We are now entering our third year of the COVID pandemic and just in case that isn’t depressing enough, the people in charge of wiping out the virus are instead tapping out and starting to admit it’s probably an “endemic” which might sound OK because it’s got the word “end” right there at the beginning, but is totally misleading because “endemic” actually means it’s a virus we’ll never wipe out and always have with us despite the fact that we have a cure.
A cure far too many people are refusing to take.
To put it in sports terms because we obviously care way more about football than we do about stopping a virus that has killed nearly 5.6 million people worldwide and 857,781 Americans here at home:
It’s like we’re losing by three points and the other team fumbles inside their own 20 and one of our defensive linemen who has clearly been hit in the head far too often or at the very least spent way too much time looking at social media, has picked up the ball with nobody between him and the end zone, but refuses to run it in for a game-winning touchdown.
If that happened at a football game fans would lose their goddamn minds, but since it’s only a deadly pandemic (which is clearly less important than sports) about 36.6% of the fans would stand up for the defensive lineman’s right to not do anything and fuck up the game for all his teammates.
Here in Kansas City local health officials have recently announced an end to “contact tracing” (which means finding out who a sick person has been in contact with and asking those people to isolate themselves before they get even more people sick) and they’ve ended the program because they’re overwhelmed and too many people are refusing to cooperate even though our hospitals are swamped.
Google “what dumb things do Americans believe” and you might stumble across an article from The Roanoke Times that says:
45% of Americans think vaccines are not safe.
20 % of Americans believe climate change is not real.
14% of Americans believe dinosaurs and people lived at the same time.
7% of Americans believe the moon landing was fake.
6% of Americans believe crystals have healing power.
2% of Americans believe the Earth is flat.
And – saving the best and/or worst for last – 7% of adult Americans believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows.
Arrowhead Stadium holds 76,416 people so if I did the math right (and it wouldn’t surprise me if I didn’t) that means when the Chiefs beat the Steelers on Sunday night there were approximately 5,349 people attending the game who think Hershey has a herd of brown cows producing chocolate milk and they better keep the Brown Cow Herd fences repaired because 1,528 Chiefs fans are afraid those cows could fall off the edge of the Earth.
And those are the people our gutless politicians are sucking up to.
But wait, there’s more:
According to a survey sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center:
Only 26% of Americans could name all three branches of government.
33% could not think of one branch of government.
And 37% could not think of a single right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.
So it’s pretty much par for a very stupid course when one third of Americans and two-thirds of Republicans believe Joe Biden is president due to voter fraud.
Pardon me if I’m a little pissed off right now because I’m currently on my ninth day of COVID isolation (just tested positive again this morning) because a bunch of people who think chocolate milk comes from brown cows also think it’s their right to walk around getting other people sick.
As they say in Australia (where I would be right now if the unvaccinated weren’t keeping this pandemic going and making a trip there impossible) Jesus Christ on a bicycle.
Back when I first became a comparatively naïve political cartoonist in Sacramento, California who still believed professional wrestling was real and the Monkees played their own instruments, I had a conversation with a longtime political reporter and he pretty much agreed with whoever said people come in two categories:
Cynical or…
Under-informed
After covering state politics for years and years, in his opinion, about a third of the state legislators were OK, about a third were complete idiots and the final third were indistinguishable from the Prince and/or Princess of Fucking Darkness. As he explained it, these POD legislators would avoid an initial vote on pretty much any legislation and if the vote was lopsided then their vote didn’t matter, but if the vote was close, now they had something to sell.
So with that bit of insight under your belt, ask yourself how often you heard about Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema before the Senate was divided evenly.
According to The Guardian (which the internet describes as a “centre-left” British newspaper and raises questions about the British spelling of “centre” and conclusively confirms that we were right to start our own country or we’d still be watching television “programmes”) Sinema got a contribution from Stanley Hubbard – a billionaire Republican donor – for opposing the size of Joe Biden’s Build Back Better legislation.
Manchin (a theoretical Democrat) has opposed paid family leave and a clean energy program that would phase out coal (although maybe that last one is because he’s from West Virginia whose main export is a nagging cough) and Sinema has opposed an increase of personal and corporate income tax rates and according to the spelling-disabled people at The Guardian, Wall Street and wealthy conservatives really appreciate them stabbing their fellow Democrats in the back.
According The New York Times, Manchin’s campaign raised $3.3 million in the first nine months of 2021 (14 times the amount he raised at the same stage in 2020) and Sinema raised $2.6 million (two-and-a-half times what she raised over the same period in 2020). So being a pain in the Democrats’ collective ass seems to be working out OK for them.
If you want to read more about what these two lowlifes are up to, here’s the link to that Guardian article:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/nov/28/joe-manchin-kyrsten-sinema-build-back-better-plan
OK, that’s it for today so I’m wrapping things up because it’s time to ingest more Vitamin C which I’m mainly doing by drinking huge quantities of orange juice which raises the obvious question:
Where can I find an orange cow?
Our American endemic
I wanted to point out that vaccines are preventive treatments, not cures. Everyone needs to get a vaccine to prevent your body from becoming infected with the virus or at least minimize the effects of the disease. Once enough people are vaccinated the spread ends or slows way, way down. That's how the virus can stop creating variants and be eliminated. Anti-vaxxers have made sure that will never happen and many people will die needlessly and we will be on an endless loop of boosters.