The Three Arizona Afflictions
What To Do About The Stupid?
This week: The Tale of Three Arizona Afflictions. All of them immensely avoidable. All with fingerprints of Republican politicians all over them. All three expose our obsession with individualism at all costs.
Let’s start with what is likely the worst and most insidious Affliction: “the stupid,” as defined by the stunning “alternative facts” weirdness mucking up our lives.
Affliction # 1, The Stupid, underpins the other two Afflictions: Endless COVID 19 and the coming Tsunami of Sports Gambling Addiction.
“The stupid” is not my description, though I wish it was. It comes from Minnesota Reformer Editor-in-Chief J. Patrick Coolican. The Reformer is a sister publication to the AZ Mirror, both created with States Newsrooms funds to cover statehouse politics. I recommend both for your media feeds.
J. Patrick is the very gifted writer of the daily Minnesota Reformer newsletter, and this piece is the most courageous, memorable, and spot-on take I’ve read in…well…forever. Why? Because he directly and clearly calling out the absolutely unhinged behavior of the anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and the Trump-driven reality rearrangers that define why we can’t spell crazy without AZ. J. Patrick appeared to be a reluctant writer of this phenomena and self-aware about how he’d be perceived:
“…It’s impossible not to come off as an arrogant, condescending elitist when we talk this way, but it’s where we are…”
Nonetheless, he committed to write it. Read the whole piece here, though the title alone - “What to do about the stupid?” - should be enough to get your attention. Some highlights:
“How do we wrap our heads around all this foolishness? A reader sent me an excellent essay by Garret Keizer on “stupidity and transcendence.” He begins:
In 1943, after being interrogated by Vichy police officers who suspected him (rightly) of conspiring to rescue Jews from the occupying Nazis, a French clergyman named André Trocmé stepped into the open air with a revised view of the human condition.
‘Before he entered that police station in Limoges, he thought the world was a scene where two forces were struggling for power: God and the Devil,’ writes one of his chroniclers. ‘From then on, he knew that there was a third force seeking hegemony over this world: stupidity.’
Reality, Keizer argues, is tiresome, so people seek to escape it:
A confederacy of dunces offers more than social acceptance through a shared denial of reality. What the stupid crave above all else is to transcend reality. To get above and beyond it. To feel all four tires leave the ground as one’s turbocharged chariot hurtles over the canyon in a Blu-ray apotheosis of brainless splendor….
A friend once told me to imagine the median American and then realize that half the country is dafter. I like to think I don't like this kind of talk. It’s unkind, indecent, in opposition to what my parents taught me about how we should treat others. But it’s not wrong exactly.”
That’s gutsy, J. Patrick.
Just talking about this Affliction touches a true third rail. It will violently piss off the My Freedoms-FU Crowd, cower the endangered species of “decent” Republicans, and guarantee a 911 call after your “stupid” Trumper uncle turns Thanksgiving dinner into a knife fight.
But let’s be clear, this massive mess we find ourselves in is bolted to a bedrock of “stupid.” It’s misinformation amplified by right wing media, Republican politicians, and well, stupid people. Let the argument over who is “stupid” begin/continue. As J. Patrick demonstrated, it’s past time we tolerated this B.S. Say what you’re thinking. Tell The Truth.
Affliction # 2 - Endless COVID 19
We won’t spend a lot of time here because it’s just too freaking depressing. We should be done with all this, but the My Freedom-FU Crowd and the anti-vaxxers and their Republican political sponsors (Governors Ducey, Abbott, Santis, Noem, Tate, etc.) are letting the virus win in the name of….stupidity.
In Arizona, our one death from COVID 19 for every 375 people is way above the national average of one in 500. Why? Because we’re being gaslighted by stupid Republican politicians who live the definition of insanity every day. Their “answers” to the pandemic simply are not working. From The NYT’s David Leonhardt in The Morning:
“The situation here is worse than in almost any other country. The U.S. death rate over the past two weeks, adjusted for population, is more than twice as high as Britain’s, more than seven times as high as Canada’s and more than 10 times as high as Germany’s. If Mississippi were its own country, it would have one of the world’s worst total death tolls per capita, CNN’s Jake Tapper noted yesterday (Sunday).
Why? One reason is that the U.S. — after getting off to an excellent start — now trails many of these countries in Covid vaccination rate. Almost one in four American adults still has not received a shot. The unvaccinated continue to be disproportionately people without a college degree and Republican voters.”
Hmmmm. Let’s repeat that: “The unvaccinated continue to be disproportionately people without a college degree and Republican voters.” The unvaccinated are the clear majority - above 90% - of the folks in ICU units, in the elevator to the morgue, and the Arizonans ordering vast amounts of horse deworming meds. Yet, we continue catering to the My Freedom-FU Crowd and this Ducey idea that “personal responsibility” is more important than science. 19,513 Arizonans dead. Hmmmm.
