The dunce cult and its collapsing empire
A quiz: What is structurally wrong with the following sentence…? “Hospitals routinely falsify the number of Covid-19 deaths in order to get reimbursed more money by the government.”
A moment to think, and the answer below.
Answer: Did you get it? It’s right at the very beginning.
Hospitals cannot falsify deaths or fill out any reports at all. They’re inanimate objects, often made of brick or steel. They can’t sign a name, make a diagnosis on a virus infection, or fly a kite.
Doctors are the ones that would hypothetically falsify a death in order to get reimbursements from the national Medicare program. And
why is this distinction important in light of this recent phony scandal (among so many others) being thrown around by right-wing media? Because this new leap implies that a
doctor would actually be the one to incur huge fines for falsifying records to Medicare-- and doing so in motive to have more money paid out-- to his or her
employer. How many co-workers at your job risk major penalties to get more money that doesn’t go to them?
Hospitals do get paid more money for Covid-19 cases. They also get more for conditions such as diabetes, low sodium, and high blood pressure. Have they previously been lying about those conditions also? And the money they get for Covid patients is for medical notes, not death records (also illegal to falsify), so this would seem to be another bogus element of this claim. Public confusion seems to be the goal-- a game of Whack-a-mole with easily-disprovable claims but disconcerting enough if you simply keep them coming, feeding into preexisting biases and fears.
The U.S. holds 4.25% of the world’s population but 30% of the deaths from this pandemic, which was not thought to have even originated in this hemisphere. It’s been a public failure of historic proportion, a national embarrassment. No other nation is loosening lock-downs and social-distancing measures while deaths are still increasing. Not only has the science been lost to us, the battle with reasoning has been lost. The president makes statements that suggest he has no functioning brain matter whatsoever, such as the following about a positive diagnosis within his White House inner circle, “She tested very good for a long period of time. And then all of a sudden today she tested positive. So, she tested positive out of the blue… This is why the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily, right, the tests are perfect but something can happen between a test where it’s good and then something happens and then all of a sudden-- she was tested very recently and tested negative.”
That’s a mystery all right. Meanwhile, he boasts about taking a drug that his own Food and Drug Administration says could kill him, one that supposedly our health care-for-massive-profit industry is keeping hidden from desperate, dying patients.
The economy isn’t preparing to rebound. The market is principally-based on confidence and that isn’t likely to pick up when you have poor leadership and bad decisions. This crisis is a massive public health failure that
is tied into our economy, but not in the way people think. It was
caused by our hyper-capitalist economy. The Church of Reagan led Trump to defund the program designed to combat global pandemics. The surviving system is not built to survive even modest challenges. This breakdown is about the market failure of supply shortages, the crony capitalism of the severely unqualified Trumps and Kushners and DeVoses at the highest levels of government, emergency bailouts for billionaires within mere days of the longest Bull Market in history coming to an end. It’s about sentient animals being tortured and exterminated and then not even prepared for the table while simultaneously panicked Americans are hoarding frozen cuts of meat captured from the stores. It’s about corporate health care falling flat on its fat ass-- unable to provide the most basic services it promises, forcing millions of both symptomatic and asymptomatic people to avoid hospitals and clinics like the proverbial-- and literal-- plague because they wouldn’t be able to foot the bill if they ventured to go-- and even as the hospitals and their "health systems" post record profits.
Our local paper ran a story this week talking to likely presidential voters, and one nitwit remarked that she was voting for President Trump because, her words, “He’s a businessman, not a politician. And this country is a business.” Now, I’m not normally one that looks to the divine for signals, but what more do you need than this coronavirus to prove to you, at last, that the United States is
not a business? And should not be operated as if it is one? And that its leaders should not be there upon the resume of "businessman"? Are you waiting for writing on stone tablets? He’s the head of a dunce cult.
