Day 1180 – Uncle Rick’s Buck-Up Speech (and weekly review)
Sunday April 12, 2020
203 Days until the election on November 3rd
283 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
When I woke up this morning I thought it was Saturday. Now? I discover it’s Sunday, which just goes to show that time-travel is possible.
I’ve watched part of the latest Bill Maher and part of SNL’s latest. I fell asleep on both shows. If I drink wine, I fall asleep faster.
I was stunned to listen to the interview Bill had with Nikki Glazer to find that they both are “coping” and going stir crazy. WTF? Okay, so it is time for an intervention, and I’m just the guy to do the intervening. So here goes. Buckle Up Buttercup.
First off, this virus is going to be with us for a long time. Like 12 to 18 months – best guess. You can go out, you can get it, and maybe you’ll survive. Maybe, you won’t. Maybe after that, you’ll be immune, maybe not. We don’t really know. However, if you pursue that path and you get sick you are taxing our health care systems, which are already straining. You may also be spreading the virus, You don’t know. So if you want to go this route please do it with a bunch of like minded people. Go to a mega church meeting where they are going to stand up to the virus. Or go to a Trump rally. Or go to Fox News HQ and do some laughing and slapping.
Or go the Samuel L. Jackson route and Stay the Fuck Inside.
Why? Let’s examine Option 1 versus Option 2. If you think Option 1 is a good idea than consider how well it worked out for the native Americans once folks from Europe showed up. It is calculated that 80-90% of the native population was wiped out. Diaz in his account of the Conquest* recounts going into villages and there was no one there. They hadn’t left. They had all died.
The native Americans did not have the 400,000 years of intermingling with the Neanderthals that the now European stock had, which had allowed that population to build up an immunity to Smallpox and measles.
Option 2 means stay inside until “we” come up with a vaccine. There are promising signs that this may be sooner rather than later, but we don’t know. Yet. Until there is a vaccine we are screwed. Unless, of course, by getting it and surviving one builds up an immunity, but again we don’t know if that is true. We also don’t know why some survive and some die. It seems that maybe those that survive have only been mildly infected, but we don’t know.
There are, at least, two hopeful medicines that I know of. One is from Gilead Science and its drug may help one get better by limiting the virus’ ability to reproduce once it is in your body. Gilead came up with the cure for Hep-C so, yeah, that will help if it proves to work.
The other is a vaccine from researchers from the U of Pitt. It is administered via a small bandaid that has 400 little needles on it. It is based on twenty years of research that they’ve been doing on these kind of viruses. They may have something. They aren’t sure until they’ve done more testing. TWENTY YEARS OF RESEARCH! That’s the key. Trump has been slashing the research budgets of these sort of efforts. He thinks he can go out and buy what he wants. He tried to do that with a German company. To quote Mick Jagger, “You can’t alway get what you want,” and you can’t alway buy it. Especially, if it’s not available. (Maybe, a childhood cautionary tale would be better? If you’re a piggie that built his (or her) house of straw and the big bad virus came around you’re gonna get it. Likewise with brick. If you had invested in an R&D lab then maybe you’ll come up with an answer before it kills you. Wait that doesn’t really make any sense. The point I was trying to make was that if you don’t plan ahead you’re leaving yourself open to the vagaries of whatever comes your way. Yeah, that’s what I meant.)
Some might try to argue that “We didn’t know it was coming.” To which I say to thee, “Verily, I say unto you Bull Shit.” We knew it was coming. We had teams in place to deal with such things. We had a playbook. It was all in place. There were scenarios that described in detail exactly how a pandemic like this could happen.
What happened?
We elected an idiot. That’s what happened.
But.
That’s (as they like to say) “The Tip of The Spear.”
We’ve been building up to this since 1980 when Reagan, the first stupid President, was elected.
However, Reagan, Bush, Bush II, and Trump were only the frontmen for an ideological movement that has shown itself to be bereft of good thinking. By good here I mean helpful to most people. All of these “thinkers” and politicians depended on magic.
“When the Iraqis stand up; we’ll stand down.”
“A thousand points of light.”
“I believe in the American people.”
Yeah, right. They all had half baked plans and dreams. Behind this was a wall of greedy folks that were madly feeding at the trough. Ayn Rand had outlined this sort of behavior in her two classic books. Some thought it was the Soviet System, some thought it capitalism aided by government corrupted. Both were right. Like Marx, they were good at describing the problem, but not a solution.
Reagan was supposedly the new conservatism, but he was really being manipulated by his wife and her astrologer and a band of folks who were in it for themselves. Many of these folks had gone to business school and not learned how to do anything. The guy who wrote “Up With Business” said it best – people who went to the Harvard School of Business sit around waiting for the job of CEO to open up. He seems to be right. I haven’t heard of anyone coming out of business school who has done anything helpful to the country, the world, the economy, or people in those categories. Yes, they may have made a ton of money for themselves, but for others? Naw.
