WHAT JUST HAPPENED?!?
I Call Bullshit on the Past Three Months.
If the murder of George Floyd and resulting legitimate calls for social justice — sadly rendered impotent by grossly illegitimate rampaging, criminality, looting and more murder during our ongoing American Nightmare — revealed anything, it’s this:
Coronavirus was a lie.
Not that Coronavirus didn’t happen. Not that people weren’t sickened, people haven’t been killed, and one hundred percent of the population hasn’t been impacted by our new, for the moment, unpreventable contagion.
This is without dispute. Something happened.
But (so far) the “inevitable” hasn’t happened: From ‘inevitable’ health care system collapse to ‘inevitable’ regional “spikes” after cautious reopenings at the municipal level… Nothing about this global pandemic, this international state of emergency, nationwide crisis, State of New York PAUSE, New York City shutdown… has been accurate, or as expected.
The grotesque, almost parodic fear-mongering across many (most) media platforms, mainstream and social… the daily TV shows hosted by non-entities and also-rans starved and grasping, clutching for power, tripping over themselves to bogart the airwaves — interpreters flailing away beside them — at most state and local/municipal levels, have not been informative, let alone necessary.
If anything, they have been transparent: Windows revealing naked ambition, random “orders”, shocking incompetence and/or half-truths.
… to put it generously.
Some ‘hosts’ of these daily TV shows have even become household names in the past months (interestingly, almost every one of them, a Democrat in his or her own right): Andrew Cuomo… Bill De Blasio… Eric Garcetti… Gretchen Whitmer… JB Pritzker… Chicago Mayor! New Jersey Governor!
At the federal level, there was the addition of co-stars to the productions— semi-regular cast members, most with featured speaking roles (and costumed smartly!) — written in to stand beside or interact with the lead… some rising to household-name status themselves.
Dr. Birx! Dr. Fauci! Alex Azar! That Surgeon General!
ALL will be remembered as featured players in our U.S. reality series, CORONA! (S1), which premiered winter/spring 2020.
CORONA! lasted a mere three months before being bumped from its prime time slot and suddenly facing cancellation…
I don’t know about you, but I saw this coming! First they started rotating the cast around. Sometimes Dr. Birx would not appear in an episode… or there’d be disproportionate drama from That Surgeon General…
On the state and local networks, the Andrew Cuomo character manslaughtered a few thousand nursing home residents, and Chicago Mayor! got a haircut while JB Pritzker was ordering everybody else in Illinois to stay home … and that Gretchen Whitmer’s husband, right??
Everything seemed to be falling apart with the CORONA! show, and it seemed like they were running out of ideas.
Luckily, a summer replacement was being developed. An electrifying pilot episode, in which an emotionally unbalanced White cop appears to kill, for no reason, an unarmed Black man, setting off a chain of events co-opted by criminals, anarchists and rubber-necking, fire-starting riot tourists of all ethnicities.
Killing, looting, vandalism, willful destruction of private and public property, bodily harm, breaking and entering, destruction of neighborhoods and whole cities ensue… not only eviserating the good intentions and rightful calls for social justice, but pissing all over the figurative grave, and literal remembrance, of the murdered protagonist, George Floyd himself.
Also buried in the uber-violence, the surging stock market at the moment, and our increasingly fast-paced phased reopenings… forgotten… so seemingly now, last season…
The grim-reaping specter of CORONA!
Though some of the most heinously animalistic “protesters” out there smashing windows, hurling bricks, stealing, burning, defecating in public and defacing property were wearing masks (God bless ’em!), many were not.
And yet.
There they were: Shoulder to shoulder! Chanting and yelling! Ostensibly spraying their “droplets” around for all to suck in… and maybe (just a hunch) that was part of the anarchy?
Where was the media hectoring, the derisive beratement, through all of this, as cities burned? We all remember Memorial Day weekend… or when Georgia re-opened a hair salon… and heard the disproportionate cries of outrage, shaming and — again — fear-mongering that echoed through the canyons of social media, from the pages of stentorian Grey Ladies through the empty airport waiting gates where CNN and friends take off.
We were made to feel illegal for wanting to leave our homes, hit a swimming pool or a beach, get a haircut… go back to work and make money again, restart our economies, unlock our pauses.
Yet seemingly, no one gives a shit anymore. We can come, we can go. We can mask or unmask. We can rampage and kill and destroy, and besmirch and subvert the name George Floyd and pervert Social Justice… and not have to worry anymore, it seems, about being informed it’s “inevitable” we’re all going to DIE from CORONA!
This is good. We’re left alone, finally, at last.
And maybe… just maybe (just a hunch)? The past three months, or six months worldwide, will become revealed. If not to be an outright lie — For something happened… is happening — then at least a televised revolution.
