The crazies have put their man on the moon and want to keep him there

May 17, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

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One of the interesting things about being a content creator in the marketing world, as I am, is the things you learn from translating often complex concepts into communications people can understand.

A few years back I wrote a series of whitepapers for a company that handles requisitions and distribution of healthcare supplies for hospitals across the Midwest. They often step in as a third party partner to take the burden of managing those logistics off the back of the hospital so that administrators can focus on the actual healthcare side of things.

Pandemic pressures

We’re all learning the importance of these services as the Covid-19 pandemic continues its spread across the United States of America. The federal government, state governments, and local authorities all got involved procuring and distributing healthcare supplies to healthcare companies in desperate need of them.

One wonders if the company for which I wrote that content has seen an increase in demand for their services, or if they’ve been cut out of the deal entirely We’ve witnessed fights at the highest levels of government over whose responsibility it is to manage the process of manufacturing, ordering and distributing supplies critical to the treatment of Covid-19 and protection of all the people working in the healthcare world.

Where does a third-party system fit in all that craziness?

Making connections

When healthcare becomes a political topic, we seldom seem to make connections about the systems necessary to make a “good healthcare system.” It’s all about ideology instead. Some decry the idea of a “socialized” or national healthcare system in favor of the profit-driven model we have now. But when systems quickly break down and supplies are in short demand as they obviously are during this pandemic, it makes you wonder if pride in the quality of our healthcare system is not somehow misplaced.

In testimony before a national committee assessing our government’s response to this pandemic, Rick Bright, the recently ousted vaccine official, stated that grave danger exists because the United States is not prepared or responding well to the challenges caused by this virus. “The world is confronting a great public health emergency which has the potential to eclipse the devastation wrought by the 1918 influenza which globally claimed over 50 million lives,” he said. He proceeded to advocate for a coordinated national response, as opposed to President Trump’s choice to that burden onto state and local authorities. Trump has crazily bounced back and forth between the two, claiming one moment to own all authority while at the same time blaming state governors for their poor handling of the supply and demand of PPE and other needs.

Emergency rooms

As I write this I’m sitting in an emergency room tending to the needs of a person close to me. I’ve been in dozens if not hundreds of waiting rooms like this over the years while serving as a caregiver to family members and friends in need of support. I have close friends who work in the healthcare systems of this country. Some are administrators while others serve as doctors, nurses, and many other specialties. I also have friends who work in healthcare communications and public relations. All of these people are great at what they do.

But I’m not so sure our overall healthcare system is great at what it does. And when a national crisis like this strikes, we lack a legitimate collaborative mechanism to coordinate efforts in the face of genuine threats. This essentially qualifies as a coarse example of willfully broken trust on behalf of an ideology that stipulates, at many levels, that healthcare concerns are a question of individual responsibility and a system based on the Ayn Rand mantra of “every man for himself.” In many ways, that amounts to an approach in which women are cut out of the equation of making decisions about their own healthcare needs.

Patient advocacy

That doesn’t even account for people with healthcare issues at hand. I’ve witnessed firsthand what it means to advocate for a patient with what the health insurance industry categorizes as a “pre-existing condition.” It was painful and often dehumanizing to realize that the person you love is considered a liability by everyone you encounter. From the employer offering the insurance to the companies issuing it, that pre-existing condition caused people to shuffle us around like checkers on board.

I’ve also seen medical mistakes up close, such as the time a batch of chemotherapy was wrongly applied by a nurse and leached out through a hole in the abdomen to leave a chemical burn on her stomach. We probably could have sued over that incident, but we were so grateful to be getting treatment at all that the idea of rocking the boat was not an option. Plus we didn’t believe in that course of action. Our doctors and nurses were responsible people. Mistakes can happen.

Perfection is not what medicine is all about. Likewise, no healthcare system will ever be perfect. Yet there’s a new awareness of how medicine is supposed to work in this world, and what it means when it doesn’t. We’ve also become aware that denying that a problem or a pandemic threat exists does not solve anything. It makes things worse. Delays response. Causes panic and fear. Costs lives.

Yet somehow, quite crazily, many people seem to prefer denial over credible response.

Billing games

Perhaps it’s time we took more pride in what healthcare is supposed to do rather than what it costs to do it. All the exorbitant billing games played by healthcare providers, administrators, and insurance companies are wasting billions on what amounts to a massive blame game in which everyone battles over the proceeds from the price of a procedure while no one wants to admit what it legitimately should cost. I say it’s time to take healthcare insurance administration out of the hands of the companies forced to administrate it. The corporations and non-profits of this world don’t need that hassle. It confuses their mission and causes nothing but headaches for all involved. That’s why a public option is the best thing that could ever happen to the world of business, especially small businesses where keeping employees insured is a massive burden.

Medical insurance is itself a crazy proposition. I’ve seen medical bills for a chemo treatment sporting a tab of $44,000. Later I learned that its true cost was a fraction of that. The provider and insurers haggle over that big bill and eventually settle on some sort of money exchange. How is that a remotely intelligent way for healthcare to be administrated? It is not. The healthcare industry knows this. But competitive factors keep everyone locked into a profit-making model dependent on actuarial systems designed to limit treatment. That’s the pre-existing condition of the healthcare industry as a whole.

Risks and rewards

I know doctors that hate the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare because they perceive it as an administrative burden and a potential limit on their profits for their profession. Physicians take on a ton of risk between the costs of their education, the insurance for their practice, and the fixed operating costs of running their business. And because it is a business, they are not fond of regulations impacting all these factors that affect their specific situations.

So we should respect those concerns and reduce those burdens through an intelligently designed cooperative between government and free-market healthcare providers. We already have successful models for public/private partnerships in facilities such as Argonne National Laboratory where real science takes place and is available for use by businesses that can use that research in commercial and other applications. This is America, people. We can make these things happen.

Stubborn claims

But it’s the stubborn claim that government is a bad thing that has damaged public trust over the last forty years. Remember when our country had actual pride in the fact that we were the first nation to put human beings on the moon? Now the public dialogue seems to be dominated by a brand of people who insist that it never happened, or that the earth is flat, and that the theory of evolution is the scourge of humankind. Their distrust of government aligns with a distrust of science founded in the radical notion that both are trying to pull the wool over their eyes. We’ve witnessed that radical worldview in calls to “Fire Fauci” and the actions of armed protestors storming the capitol in Michigan to demand concessions from that state’s governor.

These outcomes are all products of conspiracy theories invented to grant ownership of reality to distrusting souls eager to defy and deny reality. The fact remains that the administration of government, medicine, and science all take hard work to do. The entire premise of Make America Great Again was the solutions were simple. Yet Trump himself has had to repeatedly admit, “Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?”

It takes commitment and costs money to do healthcare, science, and government right. It is astounding to realize how quickly Republicans reacted with major stimulus funding when they realized how badly Trump and their entire party had botched response to this pandemic. Of course, their instincts are always to throw money at the people who need it least. That’s why every Republican President since Eisenhower has presided over recessions, sometimes multiple in number under one administration.

The needle and the damage done

Orange Donald too

Meanwhile, the Democrats want to grant assistance to millions of people cast out of work by the effects of a pandemic made far worse by the delay caused by Donald Trump’s feckless denial there was ever a problem in the first place. The press has needled Trump over his many contradictions on the subject, and Trump has responded by claiming he “knew all along” that the pandemic was going to be bad. Yet that’s an even worse admission of guilt. If he knew, why did he not act rather than claiming it would all disappear “like a miracle?” That belief system sits well with people who saw Trump as a Magic Man in the first place.

But this dumbing down of our country to satisfy the conspiratorial urges of a willfully disenfranchised and selfish populace needs to stop. Now. We all know where that starts. Some just refuse to admit it. They’ve put their own man on the moon and want to keep him there because he talks about hoaxes and gives credence to alternative views of reality. But the evidence of this folly is the pain we’re seeing from the crippled concept of supply and demand in the healthcare industry today.

The right kind of pride has everything to do with conscience and credibility and nothing to do with crazy claims of conspiracy.

Even Trump can’t bend the laws of nature to his will

May 11, 2020May 11, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Cicada killer

As a child deeply interested in nature, I studied butterflies and learned dozens of species, taking up birding thanks to the gift of a Peterson Field Guide from a knowing aunt, and spent all the time I could outdoors where the world seemed to offer limitless opportunity to find something new every day.

Yet one warm afternoon I got a bit more nature than I expected. While popping tar bubbles and collecting “Fool’s Gold” bits of pyrite from the gravel on a neighborhood street, I heard a loud buzzing noise over my shoulder and turned to find the biggest wasp I had ever seen descending over my head. It was a cicada killer carrying prey back to its underground nest.

