How much crazier can Republicans get?

Bodies being loaded into refrigerated trucks in Texas.

Do you remember what it was like during the early days of the COVID crisis?  I didn’t.  I had to look it up.  Seventeen months ago to the day, on March 31, 2020, Time Magazine published a story about a woman in Brooklyn who had been watching from her apartment window as refrigerated trucks were pulled up outside Wyckoff Heights Medical Center and temporary wooden shelving was constructed to hold the bodies of people who had died from the disease because there was no space left for them in city morgues. 

It was happening all over New York City.  They even had a name for them:  BCP’s, or Body Collection Points.  There were two in Brooklyn, one in Queens, and one in Manhattan outside Bellevue Hospital.  Some were 53-foot long trucks, some were refrigerated tents.  They started building what they called “pop-up hospitals” to keep up with the COVID caseload, which had overrun the city’s hospitals.  One such pop-up hospital was in the Jacob Javits convention center on the city’s west side.  Another was quickly set up in Central Park. 

Back in Brooklyn, they built a wooden ramp for hospital workers to use to wheel the bodies out of the hospital and into the trucks.  Curious people started stopping on the street to watch the bodies being loaded into the backs of the trucks, so they brought the construction men back to the site to build thin white panels to keep the passersby from getting too close to the dead bodies or gathering in small crowds to stare.

Time reported that the New York State death toll had reached 1,200, with more than 66,000 cases of COVID.  More than 900 people had died in New York City alone, thus the need for the temporary morgues in refrigerated trucks and tents.

Cable news covered the COVID crisis in New York City.  You could see images of the refrigerated trailers lined up in Queens and Brooklyn.  People were asking what it was about New York that the city had so many deaths from the disease.  Was it because people lived so close together?  Was there something about the lifestyle of New Yorkers that had made the disease spread throughout the city?  Was it travelers coming in from outside the city? 

I remember finger-pointing by politicians in states in the south and the Midwest, and the fingers were pointed at the big liberal cities of New York and Chicago and Los Angeles.  There must be something wrong in those big cities to have so many people dying.

Oh, there was something wrong all right.  A vicious, highly contagious virus was spreading rapidly through the population and infecting thousands of people and some of them were dying. Very little was known about the disease.  Medical experts were arguing about how the disease could be controlled.  Some recommended wearing masks, but it turned out that there was a shortage of what was called PPE, or “personal protective equipment,” and some experts were against recommending that civilians be told to wear masks so there could be enough for the medical professionals in the hospitals who were so overrun with patients with COVID.

The president of the United States formed a so-called “task force” and began holding briefings from the White House, but those briefings quickly devolved into exercises in denial and attacks on the press for making more of the emerging pandemic than the president thought was necessary.  With shortages of medical equipment and PPE hindering the fight against the disease, he told the states to find their own, and his own son-in-law even set up a “shadow” task force, the so-called hedge fund volunteers assembled from young friends of Jared Kushner and housed in an empty office in the FEMA building.  But the hedge fund volunteers quickly started bickering about how many deaths they should budget for – they made an estimate of a possible hundred thousand, because the estimate by outside experts, who actually had experience with disease and pandemics, was “too severe.”  The group paid a lot of attention to Fox News personality Jean Pirro, who was calling up her friend Kushner and getting him to direct lots of the PPE to her favorite hospital in New York.  And then one of the young hedge fund volunteers came down with COVID and the group had to stop meeting, and the whole thing fell apart and the states had to go back to bidding against each other for badly needed medical gear to fight the disease.

More than 639,000 dead bodies later, we’re still at it.  Once again our television screens feature interviews with exhausted ICU nurses and red-eyed doctors attending patients lined up in crowded hospital hallways.

But there’s a difference.  A big one.  Seventeen months after the initial panic over the rampaging virus in New York City that no one knew anything about, we know a lot about how it spreads and what to do about it.  This time, the New York Times tells us, “Of the 10 states with the most cases per capita in recent days, nine voted Republican in last year’s presidential race and nine are led by Republican governors.”  This time the refrigerated trucks are being lined up outside hospitals in Mississippi and Texas and Arizona and Florida, and the temporary “pop-up” hospitals are being built in Mississippi and Missouri and Texas.  This time, the states with spiking COVID case numbers and steeply rising death curves are in the South and upper Midwest and the country’s heartland.

What, you might ask, are all those Republican governors in all those Republican states doing to help contain this new pandemic outbreak?  Are they following CDC guidelines and imposing mask mandates and encouraging residents of their states to get vaccinated? 

No, like South Dakota governor Krisi Noem, who, wearing blue jeans and a black leather jacket recently rode a black Harley Davidson motorcycle into the big motorcycle rally in her state in the small town of Sturgis, they are brushing aside calls for vaccine and mask mandates. “The left is accusing us of embracing death when we’re just allowing people to make personal choices,” said Roem.  Personal choices to die? you might ask.  Apparently so.  Texas senator Ted Cruz chimed in, “Freedom is good policy and good politics.”  Cruz has introduced federal legislation to forbid mask and vaccine mandates, because, you know…freedom.

The Republican Party, which only a few years ago caused a stir by requiring welfare applicants in states it controls to get a blood test for drug use, has now decided that walking around coughing and sneezing without the bother of a mask that would protect those around you is what “freedom” means.  The Republican Party has decided that Republican governors know better than local school boards which have the safety of school children as their responsibility, and they are busy passing anti-mask mandate laws giving parents the “freedom” to decide whether their children will wear masks to school to protect their fellow students. 

This is beyond the old shibboleth that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  Republican governors are not insane.  They are cruel and mean and without feeling for anything other than power.  And they are afraid.  They are afraid that if they do what they know is right, which is to require that their citizens wear masks and get vaccinated so they won’t get sick and die, a big bad bogeyman named Donald Trump will come and take their toys away.

You look at the COVID statistics and they are incredible.  On August 30, yesterday, 1,725 Americans died from COVID.  280,403 contracted the disease.  In a single day.  Go back and look at those New York stats from March 30, 2020.  66,000 cases and 900 deaths total, over a couple of months. 

Is it that we don’t learn anything anymore?  Or is it that some of us just don’t care?  Is it that these people in Mississippi or Alabama or Arkansas or Missouri or South Dakota would rather watch the refrigerated trucks fill up with dead bodies than put on a mask and walk into a supermarket or sit down at a Walgreens and pull up their sleeves and let the libs win?  Is it that they would rather die than act rationally?  Is it that they’re sheep being herded by Ron DeSantis or Greg Abbott or Ted Cruz, or are they the ones herding the Republican politicians? 

It would be nice to just sit back and say they’ve lost their minds, the whole Republican Party has gone crazy, wouldn’t it? 

But people are dying.  Thousands of people.  Still.  Once again, the bodies are piling up in the 53-foot long trucks.  It’s sad.  It isn’t all of us, but we’re fucking this up, folks, the whole nation of us. 

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