Should You Have To Reproduce To Vote?

The struggle over voting rights has gotten even more personal for me over the past week.

I am a stepparent.  Correction:  I am a proud stepparent.  I have two wonderful, grown-up stepchildren who I have helped raised since they were in single-digit ages (and I knew them for three years prior to my marriage).  They live successful, accomplished lives, which include giving my wife and me two wonderful children-in-law and three wonderful grandchildren.  Because my wife and I got married in our thirties, and because we were financially strapped at the time we got married, we decided not to bring any biological children into the world.  We considered this to have been a sensible, mature, responsible decision, and I can state for a fact that I have never regretted it.  Likewise, I know for a fact that many other people in similar situations have made similar choices.  Not for a moment did they think that doing so made them a lesser human being, and certainly not a lesser citizen of a constitutional republic, with a lesser right to cast a vote.

Try telling that, however, to the likes of J.D. Vance, or Sean Hannity, or a whole host of yahoos on the starboard side of politics who have now decided those who have made the choice not to reproduce a disqualification from participating in the process of deciding what kind of government our nation should have.  You heard that right, folks:  they don't think that I should have the right to vote.

Their reasoning is transparently specious; the argument, to the extent that one can call it that, by not reproducing, we who are "childless" are not making a meaningful contribution to society and, therefore, should not be allowed to have any say whatsoever in choosing its future direction.  One scarcely knows where to being in taking the tortured logic of this argument apart.  Are there not more than one ways to contribute to society?  Are there not more than one ways to care for and otherwise promote the interests of children?  Indeed, as people like me demonstrate, is there not more than one way to form a family?

Essentially, as is the case with so much of modern conservative rhetoric, this is fundamentally yet another piece of ad hominem B.S., directed at a constituency--the biologically childless--perceived as being too liberal in nature and therefore to be prevented from inflicting the logic of their views on those who do not wish to accept it.  The character--or lack thereof--in this specious point of view is exposed, along with the absence of any true moral or political principle, with a few simple examples.  Let's take teachers; given the amount of time and energy they put into instructing children, should they be given an extra vote if they also choose to reproduce?  And what about clergy who take and maintain vows of celibacy; should they lose the right to vote based on an exercise of First Amendment rights conservatives love to defend?  Whoops, can't do that; a good way to lose a lot of conservative votes.

Put simply, this illustrates the equal parts of desperation and fascism to which the modern conservative moment has sunk over the past four decades.  More specifically, it underscores the extent to which the restriction of voting rights, and other rights, is key to the maintenance of its political power.  Note what I said here:  not the maintenance of its ability to benefit society, but the maintenance of its power.

I'll have much more to say about this in the coming weeks and months.  Stay tuned, stay safe, and enjoy the summer while being beware of August.  Politics have been know to take a sinister turn during this month.

Second Thoughts, And Others, On The State Of The Shots

I'll admit that, after having previously written extensively about the unwillingness of so many Americans to do the right thing when it comes to getting the COVID vaccine, I didn't expect to be posting about it again, this quickly.  In writing about it last week, I attempted to be as comprehensive as possible.  When it comes to documenting and discussing life in the world after Donald Trump's Presidency, and the carnage (to use a favorite word of his) he left behind, there's a lot to cover.  But, as I wrote previously, the virus is an immediate life-or-death matter.  So, even with a lot of other topics  to take up--and I hope to do so soon--events this past week lead me to take it up again here.

I'm talking about the sudden about-face that Republicans and their conservative allies have done on the topic of the vaccine, and the need to get it.  Suddenly, it's not as seemingly optional as it was only days ago.

Take a look here at the sudden willingness of Alabama Governor Kay Ivey to reverse her previous it's-up-to-you position on fighting COVID, and to blame (correctly) the unvaccinated for the fact that there's any pandemic at all left in the U.S..  It wouldn't be fair to describe Governor Ivey as a vaccine denier; she was vaccinated in December.  But she has received a substantial amount of federal aid to promote and distribute the vaccine, which she has failed to use.  Her comments this past week suggest that she should seriously reconsider rethinking that unwillingness.  She may also want to rethink her reversal of mask mandates in the state, given that she seems to feel powerless to get shots in arms.

Oh, well.  At least she's in a marginally better position on this subject than Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor whose defiance of both medical science and human decency in the name of out-Trumping Trump has been obscene.  He has even gone so far as to take a page out of the Donald's playbook and merchandise his defiance.  But, that was then--say, last week--and this is now.