At first, horrified by the size, then fascinated by this massive insect, I watched it land and drag a cicada carcass into a hole in the Pennsylvania clay.

Although I well knew that aspects of nature could be vicious––our own feral cat had proved that to me by dispatching birds and chipmunks multiple times––that encounter with the cicada killer shattered my expectations of how forceful our world could be.

Force of nature

But it didn’t end there. Later in life, I learned that certain kinds of wasps will lay eggs in the bodies of larger caterpillars, whose innards become food for the young of the wasp once they emerge. Parasitoid wasps actually prey on all sorts of other living creatures, with some focusing on aphids, which is why some gardeners welcome the sneaky beasts into their world.

The world is full of predator-prey relationships, many with brutal consequences. Nature usually finds a balance if evolution is left to work its magic. But the human race is known to mess up this equilibrium by introducing entirely new or “invasive” species into an ecosystem. Without any natural predators or systems to keep them in check, these species can run amok, overtaking the natural environment with often devastating force.

We see invasive plant species such as garlic mustard covering woodland floors, shutting out light vital to native wildflowers. Out in the marshes, it is purple loosestrife that propagates like mad. There are also bird species such as European starlings and House sparrows that upon release into North America flourished and flooded the countryside with their aggressive ways.

Murder hornets

The latest predatory and somewhat parasitic species to invade the United States is a species of wasp called the Japanese Murder hornet. Specimens of this robust and vicious wasp have been found in the Pacific Northwest, leading some to worry that they might expand across the country and decimate honeybee populations. That problem would only worsen the challenges faced by beekeepers during a period when massive hive die-offs are common, and whose cause is not entirely known.

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Whether Murder hornets will make way across the fifty states remains to be seen. One expert quoted in a Business Insider article played down the threat: “It’s not an existential threat to mankind or to the US or to our honeybee industry to have,” Doug Yanega told Business Insider. “Even if they do get established and build a foothold here, the scale of the threat is greatly overblown.”

Another entomologist quoted in the Post-Crescent, a Wisconsin newspaper, noted: “This whole ‘murder hornet’ thing is annoying to entomologists, I think,” Draney said. “It just freaks people out and sort of unnecessarily makes people nervous.”

Coronavirus

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People are nervous about quite a few threats these days. The invasion of the Coronavirus in America has shut down the economy and cost 30 million people their jobs. The virus is an evolutionary wonder of its own, a “novel” bug that has no predecessor among human beings. That makes it more dangerous to contain because there are no antidotes or antibodies developed to combat the tiny beast. Thus it presents an existential threat to millions of people around the world.

Here in the United States, response to the Coronavirus bug was slow and ponderous. That’s because the main person in charge of pondering the issue is himself a bit of an apex predator and by some reckonings, a parasite of the first and final order.

Orange Donald too

A real (estate) parasite

Back in the days when Trump was making his way in the New York Real Estate market, he refined his predatory tactics through manipulation of rent controls and valuations, playing up the worth of his properties when it suited his ego and playing them down when it benefited his tax needs.

But his parasitic instincts flared into action when the Real Estate market crash threatened the nation in 2007. As NBC News reported, “Donald Trump counseled Trump University students to take advantage of the housing bubble as an investment opportunity and said, just a year before it burst, that he was “excited” for it to end because of the money he’d make.

“People have been talking about the end of the cycle for 12 years, and I’m excited if it is,’ he told the Globe and Mail in March of 2007. “I’ve always made more money in bad markets than in good markets.”

At that time, the housing market was already beginning to decline, and just over a year later the subprime mortgage crisis hit, part of a chain reaction of events that led to the stock market crash of 2008 and cemented the Great Recession.”

Predator and parasite combined

Orange Donald

That is Trump the predator and parasite coming together in one devilish creature. The NBC News story originally published in 2016 is all the more revealing now that Trump University was punished for defrauding the students it claimed to educate. Not only was Trump eager to parasitize the economy on which his supposed wealth depends, but he was also sucking money out of people for fake wisdom.

But we’ve long known that Trump knows how to leverage his vicious nature better than most. His television show The Apprentice celebrated his love of dispatching those he considered inferior with the famous phrase, “You’re fired!”

There’s an interesting parallel between the behavior of Donald Trump and the Murder Hornets whose habits include honeybee hive genocide and then carting off the carcasses of its victims to feed to its children. He claims to love chaos and seems happiest when tearing his victims apart. Perhaps the sociopathy of nature really does trickle up the food chain to gain expression in the human race. Supposedly our species is capable of transcending survival of the fittest and its “red in tooth and claw” dynamics. Yet the wars and political battles common to our kind do not suggest we’re all that better than the creatures over whom we claim dominion. That is why so many sociopaths seem to succeed. They appeal to a certain base instinct to dispatch the opposition at any cost. Trump is their Murder Hornet King, the face of domination and revenge.

Murder Hornet Trump

Political murder hornet

After years of eviscerating victims on The Apprentice, Trump was elected President of the United States and kept playing the same role, only this time the reality show was not semi-scripted. It was live and in-person. So whether the contestant was Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who branded Trump a “moron,” or former FBI director James Comey, who did Trump a symbiotic electoral favor by glorifying the trumped-up case against Hillary Clinton and her dreaded emails, Trump went at his mission indiscriminately. Any buzz of disloyalty was sufficient to make Trump go full-on murder hornet.

And when anyone threatens to hold him accountable for his lack of accountability or Tweets designed to sting his perceived opponents to death, Trump claims that it is his natural right to do such things, and nothing anyone says or does can stop him.

The taste of prey

Even after the Mueller team uncovered Russian interference in the 2016 election and turned in multiple indictments people in the President’s close circle, Trump claimed innocence and embarked on a new and horrifically bald-faced attempt to bring foreign influence to bear on American elections. He targeted Joe Biden by coercing the President of Ukraine to conduct an investigation into Hunter Biden. That political murder plot exposed by a whistleblower. There are always guardian bees or ants in nature that are willing to sacrifice themselves to defend the colony.

But Trump loves invasive species, you see. He embraced Wikileaks because it helped him break down the value of laws in the United States, freeing him to flaunt our Constitution and the natural limits of the Executive Office itself.

The invasive coronavirus

Trump shrug

This brings us to Trump’s non-response to the invasion of the Coronavirus in America. At some level, Trump likely admired the cunning tactics of the Chinese government that kept the virus secret until it knew what it wanted to do about it. Who knew that a virus living in bats could make the leap over to human beings? Actually, people like Dr. Anthony Fauci and the entire Pandemic Response Team that was told by Trump “You’re fired!” knew quite a bit about the potential problems caused by viruses of that type. Researchers had spent years studying Coronaviruses of many types. Predictions were made that it wasn’t a matter of “if” such a virus would threaten the human population, but “when.”

The fact of the matter is that Trump refused to believe yet desperately feared that his perfect economy could be affected by news of a potential pandemic. The fat caterpillar on which his eyes were trained was getting re-elected in November of 2020. Trump’s goal is to lay his eggs in the American government to the benefit of his progeny; Ivanka, Jared, the Trump boys, and ultimately his nearly invisible son Barron.

Parasite in Chief

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Trump is indeed the Parasite In Chief, a predator so cunning and absorbed in his mission that he failed to see that a much smaller parasite was coming up from behind. It laid its eggs as he sat dormant in his brooding complex surrounded by the buzzing sycophants who guard the dark lair from journalists and other such pests. If Trump had his way, he’d fly out and bite off the heads of every reporter he could find.

His popularity with his base is built on such instincts. They view Washington as a brood of termites gnawing away at the foundations of the American household. Trump was elected to be their can of Raid. The more poison he spewed, the more favor he won among those who favor a scorched earth result. Those instincts were verified when Trump claimed at a campaign rally that he could shoot someone and he would still be on top. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump said.

That’s a murder hornet philosophy if there ever was one. Trump is indeed a unique and invasive species in American politics. His symbiotic relationship with Russia includes the parasitic ploy of trusting Russian social media trolls to inject seeds of discontent among the aphids he calls his base. Meanwhile, Trump occupies himself by buzzing around with other murder hornets such as Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Turkish kingpin Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose political career Trump would dearly love to emulate. As described on Wikipedia: “As a long-standing proponent of changing Turkey’s parliamentary system of government into an executive presidency, Erdoğan formed an alliance with the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) to establish an executive presidency in 2017, where the changes were accepted in a constitutional referendum.”

King of the Hoppers

That’s the type of power and authority Donald Trump truly craves. Yet his predatory brand of narcissism caused him to focus on his own ego during the one moment when that brand of authority could truly have been his to wield. Trump preeningly tried to brush away the threat of a pandemic, insisting it would disappear “like magic” simply because he willed it to be so.

