“Whenever Pence talks he sounds like a serial killer calmly explaining why he has to do this to you,” TV comedy writer Jess Dweck observed after Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate.
Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly talked over Sen. Kamala Harris when he was not mansplaining or running over his agreed speaking time. Moderator Susan Page’s “Thank you, Vice President Pence” was the line of the evening, spoken over and over and ineffective in shutting him up.
The cadaverish Pence appears to have “pink eye.” A fly sat unnoticed by Pence on his white hair for two minutes. Otherwise, save for the plexiglass screens, the debate last night was a refreshing return to boring normalcy. Harris won even among men and saw her favorability numbers climb seven points in CNN’s snap poll. The internet exploded in fly jokes.
Pence was white, male, and privileged. When the debate ended, Pence’s wife joined him on stage — maskless, in violation of debate rules. Rules don’t apply to them.
Rebecca Solnit ponders how the coronavirus pandemic reinforces the connectedness of us all. The conservative failure to acknowledge that contributed to the Trump administration’s failure to curb the virus that has claimed 212,000 American lives:
The contemporary right has one central principle: nothing is really connected to anything else, so no one has any responsibility for anything else, and any attempt to, say, prevent a factory from poisoning a river is an infringement on freedom. They reject the evidence of climate change and other scientific realities on the grounds that it displeases them by undermining their ideology, rather than on the evidence. Freedom as they uphold it is the right to do anything you want with utter disregard for others (and taken to extremes, to believe anything you want, as they have about climate). To smooth over the ways this is amoral requires disassembling cause-and-effect and, ultimately, denying the systemic nature of all things.
Freedom is their shibboleth, a tribal worship word separating them from unbelievers. Donald J. Trump is the high priest of utter disregard for others.
In their logic, poverty must be caused by individual failings, not by systematic inequality and obstacles. Gun deaths must be disassociated from the deregulation and proliferation of guns. Taxes are a form of oppression, since no one owes anyone anything. Those who benefit from the system that taxes underwrite – infrastructure, law enforcement, education of workers – deny that their success has anything to do with anything but their own bootstrapping virtue and hard work. Climate change’s underlying message that what we do has longterm planetary consequences outrages their sense of autonomy.
And their notions of masculinity, Solnit adds. This makes mask-wearing to protect others “emasculating women’s work [because] absolute freedom and irresponsibility was granted to men in particular.”
Casting the wearing of masks as a form of infringement on individual liberty made masks the focus of rage, protest, and violation over the last six months, as well as violence, including murder, directed against those trying to enforce masking regulations. That the disease was disproportionately affecting poor and nonwhite people in the US meant that it was easy for these white protesters to imagine the disease as someone else’s problem (as did the fact that it first emerged in urban areas in blue states). Donald J Trump reportedly mocked and discouraged the wearing of masks in the White House. “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears,” he said to Chris Wallace in July.
Authoritarianism is always inseparable from ideas of masculinity, and in the Trumpworld version, facts, laws, historical records, and science are another thing to which a real man need not submit. He can have his own version of reality as part of his endless entitlement to freedom, and so Trump spewed out his own version of how this disease worked and what would work in response as medical experts shook their heads. Now this has caught up with him and his staff and the donors, White House employees, and press corps members their recklessness has exposed.
The coronavirus outbreak in the White House has infected “34 White House staffers and other contacts,” according to an internal FEMA memo obtained by ABC News, many more than previously admitted:
The new figures underscore both the growing crisis in the White House and the lengths to which government officials have gone to block information about the outbreak’s spread. ABC News had previously reported that a total of 24 White House aides and their contacts had contracted the virus. It was not clear in the FEMA memo with the larger number what “other contacts” referred to.
Freedom’s just another word for countless lives to lose.
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