And then, there's Sean Hannity, on Fox News.  Out of nowhere this past week, he suddenly made a statement that, in a highly nuanced way, encouraged the unvaccinated to go and get one of the vaccines.  Unfortunately for him, it may not have been nuanced enough; an apparent backlash from viewers forced him in a subsequent broadcast to state that he was not insisting on more vaccinations, claiming that he could not do this because he was not a doctor.  Of course, this lack of expertise didn't prevent him or other Fox talking heads from previously mocking vaccine advocacy and the people making it.  "I'm not an expert," along with "Can't you tell I was joking" are the two rhetorical trap doors that right-wing yakkers use when their arguments go so far south that even dittoheads won't follow them.

At any rate, this week marked a change in conservative tone on the subject of COVID vaccines.  Put simply, what's up here?

I think the meme embedded in this tweet says it all.  Take a moment to look at it, and think over what it says.

First of all, it's not a lie.  Time and again, Republicans have come around to the problems of society when those problems show up at their front door, ring the bell, and insist on making themselves at home.  There's a conservative cliché that has been in circulation for decades to the effect that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality.  Actually, the mugging has more often than not been the other way around.  It is, in fact, a severe blessing that the problems liberals want to address are problems that affect everyone, sooner or later.  This is why the arc of history bends toward justice, however slowly it may do so.

You want to know what maximizes that slowness?  Here's where it really gets worse.  Even when the problems of society get inside of their front door, Republicans still won't protect everyone in their own house.  Not if it means jeopardizing money, power, or both.  Hence, Hannity's verbal backtracking of his brief moment of broadcast bravery on the the subject of vaccines.  Obviously, the millions of Fox viewers who weren't (and may never be) prepared to handle the truth jumped on Fox's social media accounts to register their displeasure over Hannity's momentary apostasy.  Hannity responded by making it clear that he doesn't care about his viewers' health, just the ratings they generate for him as long as they're alive.

What makes that even clearer, and damningly hypocritical, is the revelation this past week that Fox News requires vaccine passports for all of its employees.  So, all of those folks on Fox promoting "healthy skepticism" about medical science, versus the good ol' 'Murcan common sense of the common people?  They are neither healthy skeptics of medical science, nor fans of the common people's wisdom.  They are flaming hypocrites who don't give a damn whether anyone in their audience lives or dies, as long as their are enough eyes on their programming to overcharge their advertisers.

All of this seems to be built on the P.T. Barnum principle that there's a sucker born every minute, so Fox is in no danger of losing viewers because the Republican Party is in no danger of losing voters.  That may well be the prevailing view at Fox and, for that matter, at other conservative media outlets.  On the other hand, not every Republican politician is so flagrantly two-faced on the subject of vaccines.  Earlier this evening, while watching MSNBC, I saw an interview with former New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman, in which she not only strongly encouraged vaccination, but went so far as to suggestion that Darwinian natural selection might be at work in the refusal of so many Trump followers to get vaccinated.  

Personally, I'm not prepared to disagree with her.  In fact, in the darker moments of my political thinking, I have considered the role that this process might play in boosting Democratic prospects in 2022.  G-d, or Nature, may yet teach the GOP and its base a thing or to about voter suppression.  But, I digress, in part because I had earlier been very anxious to write about Republican attempts to suppress the vote and the need to fight those attempts without pause or pity.

In any event, Whitman's position suggests that their is a faction of Republicans that is much more willing to publicly be pro-vaccine than the folks at Fox.  Maybe the recent drop in the stock market has had more than a little something to do with this.  After all, there's no more sensitive place to hit Republicans than in their capital gains.  But I think that it is the at-long-last realization that the greatest number of infections and deaths from COVID have been at the expense of their own voters.  Whitman effectively said as much, and I was kind of surprised that she said it in such a candid, pointed way.

Last week's post contained a mention of a story about a man who succumbed to COVID after refusing to get the vaccine.  As I leave behind me my what-took-them-so-long reaction to the new GOP wave of vaccine reversals, I find myself wrestling with a very mixed bag of feelings.  On the one hand, the vaccine deniers--all of them--have blood on their hands, in my judgment.  Lest you think I am being too hard of them in using these words, keep in mind that, in the interview I have mentioned, Whitman used exactly the same words with reference to vaccine deniers.  

And, on the other hand, they are human beings.  My obligation is not to judge theme; that's not my role or pay grade.  My job is to extend compassion to every person I come into contact with in any way.  I mourn the deniers, and those they may have infected, with equal sincerity.  None of these lives should have been lost.  It is unbearably poignant to read stories like this one, in which a victim asks for the vaccine in their dying moments and is told it's too late.

In writing last week, I express the view that a hard legal mandate of universal vaccination may be legally difficult, if not impossible.  My view on that has not changed.

But compassion for the greatest possible number seems to mandate some sort of all-hands-on-deck effort to get as many shots into as many arms as is possible.  And if and when circumstances point to a massive outbreak with large numbers of people being infected, government at all levels may no longer have a choice.  Frankly, it's not unprecedented; during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, the situation grew dire enough that people who refused to wear masks were subject to arrest.