“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.

His power was so great, he repeatedly Tweeted, that nothing bad could happen to the economy.

The Grand Parasite

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On that topic, Trump is also a grand parasite. He did nothing to build to the economy that he inherited from eight years of hard work by President Obama, whose leadership helped the country recover from the Bush-led Great Recession.

Even in the midst of that effort, Obama got blowback from his political opponents when he had the nerve to inform business interests that the government was critical in providing the infrastructure needed for their success.

He stated, “You did not build that” in talking about the nation’s investment in that infrastructure. But conservatives took that to literally mean they had not built their businesses. That’s how selfish people can be when they don’t want to owe anything to anyone.

And that’s the reason Trump got elected. The selfish horde of Americans whose spit and prejudicial spit rained down upon Obama could not stand the idea that a Democrat had saved their asses.

Wasting away

Now Trump has quickly squandered everything that Obama did create. The tariffs imposed by Trump gutted agricultural markets. The tax cuts he favored sent the national deficit soaring. Now his feckless and lazy response to the pandemic has cost millions of American jobs and the nation is headed toward yet another Republican-led recession.

It should be noted that every Republican President from Eisenhower to Trump has trashed the economy enough to cause a recession. That’s the real pandemic in America: Republican economic policy. It sickens the nation every time by infecting the country with the attitude that it is the job of United States citizens to feed and support the rich so that jobs and money can trickle down to the everyday worker.

Hopper king ants

In that respect, we should consider the plot of the movie A Bug’s Life, in which a nasty King Hopper brings his horde to bear on the ant colony. Their goal is to mercilessly clean out the stores of the ants for their own purposes. Yet the ant colony musters enough courage to resist King Hopper thanks to an oddly liberal batch of circus performers whose act serves as both a distraction and an act of resistance. Their colorful display distracts the grasshopper mob long enough for a band of ants to fly a fake bird down from a tree to scare the daylights out of King Hopper and his deplorable clan.

Thumper

Yet that’s not the end of the story. When King Hopper sees through the ruse and labels it Fake News, he goes off in mad pursuit to kill the Whistleblower ant that led the charge in standing up to the bullying ways of Hopper and his base. But the ant flees until it arrives at the lair of a hungry bird, who grabs Hopper in its bill and feeds the hapless insect to its beckoning young. What a fitting end that would be for the likes of Donald Trump, the President determined to terrorize a nation into doing his bidding.

There’s a moral to every tale in nature. No one is immune to the forces of natural justice in this universe. Not even those who try so desperately to break its laws and bend the truth to serve selfish objectives.

Biblical literalism is costing America dearly right now

May 5, 2020May 5, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / 2 Comments

Michigan gun protestors

For the last four decades, highly respected polls surveying opinions about religious beliefs have shown that between 30-40% of Americans embrace a biblically literal worldview. That belief system embraces the idea that the Bible story with its six-day creation narrative with animals and human beings fashioned out of nothing is more credible than the demonstrable cause-and-effect outcomes of material processes.

The resulting worldview of creationism also insists that every living creature but a few were wiped out in a global flood and that even the continents were tossed around like toys in a bathtub.

Those premises form a stubborn bulwark against multiple scientific principles ranging from plate tectonics to the theory of evolution.

One-third of America

So it’s time to stop and think about that: almost one-third of Americans do not accept science and instead embrace an alternate view of reality based on a literal interpretation of an oral tradition drawn from beliefs first formed some six thousand years ago. And by no coincidence, many of those same Americans hold the belief that the earth itself if no more than 6-10,000 years old. Some still believe the earth is flat, that sicknesses are caused by demons and that humans once shared the planet with meat-eating dinosaurs.

So it’s not hard to see why so many Americans fail to see the Coronavirus pandemic through a factually clear lens. It is preferable in their minds to deny science and medical information out of habit and fear that it could corrupt their minds and lead them away from God.

Cult thinking

There are entire organizations and even political parties devoted to the propagation and support of the biblically literal worldview. These range from the apologetically driven Moody Bible Institute to the Answers In Genesis “ministry” with its Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, both facilities dedicated to literal depictions of the Book of Genesis and its array of anachronistic characters. It is little more than a cult of denial, but it is enormously popular in a nation where the irony of religious freedom has produced a generation of patently stubborn idiots.

One in three people who walk into those museums buys that information wholesale. They hear it preached to them from pulpits and consume it through multiple media channels from their local radio stations to the megaphone of Fox News, where dog-whistle anti-science rhetoric claiming the falsehoods of science include calculated PR campaigns and scripted attacks on the impacts of climate change and even basic environmental regulations.

The real alarmists

Let’s be blunt: Americans convinced the earth was created in six literal days are incapable of grasping the public relations sophistication of a story such as a piece published on Fox News from the Heartland Institute, who claimed, “Not surprisingly coronavirus alarm has pushed most other issues and concerns out of the news ⎯ much to the dismay of climate alarmists,” said Steve Milloy of the Heartland Institute. “But the alarmists aren’t taking displacement by coronavirus lying down. In fact, many climate alarmists are trying to use coronavirus as a means of advancing their agenda. They are trying to surf it.”

This fearmongering approach is a common tactic that hearkens back to the earliest forms of propaganda employed by the Christian church to keep people in line. The original alarmists were always religious authoritarians. Traditionally it is the threat of life in hell that religion uses to scare people into believing what they’re told, and without question. Today’s religious leaders and politicians have adapted that approach while targeting science as the enemy of God to convince millions of people that even sound medical advice cannot be trusted.

The love of money religiously abided

Toss fears about the economy into the mix and the fearmongering takes on a whole new level of existential threat. It’s easy to scare people with the idea that someone else is trying to take your money. Climate change deniers and now Coronavirus blamers both claim that scientific warnings about these real threats are all about a money grab and/or an excuse for trying to install a worldwide government.

The sick fact is that even our own government is depicted as a threat among those claiming that basic scientific recommendations about disease control and social distancing are an infringement of liberties. That’s how a gang of gun-wielding domestic terrorists wound up inside the Michigan state capitol building demanding a meeting with the Governor. Their version of truth in action was vigilante lawlessness. In one fell swoop, they demonstrated that aggressive denial of science, common sense and rule of law can all be exacted upon society at will. Disturbingly, the President of the United States approved of their actions, instructing the Governor of Michigan to capitulate to their will. Trump knows that to appeal to “his base” he must cater to the most extreme factions with approval or risk having that 30% of cultlike Trump supporters abandon him.

Trickle-up effect

So we can see how the grassroots belief in biblical literalism and its associated denial of science and truth is costing America right now. President Donald Trump openly embraces evangelicals who deny science and even invent or propagate conspiracy theories that direct blame away from their pet President. All the better to avoid the truth that it was incompetency and delay by Trump right here in America that allowed the Coronavirus to get such traction.

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True to form and in keeping with the “science of denial” common to biblical literalists, Trump at first refused to acknowledge the threat as real (just like climate change) then downplayed its likely spread (though he was informed on a regular basis of the reality of the threat) and has now turned to claim his response has been a dynamic success, when in fact death projections are now reaching more than 200,000 Americans.

The goal now is to outstrip the failure by reframing “success” through the use of denial to convince willing supporters that Trump and team have done a good job. That means preventing any testimony by actual scientists and medical experts at hearings designed to examine America’s response to the pandemic. Just like the Senate’s denial to allow witness testimony about Trump’s corrupt activities in Ukraine, the Republican goal right now is to bury facts under propaganda. This is fascism at work.

LiveScience.com published a fascinating profile of fascism on its website that describes it this way: “Robert Paxton, a professor emeritus of social science at Columbia University in New York who is widely considered the father of fascism studies, defined fascism as “a form of political practice distinctive to the 20th century that arouses popular enthusiasm by sophisticated propaganda techniques for an anti-liberal, anti-socialist, violently exclusionary, expansionist nationalist agenda.”

Fascism, socialism and the public good

Of course, the parallel need of any fascist government is to find an enemy upon which to direct its ire, thereby focusing the fears of its constituents on that target rather than allowing the facts of its own authoritarian power grab to be known. So the Trump regime and its allies are conveniently trotting out “socialism” as that enemy by depicting social programs such as Social Security, Medicaid, and even the US Post Office as socialistically repressive forms of government that must be eradicated. Of course, Trump also eliminated the Pandemic Response Team in 2018 in order to eliminate costs. This is where belief in a vastly reduced government can have real costs.

As documented on Reuters.com: “In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Beth Cameron, former Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense in the NSC, wrote, “When President Trump took office in 2017, the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense survived the transition intact.

