Month: October 2020

FREEDOM FROM MASKS: THE RIGHT TO INFECT YOUR NEIGHBOR

In the name of liberty, unmasked MAGA heads are freely emitting oral and nasal droplets of God-knows-what. Welcome to Donald Trump’s America. In this bizarre upside-down moment, a former germaphobe has used his presidential power to turn unprotected coughs and sneezes into acts of patriotism.  Mandatory masking, Trump argues, is an attack on liberty.

Speaking of liberty, do you think Patrick Henry would have worn a face mask?  He’s the guy who, in 1775 created the rhetorical predicate for the Revolutionary War with his “Give me liberty, or give me death” speech. It’s hard to imagine those infamous words being uttered behind an N-95 facial covering. So weak and low energy, as our Twitterer-in-Chief would say.

But little did Henry know that, 245 years later, his precious aspiration for liberty would be used in another lethal battle, this time to preserve the Republican right to forgo wearing face masks during the most deadly pandemic in a century. 

In a year overflowing with specious and spurious arguments, comes this granddaddy of insipidness:  In the interest of personal liberty, nobody should be required to wear a face mask in mitigation of a virus that has infected more than 8.6 million Americans and left more than 224,000 of them dead. 

Reasonable people can differ over the closing of schools and businesses.  But to the medical professionals and other scientists tracking this epidemic, there is no dispute over the efficacy of masks. They work. And they are becoming more essential every day. 

Despite Trump’s claim that we have “turned the corner” on this virus, we are actually moving into another crisis stage. There were 82,600 new cases on Friday, the highest since the pandemic began. More than 1,000 Americans die from this disease every day. Hospitals in 38 states are at capacity or near-capacity levels. Yet, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that the virus could be brought under control in two months if everyone wore a mask. Between now and February, universal masking, according to another expert, could save at least 100,000 lives.

But there’s this liberty thing.  A quick sampling of GOP governors:  

Greg Abbott of Texas: “Requiring everyone to wear masks is an infringement on liberty.”  (Texas liberty fun fact: You can be fined for selling Limburger cheese on Sunday.)

Ron DeSantis of Florida: “(Masks are) a matter of personal liberty.” (Florida liberty fun fact: Women who fall asleep under a beauty salon hairdryer are subject to fines.)

Brian Kemp of Georgia, “(Masks) must be a personal choice, not a requirement that infringes on people’s liberty.” (Georgia liberty fun fact: It’s a crime to give away goldfish as a prize in BINGO games.)

Doug Burgam of North Dakota: “(Mandatory masks) are not a job for government because people have liberty.”  (North Dakota liberty fun fact: In Fargo, you can be arrested for wearing a hat while dancing.)

All of these red states have a plethora of laws regulating human behavior in order to protect the health and safety of its citizens.  Drivers there stop at red lights and obey speed limits, not out of personal responsibility, but because they don’t want to be fined. Stroll through their liberty-loving parks and you will see signs mandating “No Bicycling; No Rollerblading, No Skateboarding; No Loitering.” 

Yet, in the name of liberty, they will not post a mandatory mask sign that says “No Public Release of Potentially Infected Spittle.”  Encouraging the spread of a deadly virus for reasons of political expediency is bad enough. But falsely and shamelessly cloaking it in the garb of a noble-sounding political philosophy is about as low as you can get.  

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote a piece this week under the heading of “How Many Americans Will Ayn Rand Kill?”  With tongue planted at least partially in cheek, Krugman suggested that this anti-mask liberty nonsense was derivative of the late conservative philosopher who advocated that selfishness was a virtue.  

There has been speculation that Trump is an Ayn Rand fan.  After all, she did create this sentence:  “Man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others.” It is hard to imagine The Donald as a Randian scholar – or any type of scholar, for that matter.  My guess is that someone might have highlighted that sentence and read it to him. Probably during a Fox News commercial. 

As we have learned these past five years, nothing with Trump is ever remotely profound, deep or even thought-out. This, I believe, was the impetus for mask liberty:  He needed optics to match his lie about the pandemic petering out. He got the word out to those GOP governors who think they need his blessing.  And they used the liberty gambit because . . .well, because they didn’t have anything else to justify their position in the middle of a punishing pandemic. 

Sadly, this approach has falsely and dangerously ignited a violent righteousness in whacked out and frequently armed ruffians who delight in defying mandatory mask rules at grocery stores, restaurants and other public places. There have been countless examples of low-wage workers shot or otherwise assaulted by these thugs asserting their Trumpian-blessed liberty (here, here and here).

The fact of the matter is that the concept of government imposing restrictions on citizens for the public good has been a pillar of democratic governance for more than 200 years.  Nineteenth century English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, an advocate of individual freedom, once wrote, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”  The U.S. Supreme Court, in a long line of mandatory vaccine cases, has upheld the same principle. 

Patrick Henry would have shuddered at the notion that liberty means allowing people to freely disperse their droplets during a deadly pandemic.  Yet, for those unmasked Trumpian warriors who insist on baring their full faces in every crowd, a simple conjunctive change in Henry’s memorable line would cover them.  It is this:

Give me liberty, or and give me death.  