And, since Wall Street and Main Street are both still at the economic core of the Republican Party, economic pressure from the pandemic's effects, in the form of other economic impacts besides the rise and fall of the Dow Jones, are going to force both political parties and all Americans to face the reality that the only way to achieve escape velocity from this nightmare is to vaccinate ourselves out of it.  In the private sector, vaccine passports are not exclusively the province of Fox News.  Other large companies are beginning to require them.  And, in a democracy, where the private sector goes, the public sector must find a way to follow.

As for Fox?  Well, they may at some point find themselves facing government mandates on this subject not in the legislative or executive sense, but in the judicial one.  Maybe they should stop counting their profits long enough to talk to their lawyers.  The courts may be now stacked in favor of conservatives but, as I always tell my own clients, you never know.

This is probably not the last word, or words, on this subject.  We have, to paraphrase Robert Frost, miles to go before we can sleep free of the fear of COVID.  As Rachel Maddow would say, watch this space.

The War Against Vaccines Is A War Against Science

What is wrong with us?

Once, when we faced a menacing illness like polio, we went to war against it.  We developed a vaccine.  We organized a massive public health campaign, including public information programs and vaccine distribution programs.  For boomers, getting your polio vaccine in a sugar cube is a cherished childhood memory; we actually looked forward to getting it.  The consequence?  Polio is virtually non-existent in the U.S..  And no one should mourn its absence.  It is a terrible illness that condemns those who contract it to a lifetime of physical pain and personal limitations, both of which can be unbearable, and in some cases it can even be fatal.  I have a degree of personal experience with this; one of my very best theater friends contracted polio as a child and, despite the physical hell that he endured, he managed to have a life, including a life in the performing arts.  And yet I am sure that he always wondered what his life might have been like without it.

The COVID-19 virus, like the polio virus, can have terrible consequences for those who contract it.  Like the polio virus, it can lead to either disability or death.  It can spread across a population rapidly, with little or no warning.  It is a threat to the human race, and certainly to the ability of humans to live in and enjoy the fruits of what we call civilization.  Amazingly, in record time, medical science has developed a series of vaccines that have been statistically shown to prevent humans from being seriously infected.  In fact, as President Biden said this past week, the only pandemic that we have at this point is among the unvaccinated.  True, getting "jabbed" twice isn't as much fun as swallowing a sugar cube.  On the other hand, it involves a lot less suffering than being hooked up to an ventilator and dying even with medical personnel fighting for your life.

If the man whose tragic death led to this story in the Kansas City Star could still talk, it's painfully clear that this is the message he would want every unvaccinated person to heed.  Reading the article makes it painfully clear that this is the message that those who tried to save his life would want every unvaccinated person to heed.  They would want you to know that the people who are spreading toxic lies about both the virus and the vaccine don't care about personal choice, or personal health, or anything other than their personal power and wealth.  They would want you to know that getting vaccinated is the best choice to make when it comes to not only saving your own life, but also the lives of those around you, including and especially the people you care about the most.

But that's the problem.  The lies and the liars who spread them are winning.  And, as a result, the virus is winning.  And, as a result of that, thousands of people are needlessly getting infected--and dying.

I will be on Medicare at the beginning of next month.  I have spent the lion's share of my adult life, beginning with the misbegotten birth of the so-called "Reagan Revolution," watching the slow-motion destruction of our national identity as a free and unified people systematically turned into an us-versus-them horrors show by people who understand that it's easier to make money off of creating and manipulating chaos than it is off of creating value.  I have been optimistic at various times that we were coming to our senses, and getting back to the consensus-oriented politics that allowed us to create and support programs like Medicare in the first place.  Now, I find myself grateful for getting in under the wire, before the politics of chaos managed to destroy it.  They may yet succeed in doing it, but it now seems less likely to hurt me.  Then again, who knows?

In any case, throughout all of this time, and long before the pandemic hit, I would have bet real money that a public health crisis would have been the one thing guaranteed to snap us out of our national sleepwalk towards the precipice and remind us that those who gave us our system of government believed in the concept of the common good, and expected us to use their creation to advance it.  Public health is one of the oldest, and most basic, of all public responsibilities.  One cannot expect a society, and certainly not a nation, to long endure if those who belong to it are systemically dying.

And no one should make any mistake:  the resistance to the COVID-19 vaccine is as systemic as anything can possibly be.  Erin Burnett of CNN is no one's idea of a knee-jerk liberal, but even she is (as she and all of us should be) outraged by the systemic nonsense and deceit that conservative politicians and media outlets are spreading about both the vaccine and the efforts to increase the number of vaccinated Americans.  Burnett uses a somewhat saltier term to describe this effort than "nonsense" or "deceit" but, given the grotesque nature of the phenomenon in question, I think she should be forgiven.  And one thing's for sure:  she's not wrong.