South Korea had its first reported case of the virus on the exact same day the U.S. did. They have had fewer than 300 deaths from the virus since. The U.S. total climbed above 100,000 this week. Shelter-at-home policies were put in place too late, if they ever were at all-- then lifted prematurely. The attempts at information manipulation are stark. Blame China-- blame the World Health Organization-- blame previous presidential administrations. We were told that our leaders acted quickly-- but they
still haven’t acted. The message for each new day has been whatever sounds good that day, whether it be contradictory from the previous, denials, misinformation, crazy cures. It’s created a mental fatigue that’s being collectively shared by much of the nation, and it’s willful. It’s trivializing the deaths, creating a callous outlook that simultaneously says the virus is threatening enough that we must shut down our borders and upset our electoral process, but that we can somehow have college football games played in front of half-full or completely full stadia in the fall even while the students on these same campuses study from home. We've gone numb. One death is a tragedy, the saying goes, a million deaths are a statistic.
Our president has met his match. It doesn’t seem that Joe Biden is much up to a fight. But Covid-19 has Trump wobbling on the ropes. He can’t insult it or intimidate it. He can’t bend it to his reality. The more you test for it, the more of it you find. The data is a plot against him. We already had administration admissions of their “alternative facts.” That was years ago. Now when he’s confronted with his enemy-- reality, we get lines like, “You know, when you say ‘per capita’ there’s many per capitas.”
The empire’s collapse is easy for all to see. It didn’t start in 2016 for sure, but there’s been a massive acceleration. It’s all crystallized in this current challenge. First we ignored the science, skipped the warning signs because they were bad for the bottom line and because we’re skeptical of pointy-headed “experts.” Then our me-first instincts kicked in-- stockpiling kitchen and bath supplies that sometimes weren’t even applicable to the crisis-- perhaps just to exploit others, if worse came to worst. Trillion dollar companies and their government simply shrugged at the exploitation of their merchandise. We broke down into 50 different jurisdictions so that we could have 50 different responses, and virtually all the warnings could be ignored in any case.
Racism is prevalent in this too. You can mark the White House’s turnaround on keeping the country “closed” to almost the precise day that the stats started to reveal that the black and brown citizens of the nation were a disproportionately-outsized number of the casualties. The elderly-- the weak-- were sacrificed as well, in exchange for an extended summer vacation for the kids. In mid-March, the coronva-virus became, according to the White House, the
China-virus, and over 1,100 anti-Asian and anti-Chinese attacks followed in the next month. A one-time stimulus package was agreed to, but it wasn’t in the form of health care as a human right or rent or mortgage protection, it was a $1200/per person one-time gift to each one of us (barring the undocumented or their spouses) with the president’s signature—and a letter—that, in most cases, instantly became a giveaway to mortgage companies and landlords. The jailed are ignored completely. So are the homeless. We get apple slices and the billionaires get the orchard.
This is where we are because this is who we are. Two parties, both paralyzed, divided by the insipid narratives of our complicit media. “The best” of anything is just “the best available option.” We’re gun-toting idiots standing on the steps of statehouses where, inside, the lawmakers do nothing at all about the problem of white supremacist cops. Tyranny now is being told you need to wear a mask over your nose and mouth when you go into someone’s store, and freedom is having my opinion on public health being worth just as much as that of somebody that has actually studied it. It’s only selfishness. What’s in it for me? And aren’t we still so exceptional?
My mother's work
My mother, Joyce Werning-Moeller, died in a car accident in 1983, but she left behind much of her academic research, graciously gathered and delivered by colleagues to her family in the weeks following her death. At the time, she was a 30-year-old pursuing a Masters of Arts in sociology at the Graduate College of the University of Iowa. She taught courses in sociology and women’s studies at Kirkwood Community College. Her master's thesis, published by the school in May, 1982, was titled “Determinants of Egalitarian Sex-Role Attitudes in Men.” She was a married mother of 7-year-old twin boys at the time.
