The Blame China Syndrome: A Core Onus' Meltdown.

                                         

                                              Chimerica: It was never their Idea, it was ours.
                                                    And we thought ourselves so clever.

The fault, dear Brutes, Lies not in their Stars,

As seminars for fyi masks and instructions on how to wear them and care for them so as to be able to re-use them, the chorus of voices raised to now not only suggest, but require, that masks be worn anytime you leave your enforced imprisonment are overtopped only by the din from the troglodytes demanding revenge against China for bringing this on.

...but in our Own.

                                                 
Nowhere do you hear a suggestion, or read a hint that, had we an ounce of human compassion in our hearts, we would have months ago been working hard, our Free Enterprise, Capitalist system would have been zeroing in on, a method to help the population on another continent where they go to work each day, not to manufacture products for their own use, but to toil in conditions we would never allow in this country to make not only our necessities, but the most trifling, useless of objects for our one-time use or amusement for which they receive little more than IOU's. IOU's that in 2008 proved to be not just worth less but worthless.  Yet we didn't bother to lift a finger to help, cared not a jot despite how much they were suffering from the effects of a pandemic raging through their country.

Instead we ignored, it, until we couldn't; and then we pretended it would simply dissipate like those papery fortune cookies made soggy by the slightest moisture and leaving nothing but a bad taste in our mouths. "Like a Miracle", it was going to just disappear from the earth. But not from China. Yet we cared not a whit. All of a sudden the billions to be made by providing the largest population on the globe with a remedy, a product that would be made available to all the Chinese, stamped "Made in the USA", no longer had a single entrepreneur chomping at the bit to develop.

That's curious enough. But, having seen what it did to the South Koreans and Italians, the USA simply denied there was any problem.

Now, whereas one could conceivably come up with, if not justification for, at least plausible enough reasons why, one wouldn't want to shutdown the economy, what one couldn't justifiably argue against was the efficacy and necessity of the population donning masks in  order to curtail the spread of an invisible virus transmitted by oral droplets.

Had the USA adopted the KNOWN precaution of wearing masks, a prophylactic shown to be effective by the Chinese, months, well actually, years, in advance, as they donned them during the SARS outbreak as well, instead of deriding citizens who did wear them, chiding them that they were idiots just using up precious supply needed by healthcare professionals, the stockpiles those professionals are burning through now would never have been needed.

Because healthcare professionals don't don a mask and wear it all day, wash it and then use it again. That is not how things are done in our wasteful western ways. The mask is worn once and then discarded, the next patient, another mask: There will therefore never be enough masks to protect 330 million citizens, and that was a fact known by those claiming they had no protective effects, an outright lie revealed by the fact that healthcare workers were getting sick ... and dying ... from lack of PPE. But if PPE was to protect only the patients, as these authorities were claiming, how were healthcare workers getting sick from its lack? Because the amount of masks, gowns, and gloves needed to protect hospital staffs and their patients climbs toward infinity as more and more people get infected with corona. In other words, the reason you are being told to make your own, of a kind that is far less effective than the n-95's, is that even with the well-published and documented scary events taking place amidst our largest trading partner's population, there was no rush, nor even the slightest effort brought to bear by the all-knowing, all pervasive Market. Relying on Market wisdom has  shown the cornucopia of America's Market Basket to be a basket case. The profits of doom weren't alluring enough to tempt capital to risk the thinnest dime in an effort to save lives. That is not what we're about. Having been weaned from Risk, knowing only how to slough it onto the public, the Capitalists did nothing, they are now however lined up to reap the grim rewards, and pass them on to their shareholders, now that demand has been guaranteed, profits from disease assured.

Fearful that it would spend even a nickel on a product that would then be in oversupply, in our jit inventoried world, the Market, that cares nothing for human suffering and despair, as doing so robs from the bottom line, and therefore could possibly shave a penny from dividend checks, the Market Economy we have honed to a droning efficiency, is too calcified to respond to actual Market demand, busy as it is, formed as it has been, to respond only to Government and the Pentagon's demands. Once the economy has been optimized to supply our ever-expanding Wehrmacht, the prospect of millions of deaths to a system that is basically a War Machine is not a deterrent, it is the desired outcome the US economy has been built to inflict: Satisfy the demands of "Defense" first, let China worry about how best to satisfy US consumers' demands. We have real work to do here stateside: we have tanks to build, missiles to stockpile, ammo to disburse, bases to construct, MRE's to manufacture, camouflage uniforms to churn out for those millions of boots on the ground, while we fill the air  with Raptors and Predators and other killer drones, Cobras, Blackhawks and Condors, Patriot missiles and Stealth bombers; we must have more AK-47's and Abrams tanks, we need missile silos and Polaris subs to construct, Aircraft carriers and multi-billion dollar aircraft to launch, ICBM's and Hummers to modernize. But a supply of ventilators we may never use? Feggetaboutit! We do Man's Work for Macho posturing, none of this sissy medical supply paraphernalia. What? Us make gowns?! Whaddya think we are, fer crissakes, French?