“Its mission was the same as when I was asked to lead the office, established after the Ebola epidemic of 2014: to do everything possible within the vast powers and resources of the U.S. government to prepare for the next disease outbreak and prevent it from becoming an epidemic or pandemic. One year later, I was mystified when the White House dissolved the office, leaving the country less prepared for pandemics like covid-19” ( here ).”

Comparable habits

The habits and patterns of denial are so comparable between Trump and the 30-40% of Americans that deny science it is entirely logical to place blame for the spread of Coronavirus on the one-third of the American public that embraces anachronism over science in the modern age. That is proof that biblical literalism is both bad theology and an irresponsible belief system. What God in heaven or on earth would have us choose to disregard or ignore information valuable to the protection of human welfare and even the entire planet? That is a God reduced instead to the petty aims of human selfishness. That is the sin of which Jesus accused the religious authorities of his day, who demanded respect for their country club lifestyle while people suffered in the streets.

These days it is inexcusable to embrace corrupt traditions such as Biblical literalism because it is so easy to find out the facts and know better. Instead, we are being forced to live in an age of lies, misinformation, propaganda and outright fascist attempts to undermine truth in favor of political and religious power in America.

That is the real and original pandemic of untruth with which we’re trying to contend today. Those brutes on the steps of the Michigan capitol are just one illustration of its effects. The other is the painted face and combover lies of a President who can’t face the fact that he’s a fraud, an incompetent, and a bully. That brand of evil threatens to kill us all.

MAGA deserves a closer look

April 20, 2020April 20, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / 2 Comments

None of us sees behind the veil of what Trump truly values. I have spoken with people that gained an audience with the man, and his personal interactions with them were both kind and considerate. That suggests there is something more to Trump than his public persona and political style. Perhaps his supporters sense this aspect of their president. So it demands a closer look at what drives the popularity of Make America Great Again.

Trump Maga Hat

His brand of brightly-hued optimism appeals to millions of Americans eager for some sort of renewal in this country. These also tend to be people aggravated by the complexity of life as it has evolved in the American republic. Trump’s slogan Make America Great Again proposes to eliminate the complexity of life by reducing the American experiment to simple actions; cutting taxes, ending illegal immigration, stopping abortion, eliminating financial and environmental regulation and putting religion at the forefront of national policy. Does that cover pretty much of what MAGA fans want to see happen?

The Trump mantra really isn’t more complicated than that. His simplicity is his message. One could just as easily change the Trump slogan to Make Aggravation Go Away and achieve the same objectives. A big chunk of the American electorate craves simplicity. They’re sick of having to think about complex issues such as the lives of transgender people. They’re tired of hearing Spanish rather than English spoken in public places. They’re believers in old-school industries such as coal and oil because they harken to a time before the complexities of air pollution, acid rain, and climate change challenged the status quo. There must be a simpler way. Trump appeals to that manner of thinking.

But first, let’s make the aggravations go away.

MAGA redefined

Make Aggravation Go Away is a powerful message also to people whose vision of America does not require accommodation of any sort. That means Christians should not have to think about Muslim traditions or put up with people saying Happy Holidays rather than Merry Christmas. That cultural issue alone has aggravated Christians for a decade or so, coaxed on by Fox News chryons pitching the “War On Christmas.”

Make Aggravation Go Away has roots stretching way back to the Confederate cause in which states’ rights were the big issue, but mostly that was a cloak for the right to keep slaves. Indeed, that was the cause of ‘liberty’ back then. Liberty for white Christians quoting scripture to justify selfish aims while treating people of other races as property. It’s hard to read that sentence and grasp that people once truly believed that. Yet that’s what America most needs to do. Come to grips with its own conflicted traditions.

The Civil War was fought over that aggravation. There are still some Americans that wave the Confederate flag as a sign that their aggrieved state has never been recognized.

Protestors

Tracing these historical grievances from the past to present helps to explain why protestors are now gathering to “liberate” their states from Stay At Home orders issued by their governors. Responding to the pandemic has been an aggravation, which is defined as “an intensification of a negative quality or aspect.” The threat of disease is never a joyful situation. Being encouraged or required to retreat from public life is another layer of aggravation. Those orders are being treated as an infringement on personal rights by protestors who want to Make Aggravation Go Away.

Not that simple

The problem with that belief system is that life isn’t always that simple. Trump’s eagerness to prevent any outside influence from impinging on his prized economy is what directly led to the infection rate getting a head start on the nation’s ability to respond. By trying to simplify the Coronavirus threat to a sound bite and a promise that it would “go away, like magic,” Trump put millions of people’s lives at risk, and tens of thousands have indeed died.

Trump Denial

And yet his supporters still seek to simplify the complexities of Covid-19 with even more disturbing sound bites. So desperate are some supporters to protect Trump they have projected blame for the pandemic away from Trump to a more convenient and horrifically simplied target for their ire, Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Fire Fauci meme swept across the Internet with all the resonance and credulity of the Lock Her Up chants aimed at Hillary Clinton. Again, it’s all about Making Aggravation Go Away. Fauci is an aggravation because he’s a medical professional speaking in terms of science, that complex source of often bad news that stands in direct opposition to Trump’s vacuous brand of gut-instinct optimism.

fire fauci

That’s the kind analysis. A more honest approach would be to say that Trump acted stupidly by ignoring clear warnings that a pandemic was brewing overseas and that it would not be confined to arrival just from China. Fauci accurately predicted it would arrive through other channels, yet Trump desperately tried to simplify the threat by calling it the Chinese Virus. That was a clear attempt to politicize the problem with a nationalistic, effectively racist approach to directing blame away from himself. Trump aggressively failed the leadership test of recognizing a genuine threat to our national interests. That is how he approaches every problem he faces. He fails, then bails, and finally assails. It’s all about blaming others. That’s the simplest way to avoid responsibility. But to Trump, it is an art form.

As a result of Trump’s recklessness, our national interests are now bogged in a swamp of economic doldrums wrought by the need to shut down our service economy to prevent rampant spread of the Coronavirus. That requirement has cost millions of jobs and Americans are suffering, big time. The Trump response has been cynical at best. At one point he proudly promised to send Americans what he called a “big, fat check” amounting to about $1200 for most households. And then, Trump held up the distribution of those checks to make sure his name appeared on them.

Big money goes elsewhere

Meanwhile, billions have been snarfed up big money interests all too eager to accept the graft intended for “small business.” That includes Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, whose company gladly embraced more than $800M from the stimulus program. At what point did nepotism become a complete non-issue in this country? How ironic it is that Republicans love to point fingers at the supposed graft of Hunter Biden overseas while Trump’s children blatantly leverage their proximity to the seat of power to pad their present and future interests with promises of profit?

In advance of that flush money going out, Trump promised oversight of the stimulus package to Democrats, then snatched it away after the bill was passed. Of course, his supporters love him for things like that, because it’s just another example of Making Aggravation Go Away.

After all, it was Democrats in Congress that sought to hold Trump accountable for his criminality in seeking to coerce Ukraine into announcing an investigation into his now-confirmed political rival, Joe Biden. The goal of Trump’s digging around in Ukraine was to cast aspersions on Vice President Joe Biden by framing his son Hunter as a symbol of supposed corruption on the part of that family. Those accusations were why Trump’s so-called ‘personal attorney’ Rudy Giuliani spent months mucking around in Ukraine only to turn up nothing substantial. Granted, Hunter Biden does not sound like a prize pupil when it comes to judicious use of family influence or reputation. At one point, neither George W. Bush or John F. Kennedy were paradigms of personal virtue. Even Trump could be forgiven his past transgressions if he weren’t so ardently bent on creating new ones.

Impeachment doesn’t stick

Congress ultimately impeached Trump inaccordance with massive lines of evidence pointing back to Trump’s “perfect” phone call as perfectly corrupt. But the Republican-led Senate made the aggravation go away by refusing to conduct anything approaching an actual trial with testimony and witnesses. Instead, they simply broke the oath to do that and acquitted Trump even while several in the Senate admitted that Trump had done wrong. Once that aggravation was gone, along with the Mueller Report, Trump proceeded on his merry way of mocking his critics and calling everything with which he disagrees Fake News. That’s another tactic for making aggravations go away. Call them fake, or a hoax, and Trump supporters gobble it up like candy.

We don’t even know if Trumpism will allow his removal during a normal election if such a thing exists anymore. By many reports, the Russians are still playing games in the hinterlands of the Internet, posing as Americans and creating fake news sites to pump out pro-Trump and anti-Biden propaganda to divide Americans even further.