It’s both a treasure trove and a time capsule to look through her notes inside this banker's box-- culled from both classes taken and classes taught. Since her work and study were woven into her personal life, it’s a search for personal tidbits for me as much as it is a window into the global movement for women’s equality in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It feels timely to thumb through it all as FX and Hulu air their
Mrs. America mini-series that examines roughly the same period and features characterizations of prominent women of the time-- Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and the early troll of feminism, Phyllis Schlafly. I’ve always recognized my mother to be a second-wave feminist and her papers describe the era that helped make her who she was.
When she left, I was given a bound copy of her thesis. As a kid-- and now too, I liked that she included my name in the acknowledgements, along with my brother and our “light-hearted spirits and ever-smiling faces”-- her words. I’ve been told by her cherished sister that she was trying to raise “two little Alan Aldas.” The manuscript was a dry read though for a teenager, and even now it is. It’s not an online, "click-bait" feature livened with color. It’s academic, naturally. It refers repeatedly to means and standard deviations, and such items as zero-order correlations for socio-demographic, out-of-phase, and enrichment variables. There are charts and detailed descriptions of the methods of her research. It’s a contribution to the world of education. It’s over my head.
Here’s something though. A photo-copied article from Forum magazine, April, 1981-- “Can Women Ejaculate? Yes.” Apparently this was only new scientific understanding in 1981. It seems, this article relates, that we didn’t “rediscover” the clitoris even until the 1950s. There’s a lot here about the Grafenberg Spot… Oh, that’s what the G-spot is.
There are published papers from colleagues included here-- one is upon the topic “The Earnings Attainment of Middle-Aged and Older Women.” There are scissored-out comic strips with feminist and sociology themes-- with tack imprints suggesting they decorated her office. What I’m searching for with these artifacts are hand-written notes, commentary, personal opinion, but where I find it, it tends to be dispassionate. Better are papers that she was grading, where at least she might add an “I agree” or “Yes, yes!” in the margin. A handwriting analysis would be very interesting. It’s incredible to see articles from 1970s periodicals with still-pertinent headlines such as “Invisible Migrant Workers” and “Benign neglect in the U.S.”
There’s a torn-out page from People magazine where an “irreverent California designer” attempts to spruce up the judicial wardrobe of the new-- and first-ever-- female Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O’Connor. A bonus on the flip side of the page is a list of “six formidable fashion fizzles” in celebrity, including Gloria Steinem. The text for Steinem’s outfit: “No one is going to accuse (her) of being a slave to chauvinism-- or to fashion. The 47-year-old feminist leader, who some years ago gave up Estevez gowns for the Cause, seems to have overdone the monochromatic Low Rent style of the seriously political… ‘What a waste,’ chides Eileen Ford, ‘she could be so pretty.”
There’s quite a bit here actually about sexuality, and particularly the one piece I just discovered that not every child will ever possess for his or her mother-- the typed product of a human sexuality assignment entitled “Sexual History” that serves, my mother writes, as her sexual autobiography. It describes her first menstruation, her sexual experiences, and general attitudes. It is what it advertises to be, and one thing notable is there is no lack of physical self-confidence. She was an objectively beautiful woman. I’ll share a passage that I don’t think violates any privacy.
About this time the kids started playing a game which they called ‘teat tag’ which amounted to tagging someone by touching his/her breast. I abhorred the game and usually removed myself from the situation when someone got the idea to start playing it. I personally didn’t get a ‘kick’ out of touching a guy’s breast and it seemed they did enjoy touching a girl’s breast. The whole thing seemed unfair to the girls, like the boys were taking advantage of them. It made me lose respect for both the boys and girls who participated in the silly game. It seemed very childish to me. In retrospect, I think these feelings were the beginning of my feminist orientation. I realized that I could never admire or love anyone who did not treat me with respect and who did not see me as an equal.”
