China and South Korea have set examples to the world how to see economies open and productive while taking sensible precautions to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. By contrast, U.S. libertarians and President Donald Trump on the right, one world liberal internationalists on the soft left have both cost scores of thousands of lives with their childish ideological fantasies and sheer incompetence.
Oblivious to how the global pandemic has already transformed the zeitgeist, Hegel’s “Spirit of the Age” the Old Right and Old Left across the United States continue to trade their old accusations at each other, oblivious to their own incompetence and to the failure of their own collapsing political system.
What we see across the splintering and far-from-united United States is a fateful blurring and confusion between the powers of the political and legal systems. Repeatedly local courts overrule state laws and federal courts do likewise to federal laws. Usually the Supreme Court with its built-in conservative bias upholds the power of the executive, especially at the federal level. But this process may take weeks or months at a time when even hours are fateful in preventing the spread of the virus.
President Trump acted wisely in U.S. terms when he banned direct flights to and from China to slow down the rate of transmission of the virus. However, he and top U.S. health experts were taken by surprise by the rapidity with which the virus spread. Democratic Party leaders, especially House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her native San Francisco and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio ludicrously boasted of the openness of their own local realms through February to the entire world when they should have been following the examples of Russia, China, South Korea and Israel to shut down access and drastically reduce internal social interactions as much as possible.
Now we find Trump, the Republican national leadership and governors acting with radical foolishness, egged on by the idiot libertarians on the crackpot Right, to open states as rapidly as possible.
All these reckless and witless fools remain deaf and blind to the clear warnings from the great global influenza pandemic a century ago – which incidentally began in Kansas in the heart of the U.S. Midwest. (It was spread through Europe and Russia via U.S. troops ships the Western Front because Woodrow Wilson, most contemptible, arrogant and criminally incompetent of all U.S. presidents put waging World War I above national and even global biological survival.
For the great Flu Pandemic, cynically and falsely called “the Spanish Flu,” did not simply come and go. From 1918 to 1920 there were three global waves of it. And it was the second wave in 1919 that was by far the most deadly.
Today, responsible U.S. medical experts like Surgeon General Jerome Adams and Doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx rightly warn that their country must prepare for a second wave of COVID-19 this fall that could be far worse than this spring’s first wave. All of them of course have been traduced as members of an evil conspiracy to snuff out “Freedom” across the West, as if that was not well under wraps already.
However, one does not have to be Paul Ehrlich or Louis Pasteur to recognize the wisdom of these warnings: The entire history of pandemic disease across recorded history serves adequate notice of the dangers. The real conspiracy is that of the arrogant, fanatic and stupid ignoramuses who swamp the fashionable political platforms with their ludicrous fantasies of computer chips in inoculations.
Even this is not new, a century ago, the Anti Mask League was founded in the Untied States and flourished across the Heartland. Its adherents claimed, loudly and ceaselessly that wearing facemasks was unhygienic and spread the flu rather than contained it. Untold millions of fools believed them. The outcome is, of course history. 600,000 Americans died in a population only one fourth the size of today’s one – a death rate 24 times higher proportionately than what the U.S. has experienced so far..
What I call the Audit of Pandemic is doing far more than expose the inanities and obsolescence of the old conceptions of Left and Right, Liberal and Conservative, Republican and Democrat across the United States: As I predicted in my 2015 book Cycles of Change, the 2016 presidential election began the enormous process of generational transformation in the politics, economics and dominant philosophies of the Untied States. It will certainly end the era of the United States as the self-imagined hyper-power, strategically overextending its strength wildly across the four corners of the world. Not all the King Canute’s of the Anglo-American Deep State can hold back that great tide of destiny for much longer.
More immediately however, we see the claims to competence of the American Right and American Left alike exposed by the pandemic while the national wave of riots in reaction to the shameful murder of African-American George Floyd simultaneously exposes the hubris of America imagining that it can and should “set standards” for human rights and moral behavior to the rest of the world.
It is sheer delusion to imagine that the antiquated U.S. political system has worked impressively to contain the spread of COVID-19. It is sheer delusion to imagine that either the President of the United States or the most eminent leaders of the Democratic Party across the nation look other than woeful in the face of this crisis. And it is insanely stupid and delusional to imagine that the worst is now over and that America can now rush back to “business as usual.”
Those who cannot recognize and abandon their delusions will be condemned to die in them.
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