We have entered an age of pandemics. The medical community has known to expect it for some decades now. The growing world population, especially in impoverished regions, together with the close proximity in some to animal species that host a range of pathogens, mean it is only a matter of time before the next epidemic occurs. The interconnectedness of our world means that every epidemic is a potential pandemic.
Furthermore, our antibiotics have proven to have a devastating side effect. While they give us a sense of ever increasing security, enough bacteria survive them to build up ever-growing populations immune to their effects.
Various scientific groups have been modeling the likely biological outcomes of these facts. How many sociologists have thought to model the social effects, local or worldwide, however, is not clear. We tend to leave that kind of research to eccentrics and dystopian novelists. Especially in the instance in which the pathogen is a political idea.
But to the political pathogen we must add its constituents as modelers. It is most certainly not operating on instinct. Unlike cellular agents, the societal pathogen must develop a conscious plan of attack. Such a plan requires a model. We see this in the various think tanks and 501(c)(3)s that have grown up around the Republican Party over the past 50 years.
First the party had to be conquered. The name had to be kept in order to wield its influence and connections. The party was at a particularly vulnerable moment due to its shrinking base. For this reason it welcomed a foreign agent that took it over. As is the way of viruses, it made the party into a zombie vehicle of its will. The pathogen next took control of state legislatures and institutions.
Thus fortified, the zombie vehicle had a power-base. Like any virus, it had established control over a few organs and processes, at first, with an eye only to taking over the entire body.
It is not generally recognized that the pathogen itself does not have an Alt-Right orientation in the least. It is resoundingly intent upon the ultra-wealthy being free of taxation and regulation and able to wield the police forces and the military to enforce their interests. Everything else is just a tool to achieve its goals. Its identification with the Evangelical Religious Right is merely a tactic. It controls most of the money in the country but it needs votes in order to acquire the power of the government to forward its objectives. The ends justify the means.
As the population of the Religious Right shrank, the pathogen's strategy would be to replace their numbers by coöpting disaffected voting groups so opposed to progressive government that they could not find candidates to represent them. The strategy was to add them to the Religious Right in order create cobbled-together majorities eager to dismantle secular political norms, institutions and legal processes, thus creating the conditions to bring an end to the income tax, business and financial regulation and the social safety net that made them essential.
The model was simple. Keep absolute control of the party's money. Coöpt radical communities through their sense of marginalization and increase their voting rates by describing them as victims of insidious conspiracy. These voters were only too glad to assist the pathogen in conquering the body politic in exchange for non-monetary benefits such as the right to reject those “others” who marginalized them, to daunt various “others” by carrying firearms in areas not inhabited by the hyper-wealthy, exclude “others” from job and housing markets, etc. A “conservative” news media was created in order to feed them constant propaganda and instructions.
This having been achieved, the pathogen has developed into full-blown Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025. It is now running rampant through the body politic furiously working to hollow out its institutions and shift taxation (and the National Debt) from the ultra-wealthy to an already shrinking middle class and the rapidly growing poor. Constant Internet and television images (the nervous system of the body politic) are being deployed in order to keep the body off balance and the coöpted voters so mesmerized that they are unaware that they are to receive absolutely nothing of value for their role — that they will be among the biggest losers inasmuch as they are no longer needed.
Federal spending is scheduled to be reduced by demolishing the social safety net — a change that will as consequence greatly reduce wages for all but the dedicated minions with high-level skills that obey the orders of the ultra-wealthy without question. Spending will also be reduced by ending humanitarian aid and shifting the financial burden of alliances totally onto the backs of those allies and bullying them into ending taxes on U.S. Companies that operate within their borders. The power of the U.S. will no longer be used to enforce international law but will sweep it away wherever necessary in order to benefit its ultra-wealthy ruling class.
If the timing works out, the Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025 will have less and less need of the coöpted voters (now called “MAGA”). They will desperately cling to their belief that the lies of the pathogen promise genuine rewards, nonetheless. Tariffs will drive high inflation for all including MAGA. The federal minimum wage will remain $7.25 (or the equivalent) for all including MAGA. Natural disasters will ravage the planet and the homes of the common man including MAGA. Potable water will become an expensive market commodity. The wealth-gap will become immeasurable. It will all be Joe Biden's fault.
This is the model upon which the the Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025 operates. Already it has shown frustration that not all is proceeding as planned. It was aware from the start that threats, lies and bluster, would be necessary in order to confuse the body politic, to dominate historical allies and to impress the coöpted voters. Those tactics having been insufficient, outrageous demands are being delivered with an absolute confidence designed to amplify the effect. Failures can only be addressed by doubling down.
What, you may ask, can be done to prevent the body succumbing to the Trump Variant Corona Virus 2025? Can there be a cure?
Also from the Library of Babel:
- The American Garden. January 16, 2019. “By 1890, the Ladies' Home Journal was the most popular advertising venue in the country. There, between ads for cook books, children's clothing, stave-less corsets, indoor water-closets, refrigerators and pianos, and popular female columnists who advised the housewife about them all, were a profusion of ads for seeds.”
- Blank Verse Now and Then. January 1, 2019. “Surrey was as erratic as most young noblemen during early English history, and far more brilliant, and was imprisoned several times for temper and intemperance. In the end, he became rather impatient for the gouty, porcine, syphilis-riddled Henry VIII to die, and for the Howard faction to rule as regents to the young, fragile, son conceived of the syphilitic, Edward.”
- The Elegy and the Internet. July 1, 2005. ‘Drummond, we may remember, was the William Drummond, of Hawthornden, who Ben Jonson visited during a trip to Scotland, in 1619. The Scot took the time to jot a memorandum of Jonson's conversation, in which we learn inter alia that "he cursed Petrarch for redacting Verses to Sonnets, which he said were like the Tirrant's bed, wher some who were too short were racked, others too long cut short,"7 and "That Shakspear wanted Arte."’
Be sure to check out the Browser's Guide to the Library of Babel.
Also from Virtual Grub Street:
Shakespeare CSI: Sir Thomas More, Hand-D. April 22, 2023. “What a glory to have an actual hand-written manuscript from the greatest English writer of all time!”
A Thousand Years of English Terms. June 2, 2019. ‘One person did not say to another, “Meet you at three o’clock”. There was no clock to be o’. But the church bell rang the hour of Nones and you arranged to meet “upon the Nones bell”.’
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