Tag / holidays

by Edward Champion

A Proud Member of the Intolerant Left

Every belief structure contains a line in which you do not cross. The MAGA Cult has now crossed a line and have become more vocal as they have been disinvited from holiday gatherings. As they learn that their actions have consequences, don’t listen to their desperate cries of “another member of the tolerant left.” The “tolerant left” is a conservative invention. Resist by holding these uncomprehending jackanapes accountable for their hate.

We’ll probably never have a completely accurate tally of how many MAGA Cultists have been cut off and left in the cold this Thanksgiving, but we do know that a vast throng of fascists — including the hubris-fueled, dumb-as-rocks propagandist Jesse Watters — has been disinvited and told in no uncertain terms not to come home this week. And now these hateful morons are starting to lose what little of their minds they still possess. Speaking for myself, I refused to attend the Thanksgiving dinner for which I had planned to cook many tasty and hearty side dishes (homemade sourdough stuffing, my four cheese mac and cheese, corn bread casserole, and numerous other delicacies that have made many guests ranging in age from six to sixty-six squeal with delight), once I had learned that a Trump voter had been invited. I was specifically trying to honor one of the sensitive guests — an extremely kind, endearing, and very shy seventeen-year-old (son of a friend) who asked me very politely to refrain from talking politics. Had the entire guest list been comprised of people who stand for democracy, this would have been effortless. It’s the MAGA fuckwads, after all, who want to keep dragging up politics and who hope to “own the libs” with their deranged fantasy football stylings. (Less easy for me is refraining from saying “fuck” for long periods of time. The longest I made it was three hours at a Xmas gathering before I slipped. And after my loose lips betrayed the blunt truth of my ship, my friend hugged me and said that she was very proud of me for managing to make it that long. What can I say? I’m a profane yet erudite motherfucker who tries to atone for his inveterate NC-17 vernacular by dropping as many arcane ten cent words into a colloquy as I can through blind instinct. But I digress.)

The upshot is that I am not going to walk on eggshells anymore. There has always been a line in the sand. I’ll never break bread with a fascist. I am simply not going to tolerate anyone who stands against women’s rights, for mass deportation, for unmitigated restrictions on marginalized groups, for the erosion of education funding, for tariffs and economic devastation that will hurt the most vulnerable members of our nation and line the coffers of the plutocrats, and for restrictions on free speech and the intimidation of alternative voices. No. Fuck off. I’ve urged people to cut the bastards off and I mean it. If you are a fascist, I will denounce you with the most devastating vitriol I can summon and ostracize you loudly.

I can name four friends who are in a similar boat. And we’re all regrouping, gathering for some quiet moments of camaraderie. A time of peace and good eating should not be sullied by these evil goons. If you stand for an ideology that wishes the people I love and me dead, then why on earth would you ever think I could be civil with you in any way? You stand against humanism. You are my sworn enemy.

One would think that the MAGA fuckwits would be happy about this state of affairs. But it’s clear by their vociferous pipsqueaking on my social media feeds and, closer to home, by their desperate attempts to get back into my good graces that they’re not. Now that they realize that the only company they will have for the holidays will entail hateful, humorless, miserable, and uneducated jackanapes, they’re starting to understand just what they’ve lost. Well, tough titty. Don’t look at me. I voted for the centrist democracy-friendly candidate, despite the fact that it involved a lot of compromise of my leftist principles. You voted for the authoritarian strongman and you won everything. Why aren’t you happy about that? Go and consort with your fellow white supremacists and fuck off until the end of time. I mean, come on, aren’t you living the dream?

Well, their “dream” involves us, whether we like it or not. They are so obdurately wretched that they are trying to follow us like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And they are surprised when their feeble minds and flaccid bodies collide into a glue trap. You see, it’s not enough for them to win. What they want is to make us their subservient little bitches. What they are interested in is establishing a new pecking order in which they are on top. They try to taunt us and “expose our hypocrisy” with such hacky zingers as “Another member of the tolerant left.” But as Andy Khori wisely pointed out, the “tolerant left” idea is an invented term of art by the right. It’s designed to inoculate these uncomprehending lemurs from criticism. They’ll never answer to their own complicity in supporting a deranged ideology in which more women die, more families are torn apart because some of them weren’t born on the mainland, and in which LGBTQIA people live in great fear for their future. But they will try to use “tolerant left” as a gotcha point when the truth of the matter is that every political ideology and every form of morality does possess a hard limit on what is considered acceptable.

And now that these dimwitted and entitled little dipshits are starting to learn that we do have boundaries, they’re stunned to learn that they can’t get away with their platitudes and their FOX News mimesis anymore. They’re learning very swiftly that we’ve always been intolerant of any baleful force or figure standing in the way of education, democratic possibility, and human rights. And they’re also learning that we can fight just as dirty as they can, starting with the punishment of social isolation and, if they get more hot and heavy, a peremptory declaration that they are no longer a part of our universe.

“Can’t we just agree to disagree?”