Low information

But it’s not the Russians that are the real problem. It is the Make Aggravation Go Away attitudes of everyday Americans caught up in the authoritarian, nearly fascist call to defeat all those who aggravate the president in any way. This worldview is further fueled by a religious culture that for decades has attacked all that contradicts its scriptural orthodoxy. As a result nearly 40% of Americans embrace the literalistic, anti-science worldview of creationism that reduces the origins of all nature and humanity to the level of a childhood bedtime story. This is the brand of low information that has turned America into a backwater swamp of anti-intellectual populism.

No wonder so many Americans want to Fire Fauci, a medical professional who embraces actual germ theory and the evolutionary insights upon which it depends. And no wonder so many Americans want to “liberate” their state from medical strictures designed to prevent the spread of a quickly evolving virus.

In fact, Coronavirus symbolizes all the complexities that Trump supporters and their evangelical partners love to hate. In many ways, it is the aggravation to end all aggravations, a perfectly unseen enemy that propagates itself through invisible droplets and forces us to wear masks. It looks and feels like the ultimate liberal conspiracy. And if you can’t shoot it with a gun or crush it like a beer can, it surely must be some sort of Democrat conspiracy to block the ideal world Trump wants to lead us to.

Just Make Aggravation Go Away. That is the dog-whistle call of those protestors toting guns, waving both Confederate and American flags and revealing the swastika instincts of depicting The Other as the ultimate irritation in life. That’s how Hitler convinced so many that the Jews were the aggravation vexing the nation. But that brand of thinking can be applied to any other label and it still works. Immigrants. Gays. Liberals. Muslims. Tree-Huggers. Mexicans. Blacks. Indians. The list goes on forever if you let it. A nation built around eliminating aggravations is not a nation, but something else entirely.

It is evil.

Coronavirus is proof that creationism is a deadly worldview

April 7, 2020April 7, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / 1 Comment

Balls

The Coronavirus pandemic is not just a medical and cultural threat. It is also a lesson in theology. The idea that human beings are “specially created” beings that stand apart from the rest of nature has been blown asunder, and forever, by the fact that this virus and many thousands of others are threats to human existence and known to jump from the rest of the animal world to infect us.

So much for the creationist contention that God spares human beings from such humble roots. Our gut bacteria was already proof that we’re biologically dependent and derived from the raw stuff of creation. But this novel disease has put an all-new face on the fact that human beings share our guts and DNA with every other living thing on earth.

Denial still rules

Yet despite this biological threat to human health, there are Christians in strong denial of the dangers posed by Covid-19, the deadly disease caused by the novel Coronavirus. Some pastors have openly defied governmental orders not to assemble due to the risk of spreading the disease. Others claim that their religious freedom is being restricted by orders not to hold public gatherings. Perhaps the belief is that people sitting together in prayer are immune to the disease? But given clear evidence that church is no protection from the disease, it is legitimate to ask if pastors and other religious leaders really care if their congregations live or die? Cynics have questioned whether some of these pastors care more about the contents of the collection plate than the lives of the people in their pews.

Misguided beliefs

It is far more likely that it is the idea of giving up some aspect of religious authority that makes pastors so defiant toward the public safety recommendations issued by government, medical or scientific sources. Among all the perceived threats to orthodoxy, it is religious authority itself to which its advocates so ardently cling and become anxious, angry and resentful when challenged.

John the Baptist and Jesus both dealt with that problem in the religious authorities of their day. Martin Luther later challenged the Catholic Church over its imposition of indulgences and today’s selfish televangelists rake in millions of dollars in tithes and offerings but when a public crisis hits, their voices suddenly go silent, their church doors close, and they look for ways to blame those they hate for the crisis.

But most just hide behind the protection of their personal mansions until it is safe to come out again. In other words, they are theological hypocrites who couldn’t give a rat’s ass or a bat’s wing about the lives of people on whom they depend for their wealth.

Special creation indeed

Perhaps these religious leaders really are encouraged to flaunt scientific and medical advice based on the biblically literal notion that human beings are “specially created” and somehow immune to a deadly disease that reputedly sprung from the flesh of bat. Instead, creationists console themselves with the biblically literal notion that God molded human flesh out of dust from the earth, and that we have nothing much to do with all that DNA and genetics stuff that connects us to the rest of the world. That’s the worldview of theological hacks like Ken Ham, progenitor of the Answers In Genesiswebsite and its expensive temples constructed to cater to his ego, the Creation Museumand The Ark Encounter.

Supposedly these websites and facilities provide answers to all of life’s pressing questions about the origins of life, including ‘science’ in the name of God. Yet during this Coronavirus pandemic not a word of insight, advice or practical solutions emanate from the likes of Ken Ham and his ham-handed assemblage of quitter scientists. They are all theological and scientific frauds hiding behind a grand excuse to make money on the creationist schtick.

Anachronism and crisis

And people die because anachronistic beliefs have nothing to offer us in the face of a medical crisis. Thoughts and prayers do nothing, or else people would be indeed huddled in churches rather than dying in overcrowded hospitals. Medicine and science works because it depends on knowledge from the theory of evolution to determine how viruses mutate, replicate and transmit from one living thing to another. It takes an idiot to choose wishful thinking over medical cures for disease. Creationism is a deadly worldview.

It is only an egotistically naive desire to feel better than the rest of nature that drives creationists to such selfish extremes. But the Coronavirus isn’t choosy about who it infects or how well they survive. It only does what it was designed to do, mutate and move on. In that respect, it seems like a heartless invention of God to create such killers. If that’s how it works, it is the religiously literal that have the most to answer for, not those who understand that the human condition is an evolutionary function just like everything else in the universe.

Trump Derangement Syndrome is projection writ large

April 3, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

MAGA ball Today a Facebook Friend posted a story to his Wall that popped up in my feed preceded by the comment, “Trump Haters will not like this.” There was a photo of an airplane titled, “Russia delivers medical supplies to the United States after Trump-Putin call.”

Trump lovers adore projecting hate on those who do not worship their president. They even invented a term to describe those who resist the policies that Trump conceives or pushes into law. The term is Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).

Derangement

The word deranged means “disturbed or disordered in function, structure, or condition.” The implication of TDS is that anyone who objects to Donald Trump must be a dysfunctional person. The purpose of abiding in this lump-sum psychological assessment is to make Trump’s cultural opponents second-guess their beliefs about the man by making people question their own sanity.

This is better known as gaslighting, a method of mental and social abuse described by Psychology Today as, “a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality.”

Trump himself is an exceptional gaslighter, well-known for branding any information with which he disagrees “Fake News.” He also regularly contradicts his own statements in full view of the public, then doubles down on the denial that he ever said such things in the first place. It’s not even necessary to provide links to examples of these Trumpian methods anymore. The practice is so common with Trump that no one can tell the difference between what Trump wants to believe, what he actually believes and what he wants the rest of the world to believe. There are no distinctions in the distinctive realities created by Donald Trump.

Trump KIllers But meanwhile, Trump has been executing vicious policies behind the curtain of his public lying and displays of petulant patriotism. His efforts to kill the environment alone are worth contempt. All these laws governing quality of life, historical and natural sites, wildlife and environment, migratory birds and clean air, safe drinking water, noise control, the National Wildlife Refuge System Administration, rivers and harbors, even the Eagle Protection Act, have all been axed by the pen of a deranged madman eager to privatize America to its own death.

Cognitive dissonance

As a result of Trump’s own derangement, especially toward President Barack Obama, two things are at work among his followers. The first is a willing form of cognitive dissonance to embrace the reality that Donald Trump seeks to impose upon the nation and the world. Most recently, the Trumpian claim that Coronavirus was not a threat in the United States was followed a few months later by a radical disclaimer that he knew all along that the risk of the pandemic was dangerous. He only admitted it when people started to die. So which was it? Trump does not care. Nor do his followers. And his Republican colleagues immediately started the actuarial calculations to decide how many deaths were worth protecting the fragile illusion of the Trump economy, which he did no real work to establish in the first place.

Instead, Trump chose to blame everyone but himself for the nation’s belated response to the COVID-19 threat. He most ardently blamed his favorite enemy, President Barack Obama. That tactic is highly favored by Trump supporters, along projecting what Hillary WOULD HAVE DONE as president, to explain all the bad that has ever happened in this country. But now Trump’s lying and selfish delusions while blaming others for his mismanagement of this pandemic is having a real cost to the people that support him. But to affirm his supposed authority, Trump even has the gall to interfere and even block distribution of needed supplies to governors who do not “appreciate him.” This is a deranged attitude if there ever was one.

Even as it blows up in his face, Trump continues to claim that his response to the pandemic is as “perfect” as his call to Ukraine when he attempted to coerce and corrupt the president of that country into doing his personal political bidding. Trump was impeached by Congress for that offense against the Constitution that he swore an oath to protect. Yet his supporters continue supporting his claims that the investigation and impeachment were all a “hoax.”

