A century ago we had the technology to produce light-bulbs that lasted a hundred years, whereas now they barely last one. The only reason for the change was that charging you every year means more profit than would charging every other generation. Cars manufactured 50 years ago can still be spotted on the road, when no car built today will last 5. Faulty products became status quo in the USA. This began through psychiatry, where problems required prolonged attentions, ongoing therapy and constant medicinal changes. Each and every industry adapted this, with never-ending replacements and upgrades guaranteeing customers have no choice but to return again and again. Hollywood won’t ever close down because they’ve made enough movies. Anyone believing there’s a magic, done in one pill waiting to be unearthed for fixing the virus has no sense of their surroundings, neither history or culture. Customers aren’t actually allowed to get satisfied, not when perpetuating and growing demand is the methodology of all business. Profit is always the one and only goal of business, not saving lives or anything else. Advertising gladly denies that, but only to make you feel like less of a tool for your continuing patronage.
And Americans are roundly fucked for no better reason but that our government still insists on finding opportunities for private profits to be made from our circumstances. It’s never a partisanship thing in the slightest. It’s long been the sole function of this government. It is *the* American culture.
All along, Trump’s plan has clearly been to wait for private enterprise to find means to profiteer the situations. Meanwhile asshats are flipping the fuck out over a week or two of limited self-indulgence, in abject denial how it will now be years before covid is a non-issue. The USA currently has about a fifth of all the world’s coronavirus cases, while in all likelihood less than 10% of the population has been tested thus far. And when *most* cities have no sequesters in place. Or means for additional tests. Anyone who says you can’t fight fire with fire isn’t fully appreciating how this virus is kicking America’s ass.
Bravely going through choreographed motions, how will you derivative souls survive this momentary lapse in self-indulgence? Oh, what fates! Innocently denied the chance to consume without consequence! How dare the world not wipe your anal cleft thoroughly! People should be tagging governmental centers right now, but they won’t get their panties in a knot until TV production schedules begin to lapse. Even before the virus people’d rather shell out their savings to hit comic-con than gather at Mar-a-Lago with pitchforks and torches.
The strangeness too great for us to address the pain, the confusion too mesmerizing. We have not been humbled, we have been made dumb by our plight, tongues tied and jaws dangling. To spit in the wound, no nation in the history of the world is further in debt than we in the USA, and the secret to how we get by is to exist in abject denial of that. And of everything else reality has to offer. If the USA were an individual it’d be condemned as poorest in all the lands for being furthest behind. But because half of those expenditures of decades past went to building hundreds of military bases in everyone’s backyard, its debtors have no choice but to compliment its hair. Government expects private groups to fill voids, for profit, or when lives are on the line then setups such as churches who’ve their own reprehensible mandates. Social safety nets across the country have been wiped in the last decade. The virus hits, Uncle Sam’s immediate emphasis wasn’t the livelihoods of tax-payers but assurances for Wall Street. I get how the majority of followers to orthodox religions do as they do acting from desperation, because this world is a fucking mess that never relents. It doesn’t make them right though. Faith in a government which systematically fails its constituents is no more reasonable.
A small detail I see too many neglecting, is that if one manages to recover from covid they are not then immune to it. There are documented reprisals in virtually every nation experiencing the virus. With most of the USA under no quarantine whatsoever, and no national standard for the places whose leaders do have some measure of common sense, a definitive cure-all would take years to fully implement. As long as it’s anywhere, no place is permanently safe. And even then, no cure will be definitive or finite, because all industries, especially medicine, require repeat business. We traded off on closure for the sake of ongoing treatments and updates long ago, because for-profit anything means profit is the goal, not a job well done. I bet whenever an actual treatment is produced, it will be just as ongoing, with annual booster shots or some-such. And applying to literally everyone would mean the widespread execution will surely find loopholes from coverage by medicare/medicaid, as profit always comes first. It’s a pathology, when all dreams are attached to incentive, then profit will always announce an excuse for itself. Maybe it’s time for banks to become nationalized. Shutter the Dow indefinitely until actual priorities are dealt with.
A lot of what I write has the ring of pessimism, but I find all of this liberating. Happiness is unobtainable under illusions or pretenses. Let these walls crumble so we can finally take in the view that was always there. People are suffering and dying, but as someone who has attended hundreds of burials “in better days” the conclusion I had to reach was that at least they were not suffering this charade any longer. They will never waste another moment with reruns.