The buildup of Weapons of Mass Destruction has never been more fierce, the potential for a single misstep resulting in a conflagration incinerating a sobering swath of the earth's population has never before been so callously stoked. So it's little wonder that excess Vanity would stop a country from protecting itself, even when every news source in the world was reporting on the insidious spread of Covid-19, except those in its own country, which were deriding as nonsense any attempt to prepare for what was bearing down on us.

And now as Easter approaches, it's hard not to reflect on its beginning, the day after Mardi Gras, a festival of costumes and frivolity that would have Lent itself well to the donning of masks, but what instead, not from anything that China did, but thanks to our own Hubris, became the major hub of infection for the entire state of Louisiana.

Because that's the reality we are facing right now: the reality that it was not China's doing, but our own intransigence, our own vanity, wherein as little as a month ago you would have been hooted at or sneered at for wearing protection, yet, had we started, not last month, but better yet, the month before, when we saw South Korea, Italy and Iran already reeling from the ravages this virus was inflicting, to wear masks when gathering in public, there would have been plenty of them then, and there would definitely be plenty now. Oh, but not us. "We don't need no stinking facemasks! Only the stupid Chinese wear those".

And those who disagreed were shouted down by the very government that is now REQUIRING us to wear them ... but if they can require masks now, they could have require them then: it's the same government. But nope. It's a Democracy. You have to wait until the economy's destroyed, tens of thousands have died, and mass lockdowns have been necessitated before we can so gently suggest maybe, if you could manage to throw one together, it would be wise to protect each other from this deadly microbe.

The case load would have been lightened, perhaps not enough to stop a shutdown entirely, but the first wave of people would have crested far sooner and at a far lower number.

The US also had the AIDS outbreak to inform its decision, wherein a simple prophylactic could save your partner from disease, yet even the most logical step of closing down the bathhouses drew howls of protest from the very community it was being implemented to protect.

As I recall, not a single person was either blaming Cameroon, nor calling for revenge against it. It came from "Africa" is all anyone knows to this day ... that a place called Cameroon even exists, never mind where it is, is a mystery to 99% of us. But that was in the eighties. And El Cid and Nancy were still in the White House; the vicious Bush Family had yet to leave their imprimatur of war-mongering, Neo-con, compassionless conservatism indelibly branded onto our hide.

That apotheosis came on 9/11. And we allowed ourselves to be led by our basest instincts then, not knowing the torrent of cash and bloodshed that was to pour out of the US economy for decades as the cost of that revenge. Revenge against countries whose ability to threaten us at all was enabled entirely by the Pentagon (Why was Bush so sure Iraq had WMD? ...  "Daddy had the receipts.")

But blaming them was so much more fun.

The same dynamics are at play here, demonstrating, (by demonizing) we have learned absolutely nothing.

It is not China, but the USA that is blocking, yet again, medical supplies that are in dire need, this time to Iran and to Venezuela. There is not a murmur of dissent opposing this murderous wickedness.

Madeleine Albright once callously opined that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children was, "Worth it", knowing full well that what the "It" was need never be elaborated upon. She knew we simply wouldn't care enough for her to have to bother.

In John Prine's words, referencing yet another military "adventure",

"We lost Davy in the Korean War,

Still don't know what for, don't matter anymore ... "

And as this disaster is again and again compared to War, our stalwart medical personnel's dedicated determination to fight it likened to a military action, maybe we should take a minute or two to reflect on that, as a military action desires in its barbaric heart a completely opposite outcome: to inflict Mass Death. The same as sanctions, which are in fact an act of War. No guilt, no one to care about, just Kill. Let them dispose of the dead.

But these doctors and nurses are NOT in a military action, they are NOT trying to snuff out lives, they are trying desperately to SAVE lives, risking losing their own as collateral damage, and there is a world of difference. It is compassion, a sentiment America's bible belt long ago chose to close its heart to, that drives them, not hatred stoked to such a red hot fury we could actually liken the ease with which we would rain destruction down on a nation, to "a Cakewalk". Lobbing our arsenal of weapons of mass destruction on their heads because we suspected them of harboring weapons of mass destruction. Our battle cry as we also dropped one planeload of ordnance after another on one of the poorest countries in the world was, "Bomb them back into the stone age".

Something we seem to have forgotten.

How that's possible, having started the New Year by dropping more chemical weapons of mass destruction on both of those same countries almost 20 years, and trillions of dollars, later, is truly bewildering.

It's not China that needs a doctor, Blanche.