Lookin’ for laughs in all the wrong places
During a period of American history when it’s harder and harder to locate the humor in things and in which reason would suggest the search for humor becomes more desperate by the day, it’s finally dawning on me I might not be using my television correctly.
In the pre-pandemic summer of 2019, I spent a lot of time watching “Chernobyl,” a carefree series about how the institutionalization of the easy lie coupled with flagitious official corruption can conspire with common bungling to produce an international death cloud.
Things that could never happen here obviously.
But once the virus set in, I resolved to inspect some things others have mildly shamed me into binge watching, starting with “The Wire,” which was grim, yo, but still a beautifully written project depicting a deeply flawed police department wagging the mangy bureaucratic dog that just happened to be the city of Baltimore.
Stuff that could never happen today obviously.
Now I’ve taken the plunge on “The Sopranos,” in which an array of despicable characters arrange for themselves an unyielding storm of physical and psychological torture. But the scariest thing I’ve seen yet is an HBO documentary on the vulnerability of voting machines called “Kill Chain.”
I’d had a little watch party of “Kill Chain” on my list of fun things to do, and it might have remained there Monday had the president not started shouting on Twitter around 8 a.m.
“RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
Why is he yelling? Perhaps because he clearly has not seen “Kill Chain,” which points toward the fairly inescapable conclusion mail-in ballots might be the only way NOT to have a rigged election.
Because, as the documentary points out, only three companies manufacture the machines that will be used in November, because those companies do not allow inspections of their security systems, because 20 states will use the same machine that’s been hacked with ease dating back to 2005 and because hackers have become so sophisticated they can turn off a voting machine from a laptop in the parking lot and/or install malware that not only changes the results but leaves no trace of tampering, those mail-in ballots are starting to look pretty good.
“I’m terribly afraid we’re in danger of losing what it means to be a democracy,” University of Pennsylvania cybersecurity expert Sandy Clark says about halfway through “Kill Chain.” “If elections can be altered subtlely, they can be altered in a way that is undetectable; how does one trust the result of their election? And a democracy functions on trust. Without that trust, things descend into chaos and anarchy.”
Sounds frightful, but can it match an uncontrolled pandemic, a collapsing economy and global unrest due to authoritarian brutality? Or are those just the warmup acts for November?
But fear not. Just when it seems there’s absolutely nothing funny about absolutely anything, the Trump re-election campaign has credited the president with a hilarious zinger from the stage of his quiet rally the other night in Tulsa, Okla.
I’m sure you’ve seen the clips. It’s hysterical.
“You know, testing is a double-edged sword,” this bit began. “We’ve tested now 25 million people, Here’s the bad part. When you test, when you do testing, to that extent, you’re going to find more people. You’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please.”
Stop, you’re killing me — perhaps literally.
When every credible scientist on the planet is saying testing is the key to getting out in front of and ultimately controlling the pandemic, President Trump tells his people to hit the brakes, because it looks bad.
See, this is why I don’t like to put a mousetrap under the sink. If I do, I might catch a mouse. If I don’t, we don’t have mice. If you like that logic, have I got a president for you.
Trump flunkies spent the next two days insisting he was “joking,” “kidding” and the testing bit was said “in jest.” I guess because he loves to kid the dead people.
As in just about every case when the president says something so patently stupid it can’t be explained, he was officially either “joking” or being “sarcastic.” And in just about every case when he’s given an opportunity to walk back his own idiocy, he fails at even that.
Here was his attempted do-over to Joe St. George of Scripps TV.
“We do more testing than any country in the world by far, 25 million tests. Other countries do one million. Every time you do a test, as you do more tests, it shows more and more cases. We’re so far advanced, both in terms of the quality and the amount, that we’re doing all these tests and it shows cases that other countries aren’t doing or (if) we did slow it down, we wouldn’t show nearly as many cases. You’re showing people who are asymptomatic; you’re showing people that have very little problem; you’re showing young people that don’t have a problem. But we’re doing so much testing, 25 million tests, nobody thought that was possible.”
“But did you ask to slow it down?” St. George says at that point.
“Uhhh, if it did slow down, frankly, we’re way ahead of ourselves, if you want to know the truth. We’ve done too good a job.”
Uh-huh. So tired of winning. This clearly is no way to watch TV either. Give me a nuclear accident, a crime-infested, drug-addled cityscape, an endless conflagration of Mobland retribution or a doomed election any night of the week.