whole thing got me thinking again about why the symbols for the two major political parties are the elephant and the donkey. It’s all ancient history and a bit murky. The donkey comes from Andrew Jackson’s 1828 opponents calling him a jackass, and the elephant goes back to the Civil War era, when Lincoln was a “Republican”. Who cares, right?
We definitely need an update to this iconography. I think the Democrats should adopt the frog as a mascot and the Republicans, now entirely in the death-grip of an unhinged sociopath, should adopt the scorpion.
In the Russian fable of the frog and the scorpion, they both share a common need to cross dangerous waters. The scorpion suggests that the frog let him ride on his back as he swims across. The frog has his doubts, and asks the scorpion for assurances that he won’t sting the frog half-way out. The scorpion points out that if did that, they would both die, so there really isn’t any rational motivation for him to do it.
The frog sees logic in this argument and takes the scorpion on his back. Half way across, the scorpion of course does sting the frog and they both start to drown. The frog screams, “What the Hell? Are you crazy? Now we’re both dead!”. The scorpion says, “What did you expect? I’m a scorpion.”
Get Off My Lawn 