These are all the behaviors of a truly deranged man. The fact of the matter is that Trump Derangement Syndrome, rather than being a rhetorical accusation against his critics, is actually a literal description of its actual perpetrator. But Trump supporters love to project derangement on those who accuse the President of being out of line. This is the great sin of American culture today.

Standing up to the lies

Timeline of Trump's statement So I did not back down to the Trump supporter who protested when I pointed out that his claim about Trump Haters was a disturbing example of the problems Trump has created for himself. The arrival of a Russian plane on American soil was yet another hint that Trump is beholden and more likely to ask favors of Putin than to stand up for America’s interests despite that nation’s consistent attempts to undermine our democracy. Trump loathes admitting that Russians helped him get elected in 2016 despite massive evidence from the Mueller Report that revealed how, where and when it was done.

On pointing that out, my “friend” on Facebook insisted that I was a “victim” of Trump Derangement Syndrome. So I went on the offensive and documented a concise and logical list of the ways that Trump is a proven fraud from his own University to his corrupt foundation. And my friend stated those things were “all in the past” and had no relevance now. I countered by stating that Trump’s deceit and lies are still much in evidence during his contemptuously bad response to COVID-19, and that his horrific methods are now costing thousand of American lies.

And at that, my friend folded up his post and took it offline like a little kid gathering up his red playground ball and running home while crying out, “I’m taking my ball and going home!” Along the way he Unfriended me, but not before playing the victim himself, by posting a comment: “I thought you were a good guy.”

I am a good guy. I just don’t like Presidents who lie and abuse other people. That does not make me either a bad guy or in any way “deranged.”

What we can all learn from this experience is that there is nothing more frail in spirit than a bully projecting their own hate on others. When their projected cruelty finally reflects back on them in the form of exposed victimhood and selfish aims, take their playground ball and run home to MAGAhood where nobody seems to care if people play by the rules, because it’s all about getting their selfish aims fulfilled in the end.

That’s how Trumpers play the game.

Donald Trump’s sneakers are better than yours, and that’s all he cares about

March 27, 2020March 27, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

Balenciaga Men’s Triple S Mesh & Leather Sneakers, Blue $975.00 from Nieman-Marcus

More than a few people have tried to explain the persona and psychology of Donald Trump. While I tried most of my adult life to avoid thinking about him, ignoring his desperately cloying attempt at self-justification with his reality TV program “The Apprentice” and all its spinoffs, it has been impossible to avoid him now that he’s, gulp, still officially the President of the United States.

The best any of us can do to deal with this strange bit of unreality is to use our personal frame of reference and try to comprehend why a blatant egotist such as Trump is worshipped by his base. In my case, I’ve had the opportunity to deal with a number of Trump-style personalities in my life. I learned quickly how shallow they can be in how they think and what they value. I also learned how prodigiously they like to project those “values” on everything they encounter in life. And how some people still invariably worship them for these traits.

Sneaker values

Once while traveling to a client meeting in the company of the President and CEO of the marketing firm where I worked as a creative director, the man who called himself Mr. Big turned to me and said, “What’s the best running shoe?”

He knew that I was a competitive runner, so I thought he was curious about the best type of running shoes for his own exercise routine. As I began to explain the differences in the various types of shoes available on the market, noting there were shoes for cushioning, stability and…he interrupted me and said. “No, I mean, what’s the most expensive shoe?”

That is how he judged quality. What costs the most. He wanted to make sure that the sneakers he wears are somehow better than yours.

To Trump, the White House is a dump

Trump-golf-seated

We now know that a “my sneakers are better than yours” attitude is one of the most Trumpian traits of all. After all, it was Trump that branded the White House a “dump,” likely comparing the historic symbol of presidential occupancy to the glitzy hotels on which he slaps his own name as if it were a label on an expensive shirt. It’s what Trump does. And little more.

Shitholes and brown-skinned invaders

But the public insult toward the White House was not enough for Trump. He went on to label countries that he did not like “shitholes” because they did not meet his perception of what developed nations should be.

That Trumpian slur was rife with racist implications, a fact proved beyond doubt when Trump went on to brand immigrant traffic from largely white countries, such as Norway, far more desirable than people coming to America from countries whose principal populations happen to have brown or other colors of skin. In Trump’s estimation, the “best sneakers” on the immigrant market have fair hair, blue eyes, and white skin.

It’s all in what you own

We’re also faced with a President who once paid off a porn star for silence about their relationship, and who walked in on half-dressed teenage girls at beauty pageants because he thought he “owned” them.

That same President repeatedly tried to “own” President Obama for golfing during his terms in office. Yet Trump has proceeded to golf more than any President in history, mostly at resorts that he owns so that his companies will profit at the expense of the American taxpayer. His properties even charge the Secret Service $650 per night, thus maximizing Trump’s personal profit by overcharging an agency that can’t say “no” to his demands because they are charged with protecting him. This is criminal activity according to the emoluments laws governing the President of the United States. Trump should be impeached for it.

Fraud and fecklessness

But Trump is a feckless egotist, a person incapable of grasping that the fraud committed through his own University and the closure of his own foundation for corrupt activity are clear indictments of his criminally corrupt nature. In that same vein, he also claimed that his coercive call to the president of Ukraine was “perfect” and then proceeded to malign the whistleblower, the free press, the public servants testifying about corruption and Congress for investigating and telling the truth about Trump’s actions and baldly apparent motives. Even Senators that voted to acquit Trump admitted that he’d broken the law.

A petty thief

The Trump presidency is essentially one petty theft of virtue after another. Every day brings a new little crime, as if Trump were walking into an expensive shoe store, tossing his own shoes aside, slipping on a pair of the most outrageously priced footwear he can find, then walking out the door as if he owned them. If anyone questions the criminality of his actions, he blames the store for selling that brand of footwear in the first place.

Bad sneakers and the viral stench of Coronavirus

To Trump, any truth that conflicts with his oversized ego is a set of bad sneakers that he brands “fake news” and then turns around to brag about how much his own stupid sneakers are worth.

Melania sneakers But now his selfishness and bald-faced attempts to protect his petty theft of God and country are having deadly consequences. He spitefully killed the agency established by President Obama to prepare and protect the nation in the event of a pandemic. Then lacking any credible information about the threat to come, Trump also chose to ignore and lie about the deadly nature of Covid-19. Instead, Trump tried to hide the threat from the public and claim that it would disappear “like magic.” All done so that his precious perch on a humming economy (thanks much to President Obama) would not be impacted. As for his equally clueless and tone-deaf First Lady Melania Trump, all she could do during the rising pandemic was tweet about some tennis facility she was proud to christen. But she’s got nice sneakers…

Bad sneakers

You fellah, you tearin’ up the street
You wear that white tuxedo
How you gonna beat the heat
Do you take me for a fool
Do you think that I don’t see
That ditch out in the valley
That they’re digging just for me

–Bad Sneakers, Steely Dan

Now the United States has surpassed even China in the number of tested cases of a dangerous strain of Coronavirus. Trump insists that everything is going great and that his administration has done everything it can to help the American people. He even begged the Senate to toss a bunch of money together to bail him out of this mess by bribing business and the American people into not blaming him for the gross incompetency related to the dangers of this pandemic. It’s clear that it is Trump’s sneakers that stink in this case, but he’s blaming the smell on everyone else. And always will.

Trump’s dishonesty just as dangerous as the Coronavirus

March 11, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

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The chief problem America faces right now is a potential pandemic with Coronavirus spreading rapidly. A disease specialist named Michael Osterholm that was interviewed on the Joe Rogan show predicts the virus is just beginning to show its impact. Interestingly, he notes that children are some of the people least likely to be infected while adults in their forties and beyond are most susceptible. He also says that the disease spreads both by physical contact and through the air. This is new information to many of us.

Newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune have begun to release information from disease specialists as well. That is the function of a free press, to educate people without the barrier of censorship or control by factions that might benefit from controlling or influencing public opinion. In this case, good information can mean the difference between life and death.

That is where the Coronavirus pandemic intersects with the dishonesty of the Trump administration, whose immediate goal in addressing the disease was first trying to ignore the threat, then moving to control the flow of information distributed to the public. This included blocking experts on disease control from informing the public. Instead, the Trump administration and especially its specious leader, Donald J. Trump, sought to play down the risks and pump up the volume on how, according to Mr. Trump, the disease would “go away.”