Let’s look at Mitt Romney. His dad build a huge car business. Mitt is like Richard Gere in Pretty Woman before he was beguiled by Julia Roberts. He bought up a company, stripped it of its assets, loaded it up with junk bond debt, charged it high fees and then off loaded it. He and Mitt either sold it off as a repackaged stock offering or he let it go into some sort of receivership that the government had to take care of. This is not a guy who built anything, improved the lives of others, far from it. He destroyed companies and with it people’s hopes, dreams, and promises made to them.
See, there’s this underlying contract that the Republicans and those like them keep ignoring. That contract is “you work for me and I’ll take care of you.” Yeah, you can laugh and say, “BS.” But aren’t all the company ads you see either selling you something based on that idea? Either the product will or the people associated with the product will – take care of you. They’ll take care of a need or a want.
But for the guys at the top, is that true? Do they believe that? The founders of the company usually did, but once the MBAs come in – naw. But even the founders were sons of bitches. Ford had to pay double to get people to do the stinking’ jobs. Walton got sued and forced to pay for overtime. Do you know what he said? “I have to pay, but if you cash the check you will be fired.” Let’s roll the Wal-Mart people ad please. Dupont, what about Dupont? It’s big in Richmond. Many folks got nice pensions from the company, including my father-in-law. Do you think old man DuPont did that out of the goodness of his heart? F no. He was forced by the government to do so. He hated and fought it the whole way. Who was running the government at the time? Hint: Not a Republican.
So let’s move on to some of the “new conservative thinkers” like Grover Norquist. He’s smart. He’s funny. He has an idea that the smaller government is the better. Is that true? When you get down to it he’ll tell you that he believes something or other is true, but is it? Ah, there’s the magical thinking. Then they move into the Constitutional argument that other than a standing army and the post office (and the Census) there is nothing the government should be doing. Private business is better. Really? Why then did Teddy Roosevelt have to break up the trusts?
Whose going to build the roads, bridges, etc. that this country depends on other than the government? Private enterprise likes to skim the cream, but not take care of everyone. Rural electrification took place not because the electric companies wanted to do it. The government made it a priority. It is said, and this seems to be accurate, if the Department of Agriculture didn’t exist with its loan programs to rural America our farms and rural areas would look like rural China. (Which ain’t pretty, but ya know what? Maybe, we should let the jackals in to feast on that big loan portfolio? Let ‘em jack up the price on those loans and let more small farms go out of business. Then maybe all those Senators from those states that control the Senate would start voting to help the people? What am I talking about? Then they’d be completely bought and sold by powerful interests. Never mind.)
Remember David Stockman and Alan Laffer and the Laffer Curve? Yeah. Well, turns out that the theory didn’t really work out in practice. Yes, there’s a relationship between revenue and taxation, and yes there is some point at which if you tax more you’ll get less revenue, but whatever Laffer was pushing as the rate he was way off. Stockman? Yeah, cut this then that. Turns out you can cut this, but that? Forget it.
Then there’s Rand and Ron Paul. Ron had the “Revolution” the idea being that you could diddle the monetary rates (ie the rate at which the government lends money) and this would cure the economy. It’s called the Austrian School of Economics. No one had really ever heard of it until Rand. Well, that’s not true. Economists had heard of it and shrugged it off as quackery. But when it comes to economics there are a lot of quacks. Milton Friedman for instance. He was big when I was in college. He was the tough guy University of Chicago school of economics. Recently, a youtube video was going around showing how a socialist (democratic type) took him down with a simple explanation.
What happens when these guys get in power? Well, they don’t really know what to do, so they fumble around, resist doing anything that looks like it will help a lot of people, give handouts to their friends, and then get preachy about guns and abortion. Abortion in this case is really the idea of trampling on women’s rights. They are the “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” crowd. Now they’ve united with the devil, in this case the Christian devil, and they are zealously going after abortion, which is really a disguised way of dominating women.
But that’s what they do.
This isn’t what I meant to be talking about.
What I meant to say was that this virus situation has led some people to claim to be stir crazy and all that. To which I say – Buck Up.
You said you wanted more time at home. You said you wanted more time with the family. You said you wanted more time to read. (Oh, you didn’t say that? You don’t have anything to read? Don’t you own books? No. OMG. What is wrong with you?)
Make a list of all those projects you claimed you were going to do. Either say you’ll never get to it and move on or do it!
Okay. Solved that problem.
Next?
Oh. Yeah. Predictions. How long is this virus going to be with us?
There are three possible scenarios:
1 – Once we get a vaccine.
2 – We don’t get a vaccine.
3 – I forgot.
