Virus has attacked our collective minds
People protest the ongoing COVID-19 shutdown on the lawn of Queen’s Park on Saturday.
From the department of can’t make this up.
Among those arrested over the weekend in small but shouty protests across the United Kingdom — demonstrators who object to coronavirus lockdowns as unlawful and a suppression of civil rights by government — was the loopier, leftier older brother of former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Piers Corbyn is a physicist, meteorologist and global warming denier. Which, that last, should put him on the radical right spectrum.
But the sometime revolutionary socialist, one-time affiliated with the International Marxist Group, is so far left he’s lapped around to the marginalia right on key blathering points: Manmade climate change is all “nonsense” (weather change dictated primarily by cyclical activity on the surface of the sun, he argues) and the coronavirus pandemic is — as Corbyn declared via a megaphone at Speakers’ Corner in London — “a pack of lies to brainwash you and keep you in order.”
Oh, also, “vaccination is not necessary” and “5G towers will be installed everywhere” because — this is the crackpot conspiracy theory — the fifth generation wireless standard “enhances anyone who’s got illness from COVID, so they work together.”
Wild-eyed conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, there’s zero evidence linking 5G and COVID-19. And scientists fear the anti-vaxxer rump will lead to a surge in conquered childhood diseases such a measles, arising from unfounded hysteria over vaccines.
It is quite confusing, the ideological inside-outers, so one can’t tell the right from the left anymore — rather like so-called feminists who defend face coverings such as the niqab and voluminous burqas as promoting women’s rights, sparing them the ogling of men.
Or the shrill anti free-speech brigade that would bar ideas they don’t like from being expressed in public libraries.
There’s really little space between the skeptical Corbyn and, on this side of the pond, the jackboot hordes protesting state-imposed lockdowns to contain spread of the coronavirus.
Like the militia group jackasses, many of them armed with guns, who occupied the Michigan state house earlier this month after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer extended stay-athome orders in a state among the worst hit with COVID-19. Because it’s actually legal in Michigan to open-carry firearms anywhere, including the capital building.
As one like-minded wacko, representing a group called People of Michigan vs. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, posted on Facebook: “We need a good old-fashioned lynch mob to storm the Capitol, drag her tyrannical ass out on the street and string her up as our forefathers would have.”
These are the sort of folks U.S. President Donald Trump is lauding on Twitter. The same Trump who, on Sunday, retweeted a flaky video wherein his face is superimposed over the face of fictional President Thomas J. Whitmore, played in the movie “Independence Day” by actor Bill Pullman. Specifically the rousing speech delivered by Whitmore to rouse a public fightback against alien invaders.
Extensively edited to mimic a Trump rally — with such notable supporters as Fox personalities Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity in the crowd, along with GOP lemmings — the virtual Trump heralds: “And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday but as the day the world declared in one voice, ‘We will not go quietly into the night!’ ”
A Hollywood movie about alien invasion, people.
The video was made by the Twitter account “Mad Liberals,” a site dedicated to creating memes of Trump and the Republican Party.
Is it a spoof? Does Trump even know the difference? Trump is a spoof, now all-in for the reopening of America, placing COVID-19 firmly in the rearview mirror even as the virus has killed nearly 90,000 people in the U.S. and with public health experts warning about a second wave looming. Now the Trump puppets, careering from China, are blaming the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for sluggish (and botched) testing.
Testing? We don’t need no steenkin’ testing.
Most states have already aggressively reopened, stores flipping around their “Closed” signs, dancing a go-go in nightclubs, bowling alleys and tattoo parlours and beauty salons, all fine, not to worry.
Lights that were dimmed two months ago on the Las Vegas Strip are flickering back on as casinos gamble on revving up anew, although a seven-point plan unveiled last week by MGM Resorts International — MGM Grand, Bellagio, the Mirage and Mandalay Bay — envisions Plexiglas barriers around gaming tables, limiting blackjack tables to three players and no more than six at craps tables.
In Canada, the roiling against continuing shutdowns has been more muted because that’s just our style and we don’t share America’s individualistic swagger.
Go slow, go gradual, has been the mantra.
But it’s weird — again, upsidedown bewildering — how so many in the right-wing media commentariat have flipflopped on Premier Doug Ford, previously extolled as Mr. Populist Everyman.
Because Ford has held the cautionary line, incrementally peeling back restrictions, he’s been taking a pounding from his usual suspect fart-catchers.
While the rest of us may have discovered a new respect for the straight-talking galoot, his fanboys of record are treating him like a traitor to freewheeling economic primacy and boilerplate libertarianism.
Still, from where I’m sitting, preferable to the infantilizing espoused by Mayor John Tory, whose pre-emptive restricts assumes that we are all a bunch of wilful dopes who must be protected against our own worst instincts. Hence the refusal to ream open Yonge Street for pedestrians, despite skinny sidewalks that make physical distancing impossible. Because we might congregate. Hence, the turnkey on High Park during cherry blossom season.
Despite the well-established fact one is less likely to contract infection in open places.
Rather than deploy bylaw officers to fine the scofflaws, bring down the curtain on everybody.
Instead, the city gave us, belatedly, 57 kilometres of “quiet streets,” mostly side streets but also a few major roads closed off to car traffic, purportedly for the benefit of cyclists, joggers and pedestrians.
One of those liberated thoroughfares, Lake Shore Boulevard, turned into a haven over the weekend — for cyclists, joggers, rollerbladers and skateboarders.
Pedestrians, not so much. Still squeezed out by wheels underfoot and the selfish spacehogging of runners.
In any event, Lake Shore turns back into an automobile pumpkin at 11 p.m. Monday.
The pandemic has been nirvana for bossy-boots, conspiracy theorists and hardcore ideologues to the left, to the right.
An itsy-bitsy invisible microbe that attacked our lungs but also our collective minds.
In Canada, the roiling against continuing shutdowns has been more muted because that’s just our style