Trump's new wall. Quack cures. Great videos. Better than Buster Keaton. Zoom wedding. TP humor. Reality check.
LETTY COTTIN POGREBIN // NEWSLETTER #73 // APRIL 30, 2020
Given rising death rates and mind-bending Presidential lunacy, words fail. So cut to the pictures. And keep looking for laughter wherever possible.
NOT FUNNY
* Trump's quackery can kill.
The Orange Menace now claims he was kidding (a blatant lie: watch his expression) & just wanted to see the media react. But his disinformation was deemed serious enough for governors, the FDA and manufacturers of Lysol, Clorox, and other disinfectants to issue warnings about lethal effects of ingesting those products.
ON INGESTING PRESIDENTIAL POISON
* Comedian Sarah Cooper lip-syncs Trump's ludicrous medical meanderings.
* No vaccine? Try Mr. Clean. Randy Rainbow's "A spoonful of Clorox makes your temperature go down."
* When we aren't screaming in disbelief, here's how normal people react to Trump's inane advice:
VIDEOS (for laughs and beauty)
* Looks sexist -- until the kicker at the end! Little girl serves her brothers during lock-down.
* Hilarious husband-wife clown/trapeze act. Die Maiers. Old-fashioned physical humor at its best! The woman's deadpan beats Buster Keaton's.
* Amazing musical performance. Four women, dueling instruments, wonderful wit. Salut Salon.
* Music to calm a savaged soul. Playing in the background of the 4-min. video marking the 40th anniversary of the "Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio (above) the longest-together trio in contemporary classical music, is their sublimely uplifting rendition of the 2nd movement of Mendelssohn’s First Trio, in d minor.
* Ilana Yahav's sand animation art must be seen to be believed. This beautiful piece commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day (belatedly) to the accompaniment of the theme from Schindler's List.
COVID HUMOR
* TP Rationing: The sign (above) says "You shall not PASS."
A "roll" model for our kids.
Israeli cop: "Where are you going?"
Boy: "To Grandma's house. I can't stand one more day of Mommy."
(I posted an Israeli Mommy's side of the story a month ago. Remember her rant?
* Zoom wedding on Walter Street, S.E., so friendly, it's often called, "D.C.'s Sesame Street."
REALITY CHECK
* Here's how sensible people responded to the 1918 pandemic
* Excerpts from Fintan O'Toole's scalding piece in The Irish Times April 25, 2020
THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S.
NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic. . .
It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – willfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence. . .
In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety. . .
On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
But this is not just Donald Trump. . . There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection. . .
No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality. . .
Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics. Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
Stay safe. Stay strong. Stay home. -- Letty
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