Nope. Talk to the hand. You were eager to usher in a world in which boys are now threatening girls with the phrase “Your body, my choice.” And, as far as I’m concerned, we now no longer have anything in common. For what is the point of a belief structure if we don’t turn our backs when those wildly arrogant Icaruses insist on flying too close to the sun?

But, oh, how they need us! Oh, how these idiots chirrup with half-baked incoherence and small dick energy in the replies! And they can’t own who they are and the disgusting values they represent. They know that they’re now going to have to consort among themselves, without our wit, bonhomie, and all-around decency (and, in my case, my kickass cooking). They know that the only company they will keep will be braindead red baseball cap-wearing zombies who are equally unpleasant.

So call me a proud member of the intolerant Left. If you’re a fascist, you won’t get an invite to my happy life. If you’re drowning in debt after the tariffs kick in, I’ll watch you suffer from afar and not lift a single finger to help you. Because you crossed the point of no return. These fools are now squirming within a nadir of cruelty and insensitivity for which there can be no Venn diagram. They are a hostile threat to all of the human values I hold dear. They have nothing but hate, intimidation, and threats. They have no original thoughts or real ideas. They are completely incapable of understanding historical patterns. And they know deep down that they lack resilience and resourcefulness, two vital qualities for surviving the upcoming dark age that we have and they don’t.

You can also call me an elitist. I don’t care. Although I should point out that the bar for entry into my world is astonishingly low and easy: if you don’t know something, ask a question. That’s it. I’m never going to call your question stupid, even if everyone else in the room knows the answer. You asked. And that counts for something in a world increasingly hostile to facts and checkered by anti-intellectualism. But the fascists cannot even summon the basic grace to do even that. They are incapable of respect, curiosity, humility, or broadening their minds or their empathy. They really believe that they can go about living in this nation, under this wildly dangerous and narcissistic authoritarian, without ever comprehending the impact of vital institutions, once untouchable, permanently dismantled by nihilistic fascists who hope to obliterate decades of progress.

I’m a member of the intolerant Left because I love what used to pass for my country. If we become two Americas because half the hateful rubes wanted to blow up the bridge, then so be it. My side is smarter, pluckier, and more inclined to survive, especially if we keep resisting hard. I have no qualms about transforming the stupidest and most callous members of our nation into braying pariahs. Much in the way that I show no remorse in cutting off a toxic “friend” from my life. The MAGA Cult are abusive addicts who have demonstrated that they fall below the baseline for decency. And now they’re going to learn about what the criminologist John Braithwaite called reintegrative shaming. In his studies, Braithwaite found that ostracized criminals showed a higher probability to fall into recidivism. And that’s what we’re seeing from these red state hayseeds: recidivism. Through death threats and calling me “soyboy” and attempting to belittle everything about life that is fun and joyful. It would be one thing if some members of the MAGA Cult were to prostrate themselves at our feet and beg for forgiveness and ask us for help so that they can better understand the impact of their uninformed vote, perhaps even joining us in the fight against despotism. But they have demonstrated no such inclinations. They would rather double down on their xenophobia and their belittling of anyone who isn’t white, male, hetero, and cis. That’s a line that I refuse to cross. And if it makes me “intolerant,” well calling me a member of the “tolerant Left” isn’t the flex you think it is.

by Edward Champion

The Case for Canceling Thanksgiving

New York Post wingnut Karol Markowicz has argued that we should carry on with Thanksgiving as America faces its worst case count and death toll because of COVID. Her logic doesn’t add up and belies a harder truth about what we may have to sacrifice if we hope to contain the virus.

We’re less than a day into November and already the anti-science propaganda has been unspooled like a mildewed floor roller desecrating an immaculate hardwood floor. Resident wingnut Karol Markowicz, the New York Post‘s answer to a Karen for the written word, has urged her readers to celebrate Turkey Day, come hell or high water. “Go and see your family in Thanksgiving,” writes Markowicz. It doesn’t matter if they are out-of-state. It doesn’t matter if they are old or immunocompromised. Markowicz expressed all this, even as she risibly claimed that she had arrived at this conclusion “precisely because I listen to scientists.” Actually, Karol, it’s pretty damned easy to dismantle your ridiculously convenient logic. Her remedy for not passing on the virus is to find some magical place where you can get a rapid COVID test and wait for the results before enjoying the turkey and mashed potatoes.

The problem here is that there aren’t enough rapid tests available — least of all in remote regions that are highly averse to implementing desperately needed testing and tracing. Here in New York, the state that has offered the most ample testing, there have been only 400,000 rapid test kits distributed throughout the entire state. 148,935 tests were reported by Cuomo yesterday. If we replaced all COVID tests with rapid tests, we would burn through the available rapid test supply in less than three days. But that’s not going to happen. Because these rapid tests have been earmarked for schools in COVID hot spots. Markowicz’s math simply doesn’t add up. Does she think that rapid test kits grow on trees much in the manner of L. Frank Baum’s lunchboxes? I can only imagine how poorly she manages the family budget. Moreover, she foolishly believes that COVID tests will take less than 24 hours to process when any of us who have been tested know that a result can take as long as a week to come back or, in a worst case scenario, ten days.

