Two weeks ago I pondered how much compassion we should have for those who chose to refuse COVID vaccination for political reasons and then became seriously ill. Since I mentioned Tennessee right-wing talk show host Phil Valentine, a particularly vile breed of climate change-denying, faux-deficit-hawk, Hillary-hatin', and yes, vaccine-avoidin' hatemonger in that post, I should now mention that he will never be able to become the most "pro-vaccine person who ever lived" because he died yesterday after being on a ventilator, his lungs destroyed from COVID Delta, for two weeks.
In December 2020, he wrote on his blog (not going to link to it; you can find it yourself:
How's that America workin' for ya now, Phil? How'd that "personal health assessment" go?
Then on Thursday, a South Carolina legislator with the It Doesn't Get Any More Southern Than This name of Presley Stutts has died after six days on a ventilator. Before he was put on the ventilator, he was tweeting Big Lie and COVID conspiracy theories right down to the bitter end.
Here he is calling vaccination an "ungodly initiative" in June:
And this racist hatemongering from July 23:
I could screenshot for days the bile that this particular MAGA cretin spewed out, but I'll just leave you with this delicious piece o'irony:
I have to wonder how many other people guys like this infected before they were hospitalized. Look, if these guys think that Dying for Trump (and that's essentially what this is) is what they want to do, because freedumb, well, that's between them and their families. I frankly don't care if a few more voices of misinformation, white supremacy and misogyny are silenced. But since they can be contagious days before becoming ill, and even after they are being hospitalized, they are putting everyone else they come in contact with in danger -- some of them NOT willing to Die For Trump (even in Tennessee and South Carolina), I'm sure.
Valentine's brother Mark expressed his opinion of what he THINKS his brother WOULD have said had he been able, But we don't know that. Valentine was "taking Vitamin D like crazy" and had a doctor agree to provide a prescription for Ivermectin (a horse de-worming medication), neither of which have even the degree of study that the vaccines have, but Phil Valentine was unwilling to be vaccinated.
I remember when Lee Atwater, who was basically the architect of the
racist-dogwhistle GOP that gave rise eventually to Donald Trump, and the
architect of the forever-infamous "Willie Horton ad"
of 1988, was dying from glioblastoma -- arguably the worst, most
terrifying cancer in existence. I remember seeing photos of him, his
face bloated from steroids and practically unrecognizable. I'm honest
enough to say that I thought he got what he deserved, but I'm also human
enough that I felt badly for him. Part of the reason for that was that
Atwater at least acknowledged the damage he'd done to the body politic
before he died. Phil Valentine did not. And Pressley Stutts was posting racism, The Big Lie, and white resentment on Facebook right up until the propofol kicked in and the vent was inserted, thus silencing him forever.
I am absolutely gutted to learn of the passing of the talented and generous-of-spirit Mike Finnigan.
I didn't know Mike as a musician. I didn't even know how prominent and well-known a session guy he was or that he was a performing musician until quite recently. How I didn't know is surprising and how Mr. Brilliant didn't know is even more surprising, given that he was far more knowledgeable about such things than I was.
I only knew Mike Finnegan as one of the progressive bloggers with a sizable following who always extended a hand to us little folks down the blogging ladder to drive readers in our direction, via his regular feature Mike's Blog Round-Up at Crooks and Liars.
We've lost so many of the best bloggers. Mike joins a group of incisive commentators who left us too soon and who we miss every day. Steve Gilliard, Jon Swift (Al Weisel), Skippy (Gil Christner), "Doghouse Riley", and Maggie Jochild. Their voices would be so valuable in these weird times.
I'll end this memorial with this incredible cover by Mike Finnigan of Sam Cooke's A Change is Gonna Come.
[UPDATED 8/22/21] One side effect of the last nearly eight years since Mr. Brilliant died is that I seem to have developed an empathy deficit. It's not that I only care about my own small problems, it's more that I no longer have patience with people for whom every small inconvenience is a trauma of equal proportion to, say, a personal tragedy.
At one time, this would have been, say, simple irritation with someone who sees a great cosmic conspiracy against them because the toilet valve needs changing. But of course for the last year and a half, it's been about the lunacy surrounding the simple task of wearing a piece of cloth on one's face to protect oneself AND others.
Mother Nature, who has clearly had enough of our miserable species, has brought us first SARS-CoV-19, and when that didn't hit home that we need to clean up our act, has now decided to throw Delta, a more aggressive variant, into the mix.
