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TheFerret

(629 posts) Tue Apr 28, 2020, 10:10 PM Apr 2020

Dissecting the Conservative Brain During the Age of Coronavirus (Ferret/Shower Cap)

So, how’re you holding up under quarantine? Is your family driving you mad yet? Are you beginning to entertain Saw film fantasies about your spouse/parent/child/roommate? Feel free to discuss your grotesque, labyrinthine, plots in the comments; don’t worry, superhero blogger/client confidentiality rules apply. In the meantime, the real horror is, as always, the news.

(Find this post, in living colors, with nifty news links, here: http://showercapblog.com/dissecting-the-conservative-brain-during-the-age-of-coronavirus/)

Looking through my outline for tonight’s piece, I noticed that the headlines from the past few days have laid bare many of the deficiencies of the modern Republican mindset. Therefore, it’s THEME NIGHT here at Shower Cap’s blog, as we will pick through the conservative brain, looking for ticks and explanations, while we wait for the scientists to distill their anti-COVID serum from Diet Mountain Dew and Tom Hanks’ blood.

We’ll start with the low-hanging fruit. When last we met, Doctor Dotard had just prescribed a sunshine and bleach cocktail for the corona that ails ya, and sure enough, MAGA nation treated America’s poison control centers and emergency rooms to a surge in “is it ok if I swallow Clorox?” calls and even “whoops I swallowed Clorox without asking first” visits. So the first observable trait of the conservative mind is that it just doesn’t work very well.

The Daily Propaganda Spew itself seems to be a casualty of InjectLysolDirectlyIntoYourEyeballgate, as Weehands McNodick’s handlers have finally convinced him to back off before he accidentally tells his followers they can treat COVID-19 by pounding their foreheads with the claw end of a hammer. I’m sure he’ll still waddle out to bellow and whine from time to time, but for now it appears America’s longest, shittiest, and most dangerous clown show is more or less cancelled.

Many of the more regrettable powers wielded by Hairplug Himmler are those delegated to him as commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. Deprived of the Klan rallies he so desperately needs to keep his fragile ego inflated, he’s un-canceling West Point’s graduation ceremonies, and ordering 1000 cadets back to serve as his captive audience in obviously unsafe conditions while he rants about his media coverage and Hillary Clinton getting debate questions in advance. Seems like a piss-poor reason to risk lives to me; anyone who dies because a deranged game show host felt like using them as a self-aggrandizing prop for an hour or so is gonna be the laughingstock of Valhalla. At any rate, here we see another fundamental trait of the Trumpian brain: homicidally sociopathic selfishness.

Team Shitmaggot petulantly attempted to order CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins to give up her front row seat in the Shart House briefing room and switch with a reporter in the back (both refused, yet another tally mark in Littlefinger’s miles-long L column), a near-perfect manifestation of the mashup of authoritarianism and pettiness at the heart of this demented worldview. It was like if Mussolini and a middle manager at the Comcast call center had a kid.

Meanwhile Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton helpfully demonstrated the long-term effects of allowing your mind to fester for years in a simmering stew of self-righteousness and prejudice. In Tom’s hate-warped brain, it actually seemed like a good idea to go on Fux Nooz to demand that American universities cease teaching Chinese students science. That happened. In the real world. “Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers” are still okay though, but I think we need to follow up with the Senator’s office, get some clarification. Is a business major permissible, or can we afford the risk to America’s strategic stockpile of shift management techniques?

Now, Tom’s dumbshit proposal is of course hellaciously racist, but please don’t ignore the fact that it’s also gobsmackingly stupid. This dolt is a U.S. Senator. This is an idea he had that he felt was good enough to share with the whole world on live television. He thinks mom should stick this one to the fridge with her best magnet. Lord. Tells you everything you need to know about Cotton and the malicious twerps who platform him that all they have to offer during this global crisis is a little more fuel for the fires of hatred, while countless Asian and Asian-American health care professionals risk their lives daily.

Famed Arizona Republiclown Kelli Ward has figured out how to dupe the lamestream librul media, proposing Operation: Trojan Nurse, in which astroturfed anti-quarantine protesters would clothe themselves not in Confederate flags, but the garb of health care providers! Wow, and you totally woulda gotten away with it, Kelli, if you hadn’t POSTED YOUR MASTER PLAN RIGHT ON FUCKING TWITTER, and also if this flock of rectal boils could actually pass for medical professionals, and wouldn’t get tripped up by the first reporter who asked “so which side of the body is the heart on, Doc?” The conservative mind is not as clever as it believes itself to be.

Meanwhile Kim Jong-un has become Schrödinger’s Dictator, somehow both alive and dead, and also, mysteriously, existing on some levels of reality as a strawberry cheesecake Jell-O pudding cup. This story does not, as you will note, fit neatly in with the blog’s theme, which upsets no one more than me, I assure you.

