Gemsbok, eland, impala. And a predator, unseen. Waiting.
Pillar of Fire
Given the chance, herd animals protect each other. Given the chance, so do we. Instead, in the silent brutality of their inaction, Trump and Johnson reflect the prevailing political philosophy of the time. The negligence of Johnson's party caused entire families to be burned to death in a tower of flame after they cut corners on fireproofing. A Koch Brothers-funded American pundit wrote afterward that "we should wait until we can establish that it was actually a bad calculation" to save that money.
No jumping to conclusions except, perhaps, from windows on the higher floors.
But then, Grenfell's dead were "only" low-income workers, "only" the poor, "only" refugees and babies. Here, Trump has moved to cut Social Security for the disabled they're "only" the disabled, after all while threatening additional cuts to Social Security and Medicare for older Americans.
Theirs is an animal planet. They seem to observe humanity from a distance, as if it were being filmed from a helicopter for the Discovery Channel. There is no "us" for them, just the big cats licking their blood-flecked claws in the moonlight.
Margaret Thatcher said it plainly, remember? The clipped syllables yet issue from that throat of near-mechanical inelasticity:
" ... there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families."
Can families produce and distribute medicines and supplies? Can families heal their own sick, tend to their own basic needs? Can families keep the trucks and trains rolling, keep the power on in our homes?
Margaret Thatcher was a sociopath. So was her spray-waxed and buffed hatchling, Ronald Reagan. So are all those who follow their deathly footsteps, that path of pale spoor down the road of no hellos.
Cull of the Wild
An economics columnist for the UK's Daily Telegraph reflected on the fact that COVID-19, unlike the 1918 flu epidemic, seems to target the elderly and vulnerable while largely bypassing younger people:
"... (F)rom an entirely disinterested economic perspective," Jeremy Warner wrote, the pandemic "might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents."
"Cull," from the Oxford Learners' Dictionary, means "to kill a number of wild animals from a group, especially in order to stop the group from becoming too large."
As for an "entirely disinterested economic perspective": the idea that such a thing could even exist is symptomatic of our psychopathic age.
Warner said later that he regretted using the word "cull," but was "unrepentant about the economic point I was trying to make."
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