In a passage about sexual fantasies, she alludes to a film about homosexuality that was screened in one of her classes, and she writes these words,
I found myself fascinated with the sensitivity portrayed by the two gay men… I thought it was almost refreshing to see two men expressing such warmth, tenderness and sensitivity to one another. I seemed not to focus on the fact that they were homosexual but rather on the general intimacy that they were expressing-- it just happened to be sexual.
Shockingly forward-thinking for November of 1981, and for someone who confesses to have mostly learned about the sexual act from the animals on the farm and who says she was taught about sex in the home in a way that was “very condescending and judgmental about girls or boys who had bad reputations or who (worse yet!) ‘had to get married.’” It’s a most personal document, to be sure, but probably the best existing one to illustrate what a self-actualized life she was leading. She was a very happy woman. As nearly all of them are in the archives, this was an “A” paper.
Another one submitted for evaluation is on the subject of the personality development of twins, which sparks my immediate interest. She describes the choices she faced personally as our mother as we established our identities-- whether to give us matching names, whether to dress Aaron and me alike, and how to give us separate experiences and time apart. What would be the impact of the extra “twin attention,” she questions provocatively? She provides an anecdote about the time, when we were a year old, when our rivalry manifested as an argument as to which one of us actually belonged to our mother, and which one should go find his
own mother. She describes the double work load for her and our father, as well as our idioglossia, or “twin speech,” which included mimicking each other even of incorrect word usage and pronunciation. More:
My own experience supports the notion that differences and similarities are constantly being reported to the twins and their families by "interested" spectators of the twin phenomenon. We rarely go out in public when someone does not remark about the similarity of difference of our boys. Comments such as, "I believe one is a little taller," and "One has a little longer face," are typical examples. Questions like "Is one more aggressive?" or "How do you tell them apart?" seem to me to have an even greater potentially negative effect because they suggest that we, as parents, attempt to label our children publicly as the "quiet one" or the "aggressive one." This type of labeling could easily lead to a type of self-fulfilling prophecy in which they live up to our expectations and perceptions of them.”
For the record, the names they chose for us were not at all similar, as you have surely pieced together for yourself, and for which I’m grateful. And just for the academic record, I should point out that Mom cites the simple “observation technique” as one that has created quite varying conclusions in twin study, and she says there has been too little cross-questioning, retesting, and too few large samples to deliver reliability. I’m the one that’s landing so hard on her
anecdotal experience as a parent of twins. Twin research was lacking at that time, and the birth of multiples was much less common than it is today. In a separate paper dedicated specifically to the subject of the verbal development of her then-two-year-old twins, in the instructor’s summary evaluation she has written to Joyce, “This has been one of the most interesting entries I’ve ever read.”
My memory of my mother’s career at that time is pretty limited. Sometimes I feel as if I’m only remembering
the act of remembering. But I would say that I have as much memory of her working and studying as I do anything else about her. We were a constant part of it. I recall visiting her office and meeting her colleagues, exploring freely the university’s natural history museum nearby (where my brother later interned when he attended the school as an undergrad). I remember participating those times in her long and difficult commute from the farm to the university. What is now almost all four-lane highway was entirely a two-lane excursion then. And of course I remember her working long hours at home on the typewriter at the dining room table. She would swear at times when she had to reach for the Wite-Out bottle-- that comic scene stays with me, and once she came into the den and turned off the television when Daisy Duke was in a swimsuit competition on
The Dukes of Hazzard. She didn’t just turn it off though. She bothered to explain why she was doing it-- Daisy’s beauty was defined instead by her accomplishments.
Since that terrible night when her life ended and ours were all flipped upside down, there are a million world events about which I would love to hear her opinion. The issue of women’s health has evolved. Women’s self-empowerment has evolved. Many of the old charades have disappeared and for the better. The Miss America pageant ditched bathing suit competitions the likes of Daisy’s just two years ago, and the overwhelming majority of Americans supported the move. Yet it’s hard to imagine beauty pageants still existing at all in a world where men and women truly wish to be valued equally. Maybe some of the old charades are actually still here and have also evolved. Harassment and violence against women are topics at last cast into the limelight, and yet they’re still here. So is unequal pay. Everything has changed, and nothing much has. Mom would have turned 68 years old today.