Nor should anyone pretend that this resistance is based on some sort of non-partisan, principled stance.  It's based on a belief that not getting vaccinated, and discouraging others from doing so, constitutes some sort of political victory, that somehow the "libs" will be successfully owned by the willingness of the Trump troops to spend the last moments of their lives on a ventilator that's effectively being denied to someone who is sick (whether with COVID or not) to a person whose hospitalization is not a glorious libertarian act of "choice."  Doubt me?  Take a look at this, and then tell me if you still doubt me.  Let me be clear:  any COVID death is a tragedy, but I think it's important to recognize that the choice one makes about being vaccinated is a choice that impacts, often fatally, the ability of others to make their own choices.

Are you comfortable with doing that?  Especially if the "others" are children, whether your own or someone else's?  Well, if you're not, I recommend not going to Tennessee, where the effort to own the libs has now extended to willingly exposing the lives of children to a virus that may stop them from fulfilling their own dreams and choices.  Yep, anything to own those libs.  What they're doing in Tennessee is as systemic as systemic can be; the state has even gone so far as to fire its vaccine manager, which will no doubt make it much harder for anyone in the Volunteer State to make a choice in favor of getting the vaccine.  As it turns out, in Tennessee, the only thing you can really volunteer when it comes to COVID is suicide.  All "choices" are not created equal.

And yet, for the vaccine deniers, "choice" is little more than an exercise in rhetoric.  This is demonstrated by their appropriation of pro-choice rhetoric from the abortion rights movement to justify their willingness to spread a fatal disease.  A woman's pregnancy isn't a threat to the lives of those around her; a person who has made a "choice" to get infected and become a potential superspreader is.  I shouldn't be surprised by the hypocrisy on display in the process of the deniers' willingness to steal the "my body, my choice" language of those who care more about public health than they do.  Hypocrisy is a run-of-the-mill feature of conservative politics.

So, to borrow a bit of therapy-speak, what's really bothering these people?  If this is not really about the principle of "choice," what is it really about?

I think that we actually get a bit closer to the truth of the matter when we get to the most outrageous expression of anti-vaccination sentiment.  I'm talking about the Newsmax commentator who made the case recently that vaccines are against the natural order of things, that there is some sort of moral superiority in simply letting nature take its course, even if taking its course means the needless deaths of literally millions of people.  Again, don't take my word for it; you can read all about it here.  As you can see, this assertion was egregious enough that even Newsmax, a right-wing outlet that makes Fox News seem tame, felt obliged to walk it back.  Then again, consider the fact that one of its employees felt comfortable about making it in the first place.  Call this what it is:  a reflection of the true nature of the anti-vaccination ideology--a revolt against science.

Does that seem surprising to you?  Look at it this way.  For well over a century, perhaps closer to two centuries, science has enabled us to create a level of civilization and material comfort that, in earlier ages, would have been dismissed as the wildest of fantasies.  The downside to that, however--the inevitable one, perhaps, given the pendulum-swinging nature of popular opinion--is that science defines our existence to a degree that geologies have proposed calling the present epoch the Anthropocene, given the extent to which humanity has acquired dominion over all aspects of not only human living, but the planet itself.  And that makes science an easy target when things start to go wrong in the world around us.  

This is not even a particularly new phenomenon in this century; in the previous one, H.G. Wells both saw and understood this, and incorporated it into his cinematic vision of the coming 100 years, "Things to Come," by having a petty tyrant who gained power through a devastating world war object to a group of scientist who want to build a new world order.  "Science?" he asks, and then answers:  "It's the enemy of everything that's natural in life."

Taking into account the fundamentally anti-intellectual bent in American life, the emergence of a rebellion against science, and hence against vaccines, shouldn't be all that surprising.  Many Americans have a congenital fear of people with brains and education, seeing them as comprising a kind of natural aristocracy that threatens to outthink them into submission to its wishes.  After all, anyone can acquire money or guns, but whether or not you are smart is determined at birth.  From that moment on, you are what you are.  And, if you are not among the intellectual elite, you fear those that are.

So, where does that leave us?

I don't have a comforting or even pat answer to that question.  I wish that I did.  For a lot of reasons, requiring every person to be vaccinated legally is not really an option, although scientifically it would be the best one.  The only way forward that I can see is for all sectors of society--government included--to provide as much honest information and as many positive incentives as possible in an effort to get the maximum number of people vaccinated.  And pray that, in the process, most if not all of the skeptical can be persuaded to embrace science as the only means out of the problems that science has undeniably had a hand in creating.

Pray really, really hard.

I do.