For months and months now I’ve been totally mystified — indeed, if not completely stupefied — in regards to how is it that our nation can rightly boast to having the best system of post-secondary education in the world, while at the same instant have such an overwhelming number of citizens too stupid to make the connection between wearing masks/social distancing and beating the coronavirus?
How is it that America, in spite of our magnificent institutions of higher learning, is still the only country on the planet that has not been able to lower the curve and thereby reduce the number of infections and deaths? Something just isn’t — at least to my mind — adding up here. Something is totally amiss in this deadly equation.
How is it that a man like Herman Cain, 74, a former Republican presidential candidate and pizza magnate be smart enough to raise himself out of poverty to become one of the wealthiest black men in America and yet be stupid enough to attended a tRrump indoor rally in Tulsa, OK in late June and not wear a mask — and now ends up deceased? And he certainly didn’t attend alone.
Quite literally millions of Americans regularly ignore the advice of the best medical minds in the country and instead listen to a snake oil salesman simply because he occasionally sits in the Oval Office, a complete fool who is now defending a black Houston doctor, Stella Immanuel, originally trained in Cameroon (perhaps at the Boris Karloff School of Medicine, according to a clever article in Mother Jones) because she touts the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine in treating patients of Covid-19 and also dismisses masks as unnecessary in stopping its spread.
In the past this witch doctor has made several dubious and outrageous medical claims, including detailed descriptions of the “harmful effects of having sexual relations with demons while dreaming, the alleged use of alien DNA in various medicines, and the production of a vaccine to inoculate people against being religious.” Whew! Beam me up Scotty!
Nonetheless, this obvious kook — who should be barred from the practice of medicine — has become a minor celebrity on far-right social media platforms due to her being black and agreeing with their fringe lunatic leader, no matter that she’s as bat-shit crazy as he is.
Which still begs the question: How did so many of our fellow Americans become so dense, so easily bamboozled? My theory is that this obvious case of mass insanity — this total break with reality — is due to America’s longest running so-called war — the one on drugs. The similarities are amazingly similar upon examination and scrutiny.
In order to continue to perpetuate the completely failed “War on Drugs” for over a half century, a goodly percentage of Americans have to continue to buy into sheer nonsense and falsities that have been passed down from generation to generation like so much Holy Writ … but which, in actuality, are pure propaganda, albeit one of the most successful campaigns in the history of the world.
I won’t do too deep a dive into the history of how the first drug myths were created well over a hundred years ago to cause the panic and hysteria that lead to our nation’s first drug laws. But suffice to say those laws had far more to do with the politics of opium and ridding the country of unwanted Chinese than with medical science or the dangers of the fruit of the poppy plant. Similarly, cocaine soon became the next drug bogeyman because of the Great Migration — when blacks left the South in staggering numbers for a better life in the North (but all too often ending up bitterly disappointed) — stoked racial fears based on ginned-up and dastardly beliefs that hoards of poor black males, high on cocaine, would rape white women. But the most diabolical laws of all were enacted against marijuana. When Prohibition ended, the whisky magnates had to woo customers back to their product so in 1937 cannabis was given a more foreign-sounding name and was said to drive people mad, as portrayed in the hysterical film Reefer Madness.
So my point is, as a nation where a goodly percentage of folks has historically relied on and believed in the political/propaganda lies surrounding the issue of drugs rather than the medial science of facts — where anti-intellectualism doesn’t just run rampant, but instead gallops — it’s an easy leap for individuals so born and bred to transfer the fuzzy logic and thinking they’ve always engaged in around drugs to another medical issue — the current pandemic — thus turning what should be a scientific construct into a political one.
Our national sense of self-delusion and gullibility — the desire on the part of some folks to steadfastly believe what they want to believe in spite of the facts to the contrary — is due in large part to the propagation of the longstanding lie that America doesn’t have a racist history. If people are stupid enough to believe that, then they are stupid enough to believe anything, even to dismiss the advice of competent medical professionals in regards to the pandemic.
So yes, the glaring defect of our nation’s birth — slavery — still tragically haunts our present and makes some of our citizenry who readily engage in believing fictive nonsense to appear to be the dumbest motherfuckers to ever bestrode the face of the earth: too dumb even to wear a mask to save their own lives.