Outcome 1 – is 18 months away. Maybe. Maybe longer. Maybe we get lucky and we get it sooner. Then we have to get everyone vaccinated. This getting everyone vaccinated would take effort and leadership. I’ll talk more about that in a second. No I won’t. We don’t have leaders running the show right now. Until a new president comes in we are screwed.
Option 2 – is a scenario like the Black Plague, only worse. With the plague they finally figured it out – kind of. If we don’t figure it out then we are hoping that a) those who got it and survived have built up an immunity and b) a high enough percentage of people die that the herd is thinned and by that very action social distancing comes into effect. Think of it like Lord of the Flies meets Hunger Games and all those other dystopian fantasies combined.
What to do?
I already told you – Buck Up.
What does that mean? Think for yourself.
Are you bored? Tell yourself the following (in a whiney wishy-washy voice is best) “Well, boredom is something you do to yourself.”
Put it another way, (try your Sam Kinison/Leslie Jones voice) “STOP IT!” Okay?
Wait? What? You didn’t get it. Oh okay:
“STOP IT!” “STOP IT!” “STOP IT!” “STOP IT!” “STOP IT!” “STOP IT!” “STOP IT!”
And Buck Up.
Now, will there be anything else?
Oh maybe you want some thoughtful analysis and suggestions. Okay.
Give me your palm. Let me look at it. Rather you look at it. (Get that thing away from me.) Do you see there are lines in your palm? Yeah, they are trying to tell you something. What is it? How should I know? It’s your palm. But, I can tell you this. Your life will be different from now on.
What worked before. May not work now. You may have to think. Did you hear me?
“YOU MAY HAVE TO THINK!”
(As a helpful exercise: stare at your palm, open your mouth, slap that palm onto your face.
Why open your mouth?I dunno. Sounds kind of funny.)
BTW – Some of your thoughts will be really fucked up.
And that’s okay.
Because you are … well never mind.
You will need to try new things, if …
If you want to succeed.
What does success look like?
How in the heck should I know? Look at your palm. What is it telling you?
(See what I mean? You gotta figure it out.)
I mean success is different for each person. What would success feel like to you?
What would it mean?
Did something immediately come to mind?
Yes? Write it down. That’s it. That’s what success means to you. Everything you think of after what you just wrote down is BS. That BS is trying to talk you out of whatever it is you wrote down. What you meant; what you want. You now know what it is. (All those that wrote down “Astronaut”, “Super Model,” and “billionaire” and are over the age of 7, 17, and 63 respectively – try again because what you want ain’t gonna happen.)
Will it be hard? Yeah, if you ignore it. Not if you don’t.
Okay. Get to work.
Oh yeah several little things I meant to say right at the beginning.
The part of Bill’s show I stayed awake for. He went on about diseases have often been named for the places they came from and why is everyone getting bent out of shape about calling this one Chinese?
Why? Because it strikes some people as racist and why go there if you don’t have to? I notice he didn’t mention German Measles, which didn’t come from Germany. (Look it up.)
Then he had some interviews, which were really good. He did an interesting thing. He shut up. Let people talk and didn’t interrupt. Wow. You could actually hear and understand what they were saying.
Bill suggested to Al Gore that he thought Joe Biden should appoint Barack Obama to head up his team to fight this virus, and he should do it right now. Al suggested have testing at polling places in November. Both brilliant ideas.
Angkor Wat
Then there was SNL. The cast members did their bits from their homes. The ZOOM skit was brilliant.
But in all these stay at home videos shot on an iPhone, none compare to the Apple ads that say they were shot on an iPhone. Maybe, Apple will give some lessons on how to be awesome?
Oh, and Chris Martin of Cold Play. He sang a song while playing an acoustic guitar. He was really good! I’m surprised because I think Cold Play is one of the worst bands around. Some people don’t like Nickelback, which I don’t get. Yeah, the songs all sound about the same but they aren’t bad for what they are. Cold Play, like my other group I don’t understand Arcade Fire, never seem to have their microphone levels set right. There’s just this random stuff going on, disconnected from one another. But Martin playing guitar and singing was spectacular. (Well, good and understandable – at least.)
Speaking of spectacular, we watched the Country Music Awards show, which was various country singers, at home, singing. They were all good performances. But I was blown away by Trish Underwood. I hadn’t liked how they got rid of Faith Hill for Trish on Monday Night Football, but man Trish can Sang! I’d throw my shoe for her. (How’d JH** get in here?)
Okay, gotta go work on my master plan.
Remember:
STFAH! ***
BUCK UP.
Wash your hands.
203 Days until the election on November 3rd
283 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021
*Bernal Diaz “Discovery and Conquest of Mexico”
**Jennifer Hudson
*** Stay The Fuck At Home (or STFI) ****
**** Stay The Fuck Inside
Okay where was I?
PS “Don’t Worry, I got this boss.”
Demon on the Elephant Wall, Angkor Wat
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