Trump even compared this approach to the “perfect” phone call he made to the President of Ukraine. That call led to Trump’s impeachment after multiple officials associated with or managed by the Trump administration testified their concerns about the manifest corruption at work in the President’s efforts to bribe, coerce or manipulate Ukraine into announcing an investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden, who just now swept a sea of delegates into his corner after a Tuesday election.

That dishonest action was deserving of impeachment along with the obstruction of justice that followed. Along the way, Trump blocked or attempted to block testimony that might compromise his own versions (and they were multiple) of what he calls “truth.”

Meanwhile, Trump maligns the press as “fake news” because it refuses to comply with that approach to information dispensation, otherwise known as propaganda.

It all led to a Constitutional crisis in which the House delivered articles of impeachment to the Senate, a body that first took an oath to conduct a full and honest trial and then refused to allow additional testimony even while confessions trickled out that Republican Senators knew that Trump had abused his power. But they were too afraid to vote using whatever shriveled notion of conscience they had left, and Trump was ostensibly exonerated.

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This rewarded Trump’s dishonesty, and he loves it when that happens. His entire career is a testament to “winning” but he seems to love it best when it hurts others. That’s why he ran a show called The Apprentice in which he got to bully contestants by telling them, “You’re fired.”

In an article produced by a professor named Prof. David Honig of Indiana University, who teaches negotiation to college students, he examines Trump’s preferred method of achieving success. It is always the all-or-nothing approach in which he benefits. Honig notes that rather than approach negotiations through integrative bargaining, where both sides collaborate for mutual benefit, Trump prefers ‘distributive bargaining,’ in which he sees success as him winning when the other guy loses.

Honig writes: “Distributive bargaining always has a winner and a loser. It happens when there is a fixed quantity of something and two sides are fighting over how it gets distributed. Think of it as a pie and you’re fighting over who gets how many pieces. In Trump’s world, the bargaining was for a building, or for construction work, or subcontractors. He perceives a successful bargain as one in which there is a winner and a loser, so if he pays less than the seller wants, he wins. The more he saves the more he wins.”

Distributive bargaining has another facet that is not mentioned in Honig’s article, likely because he maintains the perspective of a teacher. But distributive bargaining has an even darker side than the tactics he mentions. Among its keen practitioners, distributive bargaining embraces the harsh philosophy that the ends justifies the means. In other words, even dishonest dealings are allowable if it means winning the day.

That’s why Trump’s dishonesty is now more dangerous than the Coronavirus itself. His emphatic claims that the disease poses no threat to the American way of life are just another case of distributive bargaining. But this time, he’s trying to bilk the American people into embracing a worldview that will literally kill people, possibly hundreds of thousands of people. Don’t get me wrong: Trump is not responsible for the Coronavirus or its spread in this country. But his selfish desire to have it just “go away” in an election year when he feels his power being threatened by forces outside of his control are an offense to his notion of distributive bargaining.

Hannity

And if Trump feels there is no way he can win, he resorts to his most effective tactic of all. He lies, and then repeats the lies. Then he hire or forces other people to repeat the lies. His lawyers. His media buddies. Then he accuses those of questioning his lies of promoting “fake news.” This is Donald Trump’s entire way of life. It is how he has gotten him everything he wanted except one thing: actual respect.

But we don’t owe Donald Trump any respect when he lies to us. This is not about “respecting the presidency” anymore. Trump has blown through that protection ten times over. His properties and his children are stealing taxpayer money and enriching themselves through forced purchases and international contacts that funnel money back to the Trump family. Trump’s own University was convicted of fraud and fined $25M. His foundation was proven to be corrupt. There is nothing honest going on with Donald J. Trump at all. His thousands of lies to the American people on every subject he addresses are well-documented.

And how he’s lying to protect his precious economy, a benefit that he dishonestly claims as a product of his own policies. And even that is a lie, as President Obama’s economic performance the last three years of his two terms in office beat Trump’s any way you slice it. That means Trump got to sail along for three years, all while doling out tax cuts to the rich and lying to the middle class that they would be permanently “better off” once growth rates of 6% took over.

Donald Trump's proposed golf course

That was a lie too. He will lie until his hair stands on end if he thinks it will help him “win” somehow.

But the Big Lie that Coronavirus is harmless is one of the most dangerous of its kind. Experts such as Michael Osterholm project that 48M people could be infected before this is through. That does not mean they’ll all die. And it doesn’t mean we have to panic.

But being smart is critical in times like these. That’s not what Trump has been doing so far. He’s telling us all to choose to be willingly ignorant and believe that he’s got this thing under control through his “natural ability” to divine the seriousness of any matter under the sun. But most of all, he fears that the one illusion holding him afloat, economic prosperity, is now being yanked like that combover on his head in a high wind.

But Trump clings to the virus of dishonesty because it sickens his detractors and gives his supporters a supposed immunity to the truth. That describes the entire legacy of the Trump presidency and the sickening support his faithful lend to his credulity.

That is the real sickness in America.

It isn’t Capitalism or Socialism that is the problem, it is Selfishism

March 5, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

“How is your 401K doing?”

That five-word challenge has been the battle cry of Trump supporters for the last three years. It is the ultimate “ends justifies the means” statement on what being a citizen of the United States is supposedly about.

It is also selfish and shallow as hell to think that the only pertinent thing about life is the near-term state of the economy. We all know how economics works. The markets go up and stay up for a while, then they go down again. These trends occur in cycles and none of the ups and downs have ever proven to be permanent.

bush911

The last time the economic markets experienced a “correction” was in the 2007-2009 period as President George W. Bush left office and President Barack H. Obama became President of the United States. The economy recovered slowly and modestly at first under Obama’s watch. Then it solidified and set a course on which the economy has sailed during three years under President Donald J. Trump.

The last three years of Obama’s term actually showed stronger job increases and economic growth rates than the Trump era. Yet somehow people who support Trump love to claim that their guy is the one who made America great again.

The sad fact is that Trump and the GOP aggressively hinted that economic growth in the wake of broad-based tax cuts might reach the 6% range. That brand of white-hot growth never materialized. The result has been a projected increase in the national deficit of $8.3 trillion, ironic considering that Trump also promised to eliminate the national debt in eight years.

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That hasn’t stopped Trump supporters from trumpeting the supposedly superior state of the Trump economy. But fractures in the market-based belief quickly appeared when global supply chains ground to a standstill as the Coronavirus epidemic started killing people.

Trump is clearly panicked about his economic perch.

In response, his administration moved to censor press conferences and control messaging by funneling all Coronavirus news through Vice President Mike Pence. That act alone is evidence of the selfish style of management for which the Trump presidency has become known.

It also showed up in his impeachable actions in trying to coerce the nation of Ukraine to conduct an investigation of his perceived political rival Joe Biden. Trump used governmental resources to pursue the selfish ambitions of his re-election. One of the President’s lawyers even had the gall to claim that such selfish actions were in the nation’s best interests because anything the President does automatically qualifies in that category.

Those selfish instincts seem to be greatly admired by Trump supporters whose cheering attendance at his rallies borders on cult worship. And speaking of worship, even Christian evangelicals have chosen to excuse Trump’s inherently selfish nature with the self-serving claim that “God works with flawed people.”

It’s all part of the same Selfishism that insists on dismissing facts in favor of self-serving ideology. On the religious front, that practice has a long tradition as a faith once built on disciples going two-by-two into the world to spread the Good News consolidated under Roman power. In turn, it became a force of persecution, legalism, support of slavery and even genocide. All these were done in the name of tradition and for selfish reasons.

That’s how we got where we are today. The market system known as Capitalism rewards the selfish behavior of the powerful when left unchecked by any sort of social contract. That’s why the United States of America implemented the New Deal in the wake of the Great Depression. It was a recognition that Selfishism is the most destructive force of all in this world.

So claims that America is a “Christian Nation” in law or spirit have proven wrong time and again by those claiming to be Christian. Nothing in the ideology of Donald Trump is remotely Christian in the earnest sense of the word. Yet many Christians have the gall to claim that Trump was literally installed by God to carry out his selfish whims, and that is precisely what they are. Trump is an opportunist and a demonstrated fraud when it comes to his business dealings. Even his own University was proven to be fraudulent, and so was his own foundation. Both were corrupted by his selfish desire to leverage his name without giving value back and to siphon money given for charitable purposes into his own coffers.

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Selfishism is what Trumpism is all about.

The United States of America will collapse as a democracy and a republic if the selfish instincts of people claiming to be dispossessed while embracing and preaching the doctrine of prejudice, bigotry and getting rich at all costs that Donald Trump espouses in more than dog-whistle fashion. He selfishly flaunts those values while mocking the free press for pointing out his lies and ridiculing responsible politicians for trying to hold him accountable.