KING DONALD AND COVID: WHERE IS SHAKESPEARE WHEN WE NEED HIM?

Out there in some afterlife, is a very frustrated William Shakespeare begging for a chance to write and produce a play based on America’s 2020 presidential election. Think of it: King Donald The Maskless, shaping an entire campaign around the denial of a plague, and then being stricken by it just as voting begins. 

Americans aren’t used to presidential elections with this kind of high drama and daring plot twists.  We’re much more accustomed to Al Gore and his demand to put “Social Security in a lock box,” or George H.W. Bush’s cry of “Read my lips: No new taxes,” or, Barack Obama’s “Change we can believe in.”  

It’s hard for us to wrap our weary heads around such a diabolical storyline: An accidental and bombastic king is so taken with himself that he repeatedly tells the citizenry to ignore talk of a disease infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. He says it will all go away soon.  And then the virus suddenly swoops in and attaches itself to him, capturing not only his body but also his fate. 

Oh, what the Bard could have done with this material!  He was the master of plot twists and iconic irony.  In Henry V, for example, Shakespeare had the King of France send a crate of tennis balls to the young Henry as he assumed England’s throne. The gift was intended to mock him for his carefree, pleasure-seeking ways. Unamused, Henry upped his game from tennis balls to cannonballs, with which the military used to invade France in an epic battle. To top it off, Henry married the French princess, his adversary’s daughter.  

In The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus, a Macedonian king, was traveling with his infant daughter. He tells the audience that a vision appeared to him in a dream and warned him that he would never see his home or his wife again. Antigonus laid his daughter down in the woods.  As he walked away, a bear attacked and killed him. Soon a shepherd and his son, a clown, found the abandoned baby. They vowed to raise the child themselves.  Really.

In Shakespeare’s storytelling, events follow a karmic pattern of actions begetting reactions, of causes and effects colliding on a sometimes slippery slope.  The playwright would have been fascinated with the Donald Trump character, a rude, profane elite wannabe, born to aristocratic, emotionally sterile parents. 

Think about it.  Here’s this 74-year-old orange-tinted man-child, the most unpresidential of presidents, the product of an election he was not supposed to win.  All he really wanted was to pump up his brand a bit so he could sell more condos, steaks, bottled water and neckties. He billed himself as a business genius who, alone, would solve all of our problems.  In truth, he was deep in debt and badly needed to hawk more stuff.  He saw a presidential campaign as a road to two riches that had always eluded him: financial stability and an adoring fan base. 

As we work our way through the final act of this tragedy, King Donald’s election opponent is technically Joe Biden.  But the King’s real foe is COVID-19.  Right now, the battle between the two of them is both actual and metaphorical.  

Although Trump knew since February how lethal this virus is, he kept telling his kingdom that it was nothing to worry about. Even as the pandemic shook every corner and cranny of this country, leaving behind a terrorized trail of loss and raw fear, the president, rather than managing the disaster, continually minimized the virus. Just a week ago, with 7 million Americans infected and more than 200,000 dead,  King Donald insisted that this disease “affects virtually nobody.”

And then, just a few days later, he got it.  The “harmless” virus invaded Trump’s body.  It also infected a growing list of GOP office holders and staff who had earlier gathered – maskless  – in a Rose Garden celebration of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.  Right now, there is nothing in this world that affects Donald Trump’s future more than this novel coronavirus.

Shakespeare’s fascination with this development would hold regardless of the outcome of Trump’s disease. The conflict is not one of life and death. Instead, it’s about a powerful ruler’s battle between truth and deceit, between science and the will of a fool. 

This president constructs his own reality to please himself and his loyal fans.  He insisted Hilary Clinton was a crook, and his fans chanted “lock her up.”  He claimed caravans of violent migrants were invading our border, and his fans grabbed their guns and headed south. He says the Democrats have rigged the election against him, and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist, white supremacist group, is “standing by.”

That Donald Trump has desecrated all notions of truth is no longer in dispute.  According to the Washington Post, his current average is 23 falsehoods a day.  The culture of deceit in this White House is so deep that the first 48 hours after Trump was hospitalized were dominated by false and conflicting reports on his condition. Not only that, but there has been widespread speculation on the left that Trump is lying about having COVID in an attempt to move his poll numbers.  What else could we expect from a fact-free administration?

Science, however, does not lie.  For all of the 7.6 million Americans infected with this virus, including the 210,000 who died, there are tens of millions more – family members, friends and neighbors – who know first-hand how real and how devastating this disease in.  They also know how wrong Trump was when he tweeted from his hospital bed: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”  In this bizarre election drama, those are merely sad, close-to-final lines of a sick man and a failing candidate.

What would Shakespeare think of it all?  Well, he gave us a hint in the second act of Measure For Measure:

“. . . proud man, dressed in a little brief authority, most ignorant of what he’s most assured, his glassy essence, like an angry ape, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.”