In Brian Kemp's Georgia, college football matters more than our neighbors' health

In the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast, Harrison Ford plays an eccentric inventor who rejects the US’s shallow consumer culture. He brings his family to the Central American jungle to live off the grid and establish what he believes will be a better way of life. It goes about as well as the canoeing trip in Deliverance.

Circumstances go from bad to worse to catastrophic, Ford’s character, the patriarch, becoming increasingly erratic and unhinged. At one point he tells his family that the US has been destroyed in a nuclear attack in order to stop them from trying to escape and return home. It’s a bit like what would happen if Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness had dragged his family along for the ride upriver.

I’ve found myself thinking about the film again and again as a citizen of Governor Brian Kemp’s Georgia during the Covid-19 pandemic.

What do you do when you’re strapped into the backseat of a speeding car and Dad is driving drunk? That’s what it has felt like watching Kemp – whose election in November 2018 is widely attributed to voter suppression and other acts of electoral chicanery – lurch from one boneheaded move to another.

He “closed” the state too slowly, “reopened” it too quickly and has eagerly beclowned himself before the world by showing his utter ignorance about science and public health. Now coronavirus cases are surging out of control and the state’s already straining healthcare system is bracing for disaster like passengers in a car that has skidded across the highway median and into oncoming traffic.

At no point has science or any interest in the facts driven the governor’s policy decisions. Now, as the Republican party belatedly caves to the necessity of wearing face coverings in public,

Kemp has joined the pro-mask chorus – but only because otherwise there might not be a college football season.

“[M]y daughters, they keep asking me, ‘Dad, do you think we’re going to have college football? Surely we’ve got to have the season,’” Kemp said last week. He added, “I said, ‘Well, if people, especially our young people, don’t start wearing a mask when they’re going out in public and our numbers keep rising,