The majority will
The pandemic has revealed the fact that socialism is the only system of government that can prevent the U.S. from becoming a failed state. A coordinated national response is required, but we've been left instead with governance mired in sectional conflict and a chaotic and mismanaged supply chain of basic goods and services. The Banana Republic, like so many we've propped up around the world in the past with tinpot dictators and business-friendly goons, has come home.
As the corporations crank up their level of looting in Washington D.C., the global capital of neoliberalism, it’s unconscionable to consider that health care could still not be considered a human right within this treacherous climate, but it's not. It’s been revealed for any idiot to see that nurses and bus drivers and factory and farm workers and shelf-stockers and all the members of the subordinate class are truly the essential ones and the billionaires are nothing more than thieving freeloaders. The ones we were told would save us, such as Elon Musk, have been revealed to be frightened and petulant frauds.
Every action that’s been taken by either Trump or Pelosi has been a reactive measure couched in their subconscious understanding that the free market has no actual solutions to offer and the only system that does is the one they have both very publicly rejected, and only a few short weeks ago. For Democrats this electoral cycle, it was never really a choice between the “radical left” and the “rational center." It was never fairy-tales up against the sensible and pragmatic. It was about courage of conviction versus self-doubt and self-hatred.
On Super Tuesday and during the strategic weekend prior, self-identified Democrats lashed out in concert against the ideology of socialism. Joe Biden’s nickname should not be "Sleepy Joe," but rather “TP,” since he was the biggest panic buy in American electoral history. The voters swallowed the line they've been relentlessly fed that the larger whole of America-- those others less enlightened than themselves-- would reject the concept of Medicare for All. But a majority of Americans favor Medicare for All-- 55% of
all voters as of March, according to Morning Consult/Politico. It’s the class-blind establishment of the Democratic Party and those that financially benefit from the absence of Medicare for All that oppose it.
We knew that the Washington duopoly of power was more conservative than the coalition being pulled together by Bernie Sanders since 2015. What we have failed to acknowledge, to our most damaging detriment, is that it’s also more conservative than the average American, who, according to countless polls, favor one socialist policy after another, whether it’s Medicare for every person, or higher taxes on the wealthy, or an increase in the minimum wage, or business restrictions to protect the climate. The largest plurality in the electorate is independents, and they’ve supported these ideas and simultaneously rejected both the “Democrat” and “Republican” brands.
Primary-goers in the state of Mississippi are a good example. We’re told it’s a conservative state, even on the Democratic side. Bernie Sanders lost to Biden there in March by 65 percentage points. Yet over half of those voters on Super Tuesday say they support Medicare for All. Sanders had high favorability ratings too, but they voted against him because they were told to. Beating Trump is paramount to most “left-wing” voters in 2020 and they were told by virtually everyone that, despite head-to-head polling, Trump would have an easier time defeating Sanders than Biden.
They’ve been falsely led to believe by pundits and political insiders that, as Democrats, they are to the left of the average American. Many will tell you to your face that this is a “fundamentally conservative country.”
If I don't prefer Bernie, they ask,
why would a non-Democrat choose him? They’re correct that the news media's
image of the United States is that of being fundamentally conservative. It’s easy to get the message drummed home each day on cable news that, despite the shouting and their manufactured-conflict, an entry ticket to “centrism” in the U.S. is given to those that bow down to corporate power.
But what about these others issues-- ones that Sanders championed and that resonated with voters, particularly those voters that don't normally participate, and that hold majority support not just among “liberals” but among
all Americans? When someone on Comcast Corps' MSNBC or at Jeff Bezos' Washington Post tells you that Bernie failed to extend his appeal “beyond the left,” they’re neglecting to tell you that the largely-disengaged plurality of the country is not ideological at all. They put themselves nowhere at all along the political spectrum.