Adding balderdash to batshit, Markowicz also guilts the reader through offensively treacly rhetoric: If you don’t see your family now, you may never see them. This wantonly assumes that the majority of senior family members arranged at the hypothetical dinner table will drop dead in the next eighteen months. Dr. Fauci’s own projections indicate that we’re not going to have anything close to normality until 2022. And, even then, this would be contingent upon a global vaccine that was successfully distributed and applied among the global population.

The reality is that we’re going to be living with masks and social distancing for at least eighteen months.

Markowicz then goes on to defend Kim Kardashian’s deservedly reviled 40th birthday party on a private island. “It was the fact that Kim got a little ‘normal,'” Markowicz writes, “that really seemed to rub people the wrong way.” Actually, it was the obscene narcissism of Kardashian flaunting her wealth and privilege that caused people to get upset — as any cursory review of Twitter swiftly reveals. When an estimated 31 million people are waiting on unemployment benefits as Mitch McConnell holds up a desperately needed second stimulus check until the start of 2021, the last thing that anybody wants to hear is an attention-seeking moron insulated by vast wealth bray on insensitively about the luxury she gets to enjoy while a sizable cluster of America fears eviction. Markowicz even refers to Kardashian’s ploy as a “regular life.” Really? When frolicking on a private island is within the scope of more than 300 million Americans, then we’ll talk. But Kardashian is no more “regular” than a flock of dodo birds somehow transcending extinction to saunter through Midtown.

We then get two obscenely fabulist paragraphs painting a panorama of overeating, drinking too much, and arguing about the election. I’ve counted the family members that Markowicz adds to her sham idyllicism and we have a mother, a father, a great-aunt, plentiful cousins (let’s say four), and at least one aunt and uncle. That’s a super-spreader event of ten and I’m not even counting family friends or significant others. We know that roughly one in ten people have been infected with COVID. Let’s say that the family home is in South Dakota, which presently has a 46% positivity rate. These aren’t the kind of odds you want to mess with — not if you want your family to stay healthy and live.

Last year, 31.6 million people traveled for Thanksgiving. Let’s say that half of those people brave the planes. That’s still about 15 million. Scientists at MIT and the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health have informed us that HEPA filters in airplanes don’t function nearly as effectively against the virus. If the planes are packed with Thanksgiving travelers, you’re going to see planes turned into superspreader vessels. Your chances of getting COVID increase if you remove your mask to eat food or you are sitting very close to an infected person. Let’s be hopeful and say that only 10% of our estimated 15 million travelers come down with the virus. Well, that’s still 1.5 million cases. And if 1% of those people die, that’s 150,000 deaths to add to the already 230,000 fatalities we have seen since March.

What Markowicz is arguing for here is mass murder. To offer her a historical example she can understand, Operation Reinhard killed over 11,000 victims in Krakow. Even if we reduce our estimate by half, she’s essentially arguing for seven Operation Reinhards to go down in December. And the hell of it is that these needless casualties are so easily preventable.

We recently saw Australia — a vast country of 2.97 million miles (only one million less than the United States) — emerge into some semblance of normalcy. No new cases for five months. And that was only because Australia adopted strict lockdown measures that lasted for 112 days. The United Kingdom is presently attempting a similarly strict lockdown that could last four weeks. Maybe longer. The nation is joined by lockdowns in France, Belgium, Germany, and Greece.

Without a vaccine, the only real way to fight the virus — particularly as it bristles into the central regions of America — is through a national lockdown and significant penalties for failing to wear a mask in public. Failing that, seeing as how our government refuses to enforce a life-saving measure that will result in fewer deaths and potential containment, it seems to me that canceling Thanksgiving this year is merely a modest strategy to eliminate further spread of a virus that is clearly out of control in the great American heartland.

The only reasonable way I can see anyone celebrating Thanksgiving is for a “COVID pod” to agree for all parties to quarantine individually for two weeks before the turkey gets carved. But there’s also the potential exposure risk that comes with air travel. So even that isn’t a foolproof solution for people who aren’t fortunate enough to live in the same city as their family.

Look, nobody loves cooking for sixteen hours and feeding people more than I do. I’ve done the full Thanksgiving cooking marathon — turkey and all — five times now. Nobody loves ensuring that stranded friends have a place at a table during the holidays more than I do. But the rules of existence have changed. The way we live now is not the way we lived in March. If we want to return to that way of life — and we will eventually — then we need to consider some fairly radical ideas about how we can stop COVID. Now is not the time for the kind of foolish misinformation and fake news that is apparently Karol Markowicz’s specialty. But then she works for The New York Post. One would expect no less from a paper that couldn’t even report the professed Hunter Biden scandal right. When Tucker Carlson serves as the voice of reason, you’re hardly in the position to be arguing the wholesome high ground.