After having put up with the lunacy that is QAnon, the insult to our intelligence and just plain common decency that is Donald Trump, and being essentially alone for a year and a half (which those of you bitching about how your spouses are driving you crazy might want to think about now and then, because no matter how INFJ we might be, too much solitude is toxic), I have little sympathy for willful ignorance.
I needn't go into the litany of crazy reasons people have for refusing the vaccine, from the Bill Gates microchip delusion, to the infertility misinformation, to the "owning the libs" lunacy, and my personal favorite, believing that the vaccine is designed to create a zombie apocalpyse. There are people who eat Kraft mac 'n' cheese and McDonald's Chicken McNuggets every day of their lives who won't get vaccinated because they don't know what's in it -- this despite the fact that the CDC actually TELLS you what's in it, at least for the Pfizer, Moderna and Janssen vaccines. Of course none of these people understand what they're reading, but when a society reaches the point where misinformation found on Breitbart and Twitter and OANN and "my friend's uncle" on Facebook is more trusted than the CDC, we have a problem more serious than a bunch of armchair biologists.
Two nights ago, Republican pollster Frank Luntz went all heartfelt and full-frontal snowflakey touchy-feely Leo Buscaglia about how we have to treat the "own the libs" crowd with sympathy and compassion, whereupon Don Lemon earned, as far as I'm concerned, the Purple Heart for Valor by sitting and listening to this horsepuckey. Remember, these are the same people who shouted "Fuck your feelings!" at people disappointed at the 2016 election result; you know, the ones who DIDN'T storm the Capitol to try to prevent the Electoral College from certifying. But now we're being told about how we have to coddle THEIR widdle fee-fees, to the point of suggesting that Joe Biden invite Donald Trump to do a PSA and give Trump full credit for the vaccine, conveniently forgetting the 600,000 corpses from COVID-19 that occurred while the orange-faced shitgibbon was insisting that either a) it would go away; b) people should consider ingesting disinfectants, or c) that they should just get sick and get over it.
This is just plain nuts at this point. It's as if Donald Trump got elected and suddenly we became a nation of tantrum-throwing two-year-olds.
Here in Durham, NC, a new mask mandate goes into effect on Monday, August 9. Here I was, just starting to get my social mojo back after a year of living more like Ted Kuczynski than like Perle Mesta, and here we go again. And IT DID NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
So what do we owe these people, and how much compassion should we have for these people? Why should we be kind to and "understand" the misinformation charlatans and the willfully ignorant who will believe that a giant sky-man created the earth in six days and micromanages individual lives but won't believe, even 225 years after Edward Jenner first inoculated a 13-year-old boy with cowpox, thus creating the first smallpox vaccine; even 61 years after school children (including Your Humble Narrator) lined up AT SCHOOL to eat a sugar cube containing the Sabin oral polio vaccine, that vaccines work. These are the same people who talk about Second Amendment remedies and tote assault rifles to Walmart, but a one-second needle in the arm sends them screaming in the other direction. How much compassion should we have?
Last week I donated to the GoFundMe for the family of Michael Freedy, a Las Vegas man who succumbed to COVID after a family vacation to San Diego, leaving behind a fiancee and five children. I didn't feel sorry one bit for this guy, but I could not find it in my heart to close it to the woman who loved and relied on him. I know what losing your partner in life is like, and I had financial security and no children to worry about. This was not, to my knowledge, necessarily a Trump cultist family. They were simply people who wanted to wait to see how the vaccines shook out in the marketplace. That is not, or at least until recently was not, an unreasonable thing to want to do. I worked nine years on clinical studies so I know a bit about how the drug development sausage is made, and I wanted to wait -- until it seemed that the only path to a normal life was vaccination. I have STILL not had the Shingrix vaccine for shingles, because, yes, I wanted to give it a few years in the marketplace.
Yes, there are those like Travis Campbell, who's been all over the news advocating vaccination, who just kind of never got around to getting vaccinated despite CVS having vaccines and being open late most evenings, but what about some of the others??
What about Texas Republican Executive Committee member H. Scott Apley, who just days after posting an anti-vaccine meme on Facebook, succumbed to COVID and whose wife only NOW is telling people to be vaccinated?
