Meltdown in the heartland*
At the center of our troubles lies a general meltdown of reason that feeds into more specific local meltdowns.
The looming climate crisis has finally come home to roost, with devastating impact. We are in the middle of a huge spike in temperatures. Record heat is being recorded in vast sections of the country, and places like Death Valley are flirting with a world record. But this goes far beyond the usual suspects like Phoenix and Las Vegas. More alarming still is the situation in places like Portland and Seattle that are usually cool even in the summer so many people have not found having air conditioning necessary.
Living through an off-the-chart heat wave puts unprepared people in these areas at great risk of heat stroke and death. This summer, heat has killed, and so have the big wildfires it has sparked. Today, Mark Twain could not write that the coldest winter he ever spent was summer in San Francisco.
Reality has finally dealt the climate-denialist mindset a terminal blow but there are many nearly as dangerous forms of denialism alive all over the heartland. Denial that Joe Biden won in November. Denial that the election was fair and final, with Republicans in states like Arizona conducting endless recounting and auditing hoping that at some time they will come up with the result they want, while others wait for a miracle Trump return to the White House in August, sans an election.
Then there are many from among the same crowd of election-results deniers who also deny that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was not the brutal, murderous attempt to steal an election that we saw with our own eyes and instead are peddling a narrative in which it was all an act of brotherly love to protest a rigged election and restore the rightful winner.
Nothing is more indicative of the collective psychosis afflicting a sector of Americans than Covid-19 and vaccine denialism. How can anyone deny the reality and lethality of Covid-19 after well over 600,000 Americans and more than four million in the world have died from it? Yet, many still do.
Who can deny the safety and efficacy of the various vaccines when hundreds of millions of people in the United States and the rest of the world have taken their shots? The experts, anxious not to further alienate the nut cases, delicately refer to “vaccine hesitancy.” It is more a case of vaccine obstinacy and vaccine lunacy than of vaccine hesitancy. Lunacy is when you refuse to take a vaccine for no good reason when 99 percent of the people dying from the illness the vaccine prevents are the unvaccinated. Obstinacy is when someone presents you with that number and you are still not persuaded to take the shot.
Then there are those who deny basic facts about our economy and society. Inequality here has been rampant for decades but with the trifecta of the last few years—Trump, the Republicans in Congress, and a right-wing Supreme Court—it has all gotten much worse. Then, for the kill-shot, along came Covid-19, which like a combination x-ray machine, MRI and electron microscope revealed how it really works even in a crisis when according to media myth “we are all in this together” and what “unites us is greater than what divides us.” Lies as big as the Ritz, or Trump’s.
The few moguls and the many who live thanks to the un-tender mercies of our miserly safety net have nothing in common except eventual death.
During the pandemic, the vast wealth of a miniscule minority, the value of the stock market, the hunger of children and the elderly, gun killings and general mortality, have all spiked. Meanwhile, the top plutocrats play with flying toys paid for by taxes avoided or never levied, making money while at it, and the problems on the planet they look down to from the sky get graver each day. Earth is melting down, but oh how cool it is to see it from the heights.
