The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along

Would You Buy a Used Car from Mr. Sincerity?

Mr. Sincerity

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!" Donald Trump never tweeted this. I think his familiarity with Shakespeare rivals his familiarity with the Bible.  

But the sentiment is clearly there. He's trying to foment a civil war between - who? A lot of his followers think it should be a race war. And of course his Aryan supermen will crush the blacks, and I suppose the browns, and the yellows and the reds. And of course the white race-traitors - the ones that people like Trump used to call commie faggots, back in the 1950s.

Unfortunately for Trump, as he tries mightily to blow hot air into this balloon, the dogs of war are already loose, and have been for a while. Of course, I'm talking about the war between the coronavirus and humanity.

By the way, the coronavirus is winning. In case you hadn't noticed. 

Trump is frantically waving a bloody shirt that has remarkably little blood on it, and much of that has been spilled by his people - fascist cops and boogaloo anarchists.

We'll probably never know for sure, but it seems that a great deal of the property damage may also have been at the hands of such as the boogaloos. Trump's people. We used to call them agents provocateurs.

Anyway, the coronavirus trundles on: 180,000+ dead, 6 million+ infected. Actually, the number of infected is almost certainly much higher. And an economic catastrophe where the numbers - eye-popping as they are - simply don't tell the story. Despair does not have a number.

The coronavirus will not kill us all. But it has the capacity to destroy American society as we have known it. It's already made a good start.

The people know this. Even the people who will vote for Trump know this. A lot of them have been staring at the death of the American Dream for a long time.

I think, at this point, there's a touch of the Stockholm syndrome about the Trumpies. They may have started as avid soldiers in a race war, but now I'm getting a whiff of desperate hostages who wouldn't know what to do without their captor.

And they may pull us all down with them as they fight a magical war and refuse to face the real war. 

If Trump says grandma has to die, then grandma has to die.

And, at this point, it's baked in.  A lot of grandmas have already died, and many more certainly will. Along with a bunch of children and - gasp - healthy young adults. And many of them will be Trumpies.

How do we get out if this nightmare?

See also Quagmire, The Problem with Dystopia.