Dystopia, DeSantis style
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis postures as a populist but he is no such thing. You might say, with his degrees from Yale and Harvard Law, that he is the best-educated moron in America. But he is not a populist and not stupid.
Instead, DeSantis is the most skilled of Donald Trump’s bootlickers. He is auditioning for the role of Trump 2.0 in case the big guy, whose road is paved with legal and other pitfalls, should stumble on the way to the 2024 nomination. What a miserable ambition, becoming a pale version of the worst president in history!
In Salt Lake City, DeSantis spoke before a group that trains state legislators on how to effectively implement a right-wing agenda. DeSantis is a stellar student of ALEC . He now wears the black belt and lectures the neophytes.
Meanwhile, back in the Sunshine State, 66 of 67 counties are Covid-19 hotspots. And that’s not our only problem. Tampa Bay has become a killing zone for fish because of pollution and the red tide that threaten to turn the area into a dead zone for tourism and fishing.
DeSantis denies any responsibility for the problem, ignoring the massive release of phosphate pollution into the bay, or his disdain for environmental protection. Could it be that the responsible party is one of the many corporate criminals DeSantis and the Republican legislature regularly shill for?
While DeSantis lectures like-minded righties in landlocked Utah, who’s minding our state?
Not DeSantis, who amuses himself inventing new ways to insult Anthony Fauci, this country’s best epidemiologist. In Utah, DeSantis warned his friendly audience against allowing Florida to become “a Faucian dystopia.”
Dystopia? No, Governor, you give me dyspepsia, nay, nausea. You have been working to create a Covid-19 Utopia in Florida and finally have achieved it — 98.5 percent of the state’s counties are Covid-19 hot spots and more cases than ever reported on Saturday.
“COVID: Why Florida leads the nation,” read the headline in the Miami Herald for Sunday, August 1, 2021.
The proximate reason for this dubious distinction is that so many Floridians are unvaccinated, and today Covid strikes hard almost exclusively at the unvaccinated.
There is a higher percentage of unvaccinated in other states, however, so other variables must be at play. Florida’s hot, humid climate, which tends to drive people indoors for the relief of air conditioning, could play a role. But the whole country is suffering from a deadly heat wave, and many of the states with lower vaccination rates than Florida in the South and Midwest have recorded much higher temperatures than the Sunshine State. The weather hypothesis thus holds little if any water.
So why are we leading the Covid-19 parade toward death and disease?
Today the nation is suffering from a political pandemic. Anybody who wants a safe and effective vaccine can get it pronto. Free. All the excuses for not taking the shot are at best lame and at worst deluded: the vaccine will change your DNA; Bill Gates will implant sensors in your brain; the FDA, which you don’t trust, hasn’t given the vaccines final approval yet; the shots will make you infertile. And so on down a rabbit hole of incoherence and imbecility.
Were any of this true, why would your hero Donald Trump take the shot, quickly but secretly? You will follow him anywhere except to a life raft.
I hear the TV pundits and the public health experts say we should listen to what the vaccine-recalcitrant have to say. I have heard enough. I don’t suffer fools gladly.
I fear that I am pursuing a fool’s errand along this course of inquiry, however. The nature of psychosis is that you cannot interpret or explain it rationally. A third to half of the country seems to be in the grip of a collective psychosis of the paranoid type. Try to disentangle all the knots and contradictions and you too might end up crazy.
Freud, whose science was dubious, nonetheless had some great insights. He postulated two forces that exist within the human person, Eros, the life force, and Thanatos, the drive toward death. That half of the American population that has declined to be vaccinated to this point—the last two minutes of the fourth quarter in American football terms—seems to be unconsciously following the Thanatos program: “Give me liberty and give me death.”
Moreover, our Republican Governor, like other Republican Governors but with even more enthusiasm than most, decided from day one to act as the lead plaintiff for the pandemic. This makes no sense except perhaps within the alternative reality right-wingers inhabit. The political demography of the current wave is clear. Most of those dying are the most faithful supporters of Trump and the G.O.P.: Whites, Republicans, Southerners, people in red states in the Midwest and Mountain West, science skeptics, and the undereducated. Why enable the decimation of your own troops?
DeSantis, do not rest easy. Should Trump survive all the hazards on the way to the nomination and you stand in his way, he will come for your head.