What about right-wing radio host Phil Valentine, a vocal anti-vaccine troll with a fairly wide audience in Tennessee, who has been on a ventilator since July 28 and whose brother, in true Trumpian syntax, says that when/if Valentine gets back to the microphone, he'll be the "most pro-vaccine person you’ve ever seen"? [UPDATE 8/22/21: Phil Valentine has died.]
What about Florida radio host and former Newsmax anchor Dick Farrel, another anti-vaccine troll who changed his mind just before dying of -- wait for it -- COVID.
What about Olivia Guidry, a 24-year-old UNvaccinated ER nurse in Louisiana who had posted on social media that messenger RNA used in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines was "recombinant DNA" that somehow changes our genetic structure, which is simply not true. Anyone who ever took a high school biology class knows that RNA is ribonucleic acid, not recombinant DNA (which is really just synthetic DNA anyway). You'd think a nurse would know better, but apparently even those with some medical knowledge are susceptible to utter horseshit if delivered by their political idols. The hospital is disputing that she died from COVID, but she tested positive and a month later there has been no further coverage or autopsy results, so YOU do the math.
Or what about 31-year old Daryl Barker from Missouri, who now seems likely to recover and has vowed to get vaccinated, but avoided the vaccine because his is "a conservative family"? What does conservatism have to do with the COVID vaccine, other than loyalty to Trump and to people like H. Scott Apley, Phil Valentine and Dick Farrel?
These are the same people who think that THEIR daughter's abortion is NECESSARY (not like those dirty sluts), and that THEY deserve their SNAP benefits, not like THOSE PEOPLE. These are the people who see COVID as a hoax until it affects THEM. It's all part of the nation of two-year-olds that has resulted from four years of the biggest two-year-old of them all.
I'm tired of having compassion for these people. I'm tired of being told to care about the feelings of the "Fuck your feelings!" crowd. I'm tired of ignorance. I'm tired of this idea that somehow the magic sky-man doesn't want them to take a life-saving vaccine that in theory, their magic sky-man who micromanages individual lives gave to the people who developed it. I'm tired of Google being used to confirm the conclusions people have already come to being regarded as synonymous with research. I'm tired of charlatans and liars and the gullible, willfully ignorant people who believe them.
No, science DOESN'T have all the answers. But at least it keeps looking. I felt better about the vaccines after I read more about mRNA research and how it's been under development for 30 years. These are unusual times that call for unusual measures.
So I've ordered another box of N95 masks to take to medical appointments and other places where people gather (which I guess I have to start avoiding again now). But all this seems that this next round of forced solitude at the hand of idiots is some kind of cruel irony, just another way of being doomed to re-live my mother's life no matter how hard I try to do otherwise. So I find myself having difficulty empathizing with even these Johnny-come-latelies. And as for the rest of them, well, quite frankly, the hell with 'em.
Starting in about 2014, I found myself posting more and more on Facebook instead of doing long-form blogging. I found it much easier, in these Years Of Unfocused Widow Brain, to just share articles with a short comment instead of having to, say, put together coherent thoughts. I started this blog in a moment of weakness, but found that the time between my closing of the old place and when I started this did little to assuage my sense that the whole thing was just a slog. To this day, the most-read post here is a memorial for a young woman I didn't even know.
Unless you've kept up with your blog continuously, the landscape has changed. And that may provide a degree of freedom. With no readers and no ad feeds, there's no pressure to crank out content. It's become clear to me that 90% of people simply do not want to know what's going on in our country or in the world. It's so much easier to just draw inward, to focus on our families and our friends, and live day to day, because after all, what impact can any of us really have when everything around us is falling apart? What's the point of reading about it all, thinking about it all, having concerns about it all when it really does seem as if there's nothing we can do to change it?
Writing has always been an outlet for me, and it seems I'd forgotten about that. In the old days, I had dreams of being one of those Big Name Bloggers who either successfully monetized their blogs or got plum gigs at either nascent or prominent publications. As a lifelong Frustrated Would-Be Journalist, I had dreams. I coulda been a contenda, except that I also wanted things like a house and a retirement plan and health insurance. So long-form blogging allowed me to do both. But blogging was like The Job That Ate My Life in that the more successful you are at it, the more you want more. In 2007 I went to the conference then known as Yearly Kos and discovered that I had a bit of a decent reputation in the world of political bloggers. I was "known," if not famous. In 2008 I was laid off from my Real Job and got the Job That Ate My Life. After two years I was given a promotion, which meant a bigger bonus plan. Then four years after that I was given another one, with an even BIGGER bonus plan. And the thing is, I LIKED it. I liked the recognition. And I sure as hell liked the money.