Arizona Republicans and Governor Ducey, what to do about the stupid when the stupid are you?
Affliction # 3 - The Tsunami of Sports Gambling Addiction
Let’s see. COVID 19 is rampant in Arizona, driven by state-sponsored misinformation and stupidity. We already have a bunch of opioid addicts, a high degree of child poverty, a high degree of food insecurity, lousy public education, a lack of affordable housing, a wacky legislature, a water emergency, and on and on and on….
Seems like a good time for our state government to bring in a truly destructive, person and family destroying Affliction like sports gambling. Who could possibly come up with such a great idea? None other than the man responsible for nearly 20,0000 COVID 19 deaths: Governor Doug Ducey.
Brilliant. The revenue for the state will be awesome, right Governor? You may be able to make good on your promise to dump the state income tax, right? Well worth the cost to those families devastated by gambling addiction, right?
Is this guy Dr. Evil? Maybe.
Because of Ducey’s success in legalizing sports gambling, you can’t get out of the way of the messaging, the enticement, the push, to set your hard-earned cash on fire in a sports bet. Yeah, I’m using the drug peddling term for a reason. This is state-sponsored dope pushing, period.
And, like the pusher at the party, the gambling industry offers you the “free” opportunity to sample their stuff for a while, until shit gets real and they want your credit card number… or the title to your car… or start garnishing your wages. Your guide to the dark side is right there in the commercials around every televised sports event, commercial after commercial after commercial pushing (there’s that word again) sports gambling. I’ve been told that local TV stations cannot get out of the way of the sports gambling ad money. ESPN and FOX Sports are making big bucks too,
They’re every bit complicit in what’s coming. So are the bazillionaire owners of the Diamondbacks, Cardinals, Coyotes, Rattlers, Mercury, Suns, and the PGA. They all got a big wet kiss from Ducey to “win” their licenses. Sadly, the Democrats in the Arizona Legislature also sold out, seduced by the massive state revenues it will bring.
What does the Sports Gambling Addition Tsunami look like? Lots of young men, already struggling to find their way, are certain to get in over their heads, as explained by the Republic’s Editorial Director Phil Boas in his weekly column.
We know this is going to be bad, just as Big Tobacco knew its products were going to kill a bunch of people. And they sold the shit anyway. The Surgeon General’s warning wasn’t any sort of a deterrent. Neither is the fine print on the sport book commercials offering helplines for compulsive gamblers.
The Three Arizona Afflictions tell us a lot about what we’ve become: a culture that celebrates, no, demands, absolute “freedom” to do anything no matter how destructive, because it’s our “right.” Never mind the freedoms and rights of those victimized by it all. As J. Patrick so completely nailed it” “this is where we are.”
Can we be any more STUPID?
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The Ethical Voids of Manchin and Sinema
Good to see the twin DINO speed bumps to Building Back Better getting wacked this week by two revealing stories.
First, NYT dissected West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s (D) ties to the natural gas and coal industry. Those fossil fuels face a rapid overhaul if the Biden Climate Change efforts get through Manchin’s Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Manchin, whose family and state make millions from mining and fracking, sure looks like a toady for the resistance. For those of us who’ve suffered under West Virginia’s corrupt politics, this is another brick in that wall. Almost Heaven can look a lot like hell when viewed from the top of a strip mine or a sawed off mountain.
And, there’s another chapter in the “Quirky Kyrsten” saga as revealed by The Nation. When not sacrificing herself and Arizona to some wild idea that Voting Rights and Build Back Better must be scuttled to save the filibuster, Senator Sinema (D) spent some time as a paid intern at a California winery. Of course, it’s a winery owned by a mega-powerful Washington lobbyist. I’m sure the intern and the owner only talked grapes and such, while she earned a little over a thousand bucks. I’m sure she’ll explain it all at her next news conference with Arizona media….
Sadly, We’re Not Better Than This…
Paul Ratje of AFP shot this depressing image this week near the Rio Grande. Yeah, those are Border Patrol Agents on horseback grabbing Haitian refugees, those displaced by earthquakes who’ve walked thousands of miles through South and Central America only to face this at the doorway of the land of the free. Inexcusable.
Brings back memories of this from 2018,
when John Moore of Getty Images captured this heartbreaking scene, also at the Rio Grande, of a Honduran child terrified by Border Patrol’s interrogation of her mother. Inexcusable.
Trump, Biden, Obama… doesn’t seem to matter. What we’re doing by not having a border policy that humanely deals with the inevitable arrival of refugees is cruel and inexcusable. I used to think we were better than this. I’m embarrassed to say we’re not.