After a four-day drive across this great and troubled republic, we landed in Arizona on Dec. 6, and found that our county here, Santa Cruz, geographically the smallest in the state at 1,238 square miles, has the second-highest vaccination rate for one dose — 89 percent. This compares with 66 percent for the entire state (56 percent for fully vaccinated). The anti-vaccination tribe is strong here, but I’ve observed that the spread of Omicron seems to have persuaded a lot of people to mask up and for businesses, churches, and other venues to issue mask mandates. Governor Ducey has tried to prohibit such requirements, but the virus’s spread has made his pronouncements irrelevant, like the fulminating of a daft king whose subjects have stopped listening.
After a couple of weeks in our small town of Patagonia, we traveled to Phoenix to spend the Christmas holidays with my sister and younger son Marc, daughter-in-law, Erin, and grandchildren Livia, Ana, and Sofia. They flew in from their home in Florida. We all had a fine time, climbing Camelback Mountain, visiting the aquarium, riding horses in the Tonto National Forest; however, Covid hovered over us. On the day before Christmas, Livia, who is 18, woke up feeling headachy and feverish, classic symptoms. We scoured the neighborhood for a testing site, found one that couldn’t give us results for four or five days due to the holiday, and then went on a pilgrimage for a home test kit and a thermometer. The latter was easily obtained, but the former required trips to three pharmacies before one was found. Livia’s temperature was normal, and she tested negative for the virus. Crisis averted.
The pandemic is approaching its 2d anniversary. Two years is of course not a long time, yet the days before the pandemic struck now seem to belong to a distant era. Like many people, I’ve wearied of it and grown fatalistic — if I get Covid, I’ll get it, so I’ll just try to carry on, hoping for the best. Meanwhile, despite 800,000 deaths in this country alone, members of the GAM (Great American Moron) tribe continue to refuse getting vaccinated, and to believe that the pandemic is some sort of hoax perpetrated by a U.S. government intent on depriving them of their sacred liberties. This evidences a different kind of virus — a disease of stubborn ignorance infecting not only the uneducated but people who ought to know better. Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, in a fund-raising email to his supporters, called for Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, to be thrown in jail. And, mirabile dictu, the supreme GAM leader, Donald Trump, was booed by tribal members when he urged them to get vaccinated.
I was reflecting on this phenomenon after waking up at 5 am to watch the launch of the James Webb SpaceTelescope on Christmas morning. A French-built rocket roared aloft from the launch site in French Guiana, carrying the scope from “a tropical rainforest to the edge of time” in the words of a NASA announcer. The JWST, up to 100 times more powerful than the Hubble, will voyage to a point in space one million miles from Earth, from which it will peer back 13.6 billion years to the birth of the first stars and galaxies. The scope is an incredibly complex engineering marvel, 20 years in the making, and a testament to the human drive to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe. Although its construction was a collaborative effort by NASA and the European and Canadian Space agencies, it was mostly a U.S. project. Watching the Ariane rocket soar into the overcast skies, I pondered a terrestrial mystery: How could a society that produces engineers, technicians, and scientists capable of designing and building such an instrument also produce millions of idiots who defy commonsense measures like vaccinations, who think the 2020 elections were rigged, and who believe in conspiracy theories so outlandish a nine-year-old would laugh at them.
I share your wonder at the illogical behavior of a large portion of the population of the United States. Yes many are of the room temperature IQ group; however there are some fairly bright people that have somehow been seduced in to truly believing the most outlandish ideas. That bright educated people can be convinced to ignore reason concerns me.
You are sounding well. I hope you are feeling the same. Thanks for the December Dispatch.
Governor DeSatan of Florida and his master the Orange One will be remembered by future generations( if indeed there will be many) as planet hating , science denying morons whose love of power and adulation cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens.. Many of the unvaccinated so selfish and blisfully ignorant they’d happily take up entire hospitals leaving cancer victims , cardiac patients etc etc out on the street so strong is their hatred and scorn of science and learning. These are the times we live in: The natural projectory of Trumpism and the rapid decline of the American experiment….
Daniel E Toomey on December 26, 2021 at 7:19 pm
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I heard on the news, this morning, December 26th, that unvaxxed people who have been hospitalized are insisting that they receive the discredited remedies other than the vaccines. Moreover, the announcer also indicated that the GAMs are filing lawsuits in the doctors refuse. It is insane.
Sadly, I heard from a good friend who revealed that his 58-year-old son, and father of three children, just died of Covid-19 complication and was not vaxxed. He came under the spell of a far right wing of the Catholic Church, still celebrating the Latin Mass, many of whose adherents believe the the vaccines were originally developed using the cells of aborted fetuses. Madness!
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You can’t do much about morons. If they get sick and die so be it. There may be some purpose to their existence. Time will tell.
Contempt is an uncomfortable feeling, especially as regards people with whom we might otherwise have affable interaction. This, too, will pass, but only after we have.
Thank you for the journal and the commentary and all that is revealed in combination. Your writing is clear and gliding and has you in it. I am happy to think of you as out there with Leslie, doing all these extroverted things with such exuberance. Happy New Year and thank you for staying in touch.
Amen, LT.
“How could a society that produces engineers, technicians, and scientists capable of designing and building such an instrument also produce millions of idiots who defy commonsense measures like vaccinations, who think the 2020 elections were rigged, and who believe in conspiracy theories so outlandish a nine-year-old would laugh at them.”
Phil, the answer may be entrenched in the national belief that military spending is a vastly more important expenditure of treasure than providing a higher education to anyone who wants it. I often wonder what harm to the sense of national security flip-flopping their respective budget appropriations would do.
Thank you Philip.
And that’s the real question:
“How can Homo sapiens simultaneously be so smart and so dumb?”
Which begs the question:
“Which Tribe will eventually win?”
In the past, I had no doubt.
Today, I despair.