It should come as no surprise that a party that has spent 40 years ignoring the existence of “class” in the country would be wholly incapable of framing issues that way. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden
promote their belief that we have to cut entitlement programs. You’re painted as a radical if you attempt to argue that we shouldn’t do it. For those tens of millions that don’t follow politics as sport, this obscures the difference, if there actually is any, between the two parties.
You rarely, if ever, see a television commentator friendly to Democrats on the air acknowledging wealth or income difference in their polling, in their reporting, or in their commentary. Their professional goal and that of their bosses is to reinforce the beliefs of their existing audience, not to challenge them. It would likely shake a loyal Democrat to his or her core to know how badly the party really does at the ballot among the most economically-disadvantaged populations of the country.
Rarer still is to acknowledge how few of these people are bothering to vote at all since they see no personal benefit to trying to parse the difference between two corporate parties, other than upon the targeted social issues we're given to play with that purposely divide us. The Democrats’ solution to their quandary-- rather than firming up their bona-fides by actually protecting the poor and the working class-- is to blame the voters and accuse them of being misinformed.
Biden won big over Sanders in Michigan, but still lost to him by 9 percentage points among voters with a total family income under $50,000. Now that the unemployment rate is shooting up at historic speeds since that vote, it doesn't bode well for November in a must-win rust-belt state that Hillary Clinton already failed to deliver.
How many low-income voters-- the ones that aren’t registered to vote as Democrats and therefore eligible to participate in the party primary-- are they ignoring? Okay, blame them for their lack of civic engagement. And also say hello to another four years of President Trump. Slap on your “I voted” sticker, shame them for not getting similarly involved, and say hello to another four years of White House Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller.
Democrats have protected their Washington leadership, insulated them from uprising, by convincing voters over a generation that a candidate with a platform of structural political change can’t win in the general election. Yet Trump just did it in 2016. And before that, they said that Obama couldn’t win, but he did, and then he did again. When given the choice, that's actually the
only thing that wins.
The charges of elitism thrown at Democrats from Republicans and the Right are politically-based, disingenuous, and hypocritical, but they're not incorrect. It's the simple arrogance of demanding solidarity after you’ve rigged the game, the hard-core belief that your ideology is the only one grounded in both warm compassion and cold logic, and this idea that if you deign to hand over your vote to them every other November that you're a dupe. How dare you. Discouraging divisiveness is telling the marginalized to shut up. Sanders would have done
better in the general election than he did in the Democratic primaries. In a general election, voters are younger, less affluent, and have no reason to act like pundits.
Despite their claims to the contrary, protecting the status quo is an agenda, and it's not a noble one in this time and place. Media and party people alike have to convince you they're without one so that you continue to see life necessities as unreachable dreams. How else are they going to square 55% national support for Medicare for All with the fact that pharmaceutical companies pump $4.5 billion a year into advertising? How else can they downplay the threat of climate change, which polls show Americans of almost every stripe are very concerned about, when the fossil fuel industry is funding tonight's edition of
The Situation Room?
Democrats have been loyal to focus-group tested policies for decades. They're allergic to anything remotely "revolutionary," and they have paid the price for it dearly. It must still blow their collective mind that Bernie Sanders would attempt the type of presidential campaigns he has. And when the pandemic first started hitting the front page, they stocked up on their toilet paper candidate, having no foresight at all to see that the coming crisis would only make the need for socialized medicine more pronounced, not less. They made a bet that has no assurance at all of paying off this November. As people continue to die from lack of care or go destitute from the debt of their illness, future voters-- not just the ones in 2020-- will remember this fear-based mistake and it will cause even greater damage to their diminishing credibility. And they'll have had the polls in their favor the entire time.