He was impeached, but he is not contrite. It is telling that the faction of religious believers who love to blame America’s ills on gays or abortion or science are silent on the fact that the Coronavirus has emerged from the ether to threaten the autocratic stability of a President so concerned about himself that he can’t even admit that people are dying under his watch. Selfishism is the ultimate killer in this world, and it deserves its own political moniker. Sooner, rather than later.

The irony of lung cancer and Rush Limbaugh

February 4, 2020February 4, 2020 / Christopher Cudworth / Leave a comment

I’ve been a Rush Limbaugh “listener” for several decades now. I’ve heard him proclaim that there’s no such thing as hunger in America. I also heard him purposely conflate the term “personal autonomy” with “personal anarchy” while discussing how Dr. Jack Kervorkian described people making choices related to end-of-life decisions.

Today’s story in the Chicago Tribune quotes Limbaugh saying that he’s engaging a much more personal relationship with God now that he’s diagnosed with advanced-stage lung cancer. I recently had a friend and former coach die of that disease. He was a lifetime smoker and it finally caught up with him.

On that subject Limbaugh once prevaricated that we should all be thanking smokers for their contribution to the world. As recorded in a direct transcript from his live radio show, he conducted this conversation with a caller about the subject of smoking.

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CALLER: Earlier you were saying about smoking, that people ought to be thankful that there are smokers, because the money gotten from smoking helps to fund all these child programs and everything? But that’s like saying I’m glad that there’s bumper accidents because then auto mechanics would still have jobs and it improves the economy. Or knives. It’s a good thing that people cut themselves because that’s good for the bandage industry. That’s just my opinion.

RUSH: Well, now, wait. Hold it, hold it just a second. I’m sure the hospital industry would agree with you that they support knives, there wouldn’t be scalpels without knives.

CALLER: No. They’re not doing it on purpose, now. Wait a minute. People in hospitals that are —

RUSH: Hey, you need bandages.

CALLER: You’re doing that to cure somebody. They’re not doing that to hurt anybody.

The Caller hit a sore point with Limbaugh in that last statement. Rush has always claimed he’s trying to help America with his cut-and-dried brand of ideological advocacy. He once raved out loud that it was tough luck if some people couldn’t see well at night when vehicles equipped with high-intensity headlights blinded them. In other words, it’s never been caring about others than Limbaugh has advocated. He has been the King of Selfish Motivations for many decades, and now it’s come back to haunt him. Immediately after the initial exchange with his concerned caller, Limbaugh conducted a harsh yet brief tirade in defense of smokers.

RUSH: Well, smokers aren’t killing anybody.

CALLER: Except themselves.

RUSH: Yeah, but how long does it take?

That question is about to be answered for Limbaugh. It may indeed take a while for him to die, or it may snatch him overnight. He’s never appeared to be the picture of health, given his heavy lean toward obesity and an addiction to pain pills that turned him into a criminal of sorts to get his fix.

But he’s never been much for serious contrition about a single thing in his life. He instead claims to not suffer fools gladly, and that includes denying any form of science that contradicts his closely held beliefs in his own brand of “personal autonomy.”

The day that Rush stood on his soapbox bragging about the benefits of smoking, the Caller went on to bring up another topic

CALLER: — secondhand smoke.

RUSH: No. You can’t. That is a myth. That has been disproven at the World Health Organization and the report was suppressed. There is no fatality whatsoever. There’s no even major sickness component associated with secondhand smoke. It may irritate you, and you may not like it, but it will not make you sick, and it will not kill you.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.

Right there we have the horrific template for dismissing serious issues using simplistic examples. The same held true when Senator Jim Inhofe held aloft a snowball as evidence that climate change is a hoax.

Limbaugh is a fool about the subject of smoking, and many others. The real costs of smoking are documented in a Reuters story published in December, 2014:

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“Hoax” is a favorite word of ideological propagandists.

(Reuters) – Of every $10 spent on healthcare in the U.S., almost 90 cents is due to smoking, a new analysis says.

Using recent health and medical spending surveys, researchers calculated that 8.7 percent of all healthcare spending, or $170 billion a year, is for illness caused by tobacco smoke, and public programs like Medicare and Medicaid paid for most of these costs.

“Fifty years after the first Surgeon General’s report, tobacco use remains the nation’s leading preventable cause of death and disease, despite declines in adult cigarette smoking prevalence,” said Xin Xu from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who led the study.”

The examples we could list here of subjects in which Limbaugh purposely obscured the real costs of willful disregard for personal and public health are legendary and manifold. Here’s what the stubbornly ignorant Limbaugh said on his radio show about the subject of climate change:

RUSH: By the way, have you seen the latest lame attempt on this? You know what now, folks? Food crops are getting much harder to grow. Oh, yes! Climate change. Climate change has affected the pH of the soil. Climate change is causing soil to become more arid. Climate change is making it really, really, really tough on farmers to grow more food. We are on the verge of predictable starvation! They know no limits.

The dirty little secret about climate change, whether it’s man-made or not, is when it does happen, there’s gonna be a whole lot of the world that’s gonna be capable of growing food that now can’t, if they’re right. There’s no argument from here that the climate is not changing. Only a fool would say that is because the climate is constantly changing. We go ice age, we go dark age, we go sun age, we go oppressively hot; nobody can survive this. Earth has been around a long time.”

Gaslighting America

This is Rush Limbaugh seeking to dismiss human influence on climate change. In other words, it is a direct attempt to avoid personal responsibility for a problem that people can fix if they put their mind to it. But Rush Limbaugh and his listeners don’t like to admit the need to change, and that’s deplorable. They don’t like to confront challenges ranging from racist outlooks to religious fears of science. They prefer instead to ignore the fact there is a problem while claiming that smoking or toxic greenhouse gasses provide a benefit to the world. That’s called gaslighting. It’s an attempt to abuse truth in favor of selfish, controlling behavior. And it’s rampant in America right now. Rush Limbaugh is a big reason for these attitudes.

Fixing problems

Now the whole world is having trouble breathing, and the cancer that is causing it is human activity. We are responsible for the fix we’re in.

And like Limbaugh, some turn quickly to God looking for a fix and a cure. Some even deign to claim that the destruction of the earth is itself God’s Will, and that we are only helping to bring that about.

That’s a killer philosophy, a pathology of the spirit aptly expressed by the likes of Donald Trump in his cloying attempts to recruit evangelicals to his side in a relentless pursuit of power. Trump preaches the depressingly nihilistic religion of the selfish, ignorant and fearful who love to claim absolute authority even as their worldview proves to be a cancer on everything it touches. It is willful naivete disguised as wisdom.

Proponents of willful naivete place their hopes in the near-term glory of a healthy economy, yet economic markets shudder at the merest hint of the newest flu virus whether it emerges from a snake, a monkey, a pig or a bird.

They claim Christian virtues by insisting that the nation can never come to true harm under the providence of God. Yet scripture documents the many ways people ignored the prophets in favor of selfish desires and aims. Nature and God combined to crush those cultures and empires for their hubris. A selective reading of scripture can produce whatever justification one desires, and the Christian religion has done that for nearly two millennia, killing Jews for the literal death of Jesus, a battle cry adopted by Adolf Hitler who justified the Holocaust by saying, and we paraphrase, “We are only doing what the Christian religion has been doing for 1500 years.”

Prejudice as principle

That brand of prejudicial hubris is precisely what Rush Limbaugh has preached and propagandized in America for three decades. His targeting of “liberals” has turned the ire of authoritarian believers into a murderous cabal craving absolute control over the American populace. His strain of political cancer now attacks the core of constitutional law in a Senate that refuses to hold a corrupt President accountable because it is too inconvenient to treat that cancer with the chemotherapy of impeachment. “It would be too rough on the country,” some Senators insist. This is what happens when prejudice is substituted for principle.

The realities of cancer

I’ve had friends die of cancer. I’ve had a wife die of cancer after eight years of survivorship. My mother died of cancer, but she passed much more quickly. In her case it was a mercy. In my wife’s case it was a journey. So I know what it means to confront cancer and to trust in God and friends to help deal with its concussive effects, whatever they may be.

I don’t wish those difficulties on anyone. But one cannot help recognize the irony of the unique brand of cancer now scourging Rush Limbaugh’s body. He’s already experiencing shortness of breath. Perhaps the doctors can save his life. Yet one wonders whether anyone is capable of saving his clearly vindictive soul. That is the challenge Rush Limbaugh truly needs to face, because he’s spent thirty years wishing evil upon those he abhors and hates. So we’ll see. Sometimes cancer changes people. And wouldn’t that be a remarkable outcome for one of the most cancerous personalities in American history?

Genesisfix's Blog

On religion and politics

Author: Christopher Cudworth