When I started blogging in 2004, it was because I'd been reviewing movies online since 1997 and THAT had become a slog. Even a wonderful film like Jet Li's Fearless had me hamstrung about what to write. For a decade, I cranked out content, some of it good, some of it great, much of it mediocre. But I think it's time to come home. If people want to read what I write, they'll either find it or ask me. And on Facebook, I'll do what everyone else does and share nature photos, cat videos, and funny memes. If social media is about bread and circuses, I'll juggle on a unicycle in a clown suit throwing pieces of challah at my friends the way everyone else does.
So all that out of the way, here we are in August 2021. We are 17 months into the Great COVID-19 Pandemic of Seemingly Forever, and this virus has shown itself to be The Thing That Wouldn't Leave. What people have never understood about The Thing That Wouldn't Leave is if you keep feeding it, it WON'T leave.
One time back in maybe 1985, Mr. Brilliant ran into an old high school friend at a bus stop and brought him home. And the guy stayed for 4 days, our apartment becoming littered with Chinese food containers, cigarette butts and pot resin. We'd stand in the kitchen and joke about how this guy was turning into The Thing That Wouldn't Leave, but it was four days before Mr. B. finally told him to go home. Perhaps if we'd brought in Chinese takeout for only ourselves, he'd have left sooner.
But here we are, with a new virus variant whose name is largely shortened to just Delta (which gives it a certain Greek frisson, unlike the vaguely Jewish sounding "COVID," which has always seemed unfortunate to me given that the GOP is rotten with anti-Semites who only need to keep Jews around for their apocalyptic delusions). And thanks to most of the Republican Party and all of the right-wing media echo chamber, the same people who put Donald Trump in office have joined with the Great Medical Conspiracy "natural healing" contingent to make people skeptical about getting vaccinated, instead preferring to buy worming medicine for horses at the feed store because Michael Flynn's brother told them to use it. Every news report seems to have another GOP governor who has finally woken up and realized that rather than "owning the libs", vaccination refusal is simply killing off his own voters, being heckled by the ignorant, the deluded, the crazy and the misinformed.
Look, I understand vaccine hesitancy. I worked on clinical trials for nine years at the Job That Ate My Life. I know a little something about clinical research, and how long it takes, and how only about 14% of compounds that make it into human trials make it to approval and only about 3% of cancer treatments. And I too was hesitant at first, because yeah, they DID seem rushed to market, and then there's the question of the CDC and FDA reporting to Donald Trump for most of the pandemic's duration up to that point. But unlike people for whom research just means Googling conclusions you've already come to, I read about how mRNA research is not just something that a lab pulled out of its ass yesterday, but has been in the works for 30 years. Messenger RNA is like a teacher which tells your immune systtem how to fight this novel virus that it doesn't know what to do with. And of course you can see why this has focused on cancer therapies until now. After all, a treatment that can target just one kind of cell (cancerous) and leave healthy cells alone could go a long way towards reducing toxicity, right? So why NOT take 30 years of research and apply it to a vaccine? Once I knew that, I started doing whatever I had to in order to get this vaccine, and it bought me a few months of normal life, until people who have no idea how to read a protocol or a study decided that Google = research and that they knew better than anyone who actually had, well, knowledge.
I used to dream about Mr. Brilliant often. Sometimes I'd remember them, but more often not. I'd wake just with the realization that I'd dreamt about him. Often there would be other people in the dreams. Or he wouldn't be in them, but there would be other people in them. I spent about 10 months of the pandemic napping during the day because I was so busy at night. After all, my real-life social life was all but on hold other than on Zoom, but I was living a very full life in my sleep. Once I started being able to socialize again, I dreamt of him less. But here we are, with every social gathering bearing an undercurrent of existential dread despite vaccination (especially for those of us having exceeded the designated six months of confirmed protection), and isolation looming again, and there he goes again -- coming back from the dead in my dreams. The good news is that when he does, I can enjoy his company now instead of obsessing about having to buy him socks, underwear, and a new phone.
This is what isolation does to the widowed.
I could go on. I could talk about the Democrats' cluelessness about voting rights, and about corporate media, and about Andrew Cuomo being an asshole, and why Democrats are always held to a different standard and what does it buy us, and so on. But I have to save something for next time.
So join me as I shout into the void. Or not. You still have a choice.
