Yr News Roundup

Very occasionally, I write stuff for specific friends. An Australian friend of mine pointed out that, since the Australian Government threatened legal action if Facebook continued its data-selection patterns with regards to news, they would censor that part of the app (or something; I was distracted by another video another Australian friend sent me of a saltie swimming up to a beach to devour a shark; which isn’t something you see every day)(unless you’re in Queensland, in which case it might just be another Thursday), so, she’s having a hard time finding out what’s happening in America. I thought Australia was better than Facebook news, but, it’s been an educational week for all of us.

As a fairly-avid news-consumer (mostly the Associated Press, various national newspapers, and the odd television news network)(I do feel compelled to point out that if you are unfamiliar with the Los Angeles Times’ Steve Lopez, you really need to check him out), I felt it my international duty to rise to the occasion. No, I won’t be citing sources; I’d apologize, but Tucker Carlson never does, and he gets paid. Just think of me as the calmer, funnier, less-racist version of him (I can dash down a triple espresso and get that same, ill-kempt, manic-surprised look and energy, though). SO…

In big news this week, Rushington Lloyd Limbaugh IV, better known as Rush Limbaugh, died. For those of you who live in a saner country, it kind of bears mentioning that American politics is interwoven with American culture in a way that I’ve never observed outside of Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. I mean, the French love their bakeries and might have various farm subsidies to encourage croissant production, but I don’t think they have many legal treaties regarding marital infidelity, crushing existential despair, filterless cigarettes, or any of the other pillars of French society. Whereas the Drug Enforcement Agency saw a massive jump in funding after Nancy Reagan’s weird “Just say no” PSA (obviously, DJTJ and Kimberly Guilfoyle ignored that one, but I digress). In practice, this means that American celebrities, corporations, and moneyed interests can effect policy far more substantially than mere politicians. Limbaugh was a talk radio host — think of a morning drive-time DJ, but not as fun, and with a much worse drug habit. If you truly hate yourself, you can find any number of Youtube clips of him deriding AIDS victims (this is true), black folks (also true, although there’s a wide number of misattributed quotes out there), and, generally, spreading the viral, corrosive, venal rhetoric that fueled the rise of the GOP to control Congress in the 90s. You could be forgiven for thinking of him as the poor man’s Donald Trump, but Trump’s $400 million in debt, arguably making D. Trump the poor man’s Donald Trump. I digress; after years of extolling how liberals have overhyped the dangers of tobacco, Limbaugh died of lung cancer (which, this I know from extensive personal experience on Planet Cancer, tends to spread to the brain). I don’t know if that’s irony or coincidence, but it’s good news for humanity, in general. For everyone about to wag their fingers at me for speaking ill of the dead, let me remind everyone, the man read the names of people who died of AIDS on the radio. He may not have assembled and directed the Capitol Siege, but he absolutely laid the political groundwork for “othering” your political opponents, calling for their death, and then giving up after a year into cancer. As a brain cancer survivor, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I’ve literally been No Evidence of Disease longer than Limbaugh tried to stay alive. When will these regressives pull themselves up by their bootstraps and out of the grave? Again, my vitriol toward a man who made his name mocking minorities in our own country may seem unfounded if you’re a wealthy hedgefund manager; for everyone else, he degraded the political conversation and made casual bigotry cool again, all without holding office (or a functioning mind). The world is demonstrably better off without him, although Satan certainly has my sympathies now that he’s been tasked with Rush’s maintenance.

In other news, our federal government is still gridlocked with regards to economic relief policies in the face of COVID, but we have ramped up production of vaccines, infection rates are declining, and… half a million Americans are dead. Yup, more Americans died of this bug than in World War 2. To be fair, fascists had a heavy hand in both situations, but that’s still a staggering casualty rate.

In “More Americans dying needless, preventable deaths” news; once-in-a-year winter storms hit Texas, pretty much destroying their power grid leaving almost a quarter of the population without electricity (and a significant portion without water, because of pipes freezing). I use the term “once in a winter,” because horrifically cold temperatures in the winter, as well as snow and ice are fairly common in… Northwestern Texas — True story, I once had a professor in graduate school who hailed from somewhere in North Texas, and he peppered a few shots of the fatherland in all of his presentations; all of them had snow. So, the excuse, “Well, we didn’t expect it to snow in Texas!” holds less water than an upset toddler on a water slide; certainly, anyone trying to make a system maximally safe under all conditions might start with the hypothetical, “What if this weird ‘climate change’ stuff isn’t a hoax?” For some reason, Texas Republicans seem hell-bent on blaming this utterly-foreseeable disaster on Alexandria Ocasio Cortez because she’s a black woman in Congress (I’m exaggerating this, but the racial and class divides in this country are kind of hard to comprehend until you see them first-hand). As a Californian, I’d say it might have something to do with the power industry being utterly incapable of regulating itself, and Texas completely deregulated its power industry decades ago. In the middle of a crisis that has claimed 30 lives, alleged human and somehow-still-a-senator Raphael Edward “Ted” Cruz decided it would be appropriate and not-at-all deeply callous to take his kids to Cancun, in Mexico. Yeah, remember that time Marie Antoinette asked why the starving peasants didn’t eat cake? Cruz had that moment, captured on film, of abandoning his constituents for warmer climes. Cruz has since offered a feeble rationalization that, somehow, made him seem only less human than he already was (again, this is all true). As a way to discourage immigration to the US, all visitors will be reminded that they will, in fact, be in the country Cruz calls home for the duration of their stay. Cruz, in the meantime, should stay in Mexico until America is good enough for him to come back and wait out those bleak Texan winters with his constituents.

Speaking of deregulation and death, Millennials finally killed something this month. Specifically, we killed off a hedge-fund that had been short-selling GameStop stock, and the details would involve a deep-dive into the workings of Wall Street, American nerd culture, and the Internet in a way that is beyond the scope of this piece. Suffice it to say, Wall Street bet against GameStop, gamers spitefully bought up stocks to increase demand (and price), and now someone with an MBA is down a few hundred million dollars. No, not Donald, some other hustler with nine-digit debt. Wall Street, meanwhile, is moving to make it harder for “retail investors” to get into the market; which would also sink their case for being bailed out by the US government every decade or two. I think the average American will probably survive that blow, but Melvin Capital might not.

And Joe Biden, an actually-religious politician (most of our politicians swear fealty to political expedience, which requires identifying as a Christian, very few actually attempt to be religious when it becomes inconvenient) attended Mass this week for Ash Wednesday. Americans were stunned at a president entering a church without first tear-gassing it.

We also had Groundhog Day a few weeks ago, which is a really weird American tradition in which some poor marmot in central Pennsylvania is unceremoniously prodded out of their den for the benefit of a crowd of people. We do this every year to determine when winter will end. I’m obviously being reductive for the sake of comedy, but this description isn’t too far off the mark.

So, that’s the end of the third week of the second month in the Year of Punxsutawney Phil, 2021. It’s something of an improvement over this time last year, but half a million of us have died in that interval, and the economy and society are still on precarious ground, so, take the good with the bad. Again, that might seem insensitive, but we have political leadership that seems to think it’s fine to take an exotic vacation in the midst of multiple national crises. The good news is, stacked up to Ted Cruz, BoJo & Co. seem positively mammalian.