The Sheer Awe-inspiring American Clusterfuck

This is not exaggeration for effect.

I am awed by the American handling of Coronavirus. Truly awed. I’ve been writing about the slow-motion American collapse for ages. Heck, last year I wrote an article about how the US is a failing state:

The US is a gold-flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.

Yee-hah!

So, right now we have five states in the US that never bothered to self-isolate.

We have the Governor of Georgia announcing he will allow gyms, barbers, and fitness clubs, among others, to reopen on the 24th.

We have the Governor of Florida reopening Florida’s beaches. Good thing Florida doesn’t have a lot of old people!

There are astroturf protests asking for an end to isolation. “Let us die, let us die, let us DIE!” (Also, let us kill others.)

Virtually all the relief money has flowed to the top, not the bottom. Landlords and tenants are in crisis. Unemployment is going over 30 percent and in many places higher. A vast swathe of US small business will be destroyed, and they are unlikely to recover in a generation. Firms which borrowed money to do stock buy backs, or to give money to their private equity purchasers are slopping at the trough, but many of the actual businesses on the ground (like Neiman Marcus) will go under.

PPE can’t be found for hospital or logistics workers. Important pieces of the logistics hub, like meat packing plants, are shutting down. Warehouse workers are protesting, truckers are scared, etc.

The US is unable to make or procure an adequate number of masks or prioritize who gets them (though, really, everyone should be). The ventilators made by GM are inadequate, because Trump wanted to keep the price down.

Hospitals not only don’t have enough PPE, they’re going bankrupt because they haven’t been given enough money.

And so on.

Failing state. Cannot actually do really basic things. New Zealand did everything right, the US has done almost nothing right, and when it has, it is undone by some drooling, incompetent, ideological stooge or corrupt businessman or politician: “Get them back to work! I’m losing money!”

Here’s one simple issue: New York and other states are turning the corner. Stats are difficult, but it can be seen in the reduction of new cases in the hospitals. It will take some time to really get the curve down, but it’s being done.

Meanwhile, there are still accelerating pockets of infection in states that never shut down and other states are re-opening too soon.

How do you handle this? Well, what I would do if I were governor is get together with other governors who aren’t completely evil and corrupt and close the borders between states. Shipped goods from lunatic states gets put in depots on the border and is picked up by local shippers, everyone from a state which hasn’t isolated correctly doesn’t get in unless they go into quarantine.

To do this, the Governors will likely have to call up the National Guard. The US will be divided into groups of states which have shut off almost all travel between themselves.

All assuming Trump doesn’t get in the way and make it impossible, in which case, reinfection! More isolation, etc.

A complete clusterfuck.

Iceland, which has handled this pandemic in exemplary fashion, has noted that they have done what they were taught to do by Americans. Americans can no longer do these things. Jane Jacobs, in her book “Dark Age Ahead,” said that the key sign of the oncoming Dark Age was old knowledge being lost; that things which we could once do, we no longer could. She actually used the CDC as an example, and that was decades ago.

This is genuinely awe-inspiring to watch. I am truly amazed. I imagine it’s like watching the late Roman Empire, muttering to oneself, “We were never as great as they say, but we we could get things done.”

But the American elite reaction to anything these days is to see it as a looting opportunity. Pump up the stock market, let the peons starve and run out of rent money, shovel money to the rich, and buy up distressed assets. That’s what both DC Republicans and Democrats are doing and okay with. Yes, yes, Democrats are okay with it. They could actually play hardball and have not, and instead have capitulated after token protests.

There are clusters of competence, of course, but they are overwhelmed by incompetence, corruption, and callous disregard for anyone who doesn’t make at least seven figures a year. The elites are inbred, out of touch with actual production and only capable of playing political games. They get money by manipulating politics, not by genuine production.

The masses are little better. If New York Governor Cuomo had put New York on isolation even two weeks earlier, he could have saved thousands of lives. He has been behind the ball on everything all the way down the line. Of course, his approval numbers are soaring. (He’s an inbred incompetent, but less incompetent than Trump, so I guess he’s graded on a scale.)

It’s impossible to keep up with this, but the bottom line is that the US is broken. You’ve off-shored too much production capacity, your elites are incompetent, out of touch, corrupt, and trained to make their money by hurting other people. Your population refuses to vote for anyone who does the right thing, and instead keeps choosing (with the aid of the media, yes) people who are evil and so impaired that a sensible person would be aghast at the thought of even hiring them to walk their dog or babysit their kids. (Tell me that you would tolerate either Biden or Trump doing either job. But those are the people you want to be the most important person in the country.)

All empires and great nations end. With almost no exceptions, they rot from the inside, and any outside push is secondary–such as from threats they could easily have defeated in their prime (as Rome was able to keep the Germans on the other side of the Rhine for centuries).

America is a failing state. It can’t even handle problems for which the solution is well-defined. It can’t resist turning every crisis into an opportunity to make its elites richer. Its population prefers incompetent and depraved leaders who have spent their entire lives demonstrating contempt for the people who vote for them.

Failing state.

But awe inspiring to watch. Surreal. Amazing.

edit (April 23, 2020): Replaced “New Zealand” with Iceland for the quote about who they learned from. Both countries have handled Covid far better than the US to date.

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