But I can get right back on track with the tale of Audrey Whitlock, a leader of the North Carolina cell of the Your Life For My Haircut crowd. Audrey is throwing quite the little tantrum that she was forced to quarantine after testing positive for COVID-19, painting herself as a modern-day George Washington willing to (make you) die for her right to spread contagion throughout her community, potentially killing her neighbors over an impulse trip down to the corner shop for some vape pens and an Almond Joy. This gets to heart of a key aspect of the Republican psyche, the perversion of the very concept of liberty, where your “freedom” to indulge your slightest whim is more important than your fellow humans’ lives.

So, let’s take a look at that perversion on the macro level. Now, Republicans are really in a pickle these days. Their whole November strategy, basically “Lookit This Sexxxy Economy Who Needs Decency or Democracy Anyhow,” ran into the coronavirus buzzsaw, because asking the 26 million newly-unemployed if they’re better off than they were four years ago suddenly seems like a shit plan. Now, a functioning brain would say, hey, let’s emulate New Zealand here. Let’s ramp up testing. Let’s enforce strict, universal, lockdown policies as long as we have to, and then, once we’ve got shit under control, we can ease back into something resembling normal life, in a careful, orderly, fashion. Let’s stay safe and save lives.

Ah, but this is not how the Republican mind works! Long-term planning eludes the conservative almost completely. Sacrificing comfort today to ensure a better tomorrow simply does not register as a viable possibility. The cost TODAY is all that matters. And that’s why the GOP, in its giddiness to push the serf class back out the door and into potentially lethal working conditions, isn’t focused on procuring the testing or protective equipment needed to keep people safe, but rather on shielding employers from liability for the inevitable ensuing avalanche of infections. Yes, they know we will get sick by the millions if we go back to work now. They don’t care about that, they care about your boss getting sued for putting your life in danger in the first place.

Indeed, the Velveeta Vulgarian announced today that he’ll sign an executive order compelling meat packing plants to remain open, creating a zone as free of legal consequences for the owners as it of PPE for the rank-and-file workers. And yes, you’re not dreaming, this is already an industry that’s been hit hard by the coronavirus, with outbreaks in numerous plants leading to shutdowns. There’s no mandate to create safer working conditions, of course, just Git Out There and Work Till You Die, Peasants. Now I see Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds proclaiming that any plebs who don’t feel like showing up for work in the hot zone will be ineligible for unemployment, since they value their own worthless lives more than her precious economy. Guess which political party Kim’s a member of?

Politico reports, “tens of millions of pounds of American-grown produce is rotting in fields as food banks across the country scramble to meet a massive surge in demand,” because the Republican commitment to moronic axioms like “government is the problem, not the solution,” means they can’t, or won’t, use the powers of government to help the American people even when government is the clear, best, or even ONLY FUCKING SOLUTION. This is Shitty Wonderland, my friends; Lewis Carroll has switched from opium to basement-lab meth. I would very much like to leave.

Above all else, the Trumpian mind is consumed at all hours by nagging resentments, leaving little room for stupid cuck shit like “doing your job as President of the United States.” That’s how you wind up with our own Adderall-Addled Assclown, shuffling around in the midst of the pandemic whose spread he enabled at every turn, unmoved by the massive list of vital, life-saving, tasks he’s still fucking neglecting all these weeks later, instead devoting his time to screeching into the void his longstanding grievances about journalists and their unjustly-won “Noble Prizes.”

Someday, some intrepid adventurer will risk their life attempting scale the colossal mountain of evidence that Tangerine Idi Amin knew about the dangers of the coronavirus weeks in advance of doing anything about it, opting instead to golf and lie while the little fucker spread throughout the populace. Now we’ve learned the intelligence community was screaming DO SOMETHING, YOU MALODOROUS SCATMOUND in the President’s Daily Brief as far back as January. But you see, the President doesn’t LIKE reading, and therefore 59,000 Americans (and counting) had to die. Again, his momentary displeasure > your life. We passed 1,000,000 officially documented cases yesterday, by the way.

Vice President Mike Pants took himself a little field trip to the Mayo Clinic, pointedly refusing to follow their requirement that everyone wear a mask, and if some enterprising viral beatniks happened to hitch a ride on Mikey Hairshirt back to his place of business, wouldn’t that just be a shame? Here we see the Veep valuing the approval of his Turd Emperor over his own health, or the health of the millions who (tragically, inexplicably) look to him as a role model during this outbreak. Mike was never too bright to begin with, and now his brain is just full-on broke.

And now Government Cheese Goebbels wants to tie coronavirus relief funding to immigration policy, his latest stab at blackmailing states into abandoning sanctuary city laws. You see here that the Trumpian mind is incapable of learning, returning to the corrupt quid pro quo well even after getting impeached for such behavior just a few short weeks ago.

(Oddly, there do not seem to be any such strings attached to the $96.1 million bailout his big donor buddy (a dude named Monty Bennett, I guess because “Beaufort Whitecastle” was taken) snuck through a loophole in the PPP fund intended to help small businesses.)

In conclusion, the Early 21st Century Trumpist Conservative Republican Mind is a dark and damaged thing, a diseased clump of misfiring neurons incapable of empathy, logic, or even simple math; it is, in short, the mind of a Giant Burning Asshole. I certainly hope none of y’all are locked up with one right now. Which brings us back to Saw. And with that, I sign off...stay safe out there, Shower Captives!