I’ve spent over two weeks watching in awe as Americans get in fights over wearing face masks to protect from COVID19 virus infection. You don’t need to concentrate on the math compiled on this site to know that the US is unquestionably the worst when it comes to dealing with the pandemic. As I’ve posted many times over the last eight years, the US is about 4% of world population. We’re over 25% of the world’s Coronavirus cases, and while the EU and most of Asia is on the downswing, the US case load is still growing at a prodigious rate.

My memories recently attacked me. I grew up in the Sixties, when many impactful things happened. And I grew up in a hardcore Repub family. How hardcore? I remember my parents’ bridge club meeting after the ’64 election. All of the members were sure the election had been fixed by those nasty Democrats because no one THEY KNEW had voted for LBJ. GOLDWATER WAS GYPPED! I give you that observation because (though my parents left Ohio when I was a pre-teen), White Ohioans are still pretty far to the right.

But the other night I was cruising through all those new videos surfacing of ‘Muricans not wanting to Mask up in order to keep from getting COVID19. Trump and Fauci started it, of course. Trump had to cover for the fact that the US hadn’t manufactured enough protective gear for healthcare personnel, let alone civilians, to address the coming pandemic. So Fauci, who should have been calling out Trump, disparaged use of masks for ‘normal’ people. He was lying, and he had to admit as much. This is also pertinent on his mendacity. Fauci and Trump’s maskless paradigm killed thousands of Americans. That’s not my opinion alone (I am the simple performance artist). If you go back to the above link to the Worldmeters site, you will be able to look up American casualties versus the casualties in South Korea. Both countries had their first COVID patients on the same day in January. South Koreans did social distancing and masks. The US didn’t. That’s why South Korea has limited deaths to under 300 while the US has over 136,000 as I write this. So maybe Trump and Fauci are responsible for every American COVID 19 death above 300?

Anyway, it takes no work to find video or written accounts of Americans refusing to wear a mask to protect against getting the infection. Even when Doctors have come forward to explain the risks, a growing number of ‘Muricans are busy arguing against masks. A video from COSTCO is special, because the unmasked miscreant’s argument against wearing a mask is that ‘I woke up in a free country‘. In Dallas, a young woman threw her groceries out of her cart rather than put on the mask in her hand, FFS. There are hundreds of such events caught on camera. And that’s just individuals. Whole state capitols have been shut down by protesters wanting a re-open of states, coronavirus be damned. You don’t see the protesters wearing anti-Covid masks. Because, Murica. Freedom.

Which brings me back to 1964. It wasn’t just the year when Goldwater lost the presidency. It was the year the US surgeon General told America that tobacco smoking was killing people. You know what happened (at least around my parent’s part of Ohio?) A whole lot of adults (practically all the adults I knew at the time) responded with ‘well what do THEY KNOW?’. My relatively young grandfather died of lung cancer about the same time. nobody in the extended family wanted to talk about smoking. And in the years that followed, both parents and the rest of my grandparents all had their lives turned miserable (and ended early) by tobacco addiction. And what did they (and many of their contemporaries) do? Did they quit? Not in time to stop the damage. Nope, many of them (and many ‘Muricans in general) joined Astro-turf ‘Smokers’ Rights’ groups, and advocated that as adults they had a right to choose to smoke. ‘Cause they’re ‘Muricans.

The Tobacco lobby got what it wanted with its ‘adult choice’ campaigns. Smoking is once again treated as a sign of adulthood instead of mental defect. Tobacco companies are still able to pedal their poisonous products. They’ve figured out other ways to promote their products besides advertising.

As for wearing masks to stave off a pernicious disease with no real cure, ‘Muricans have been suckered once again. If I had the patience, I’d write about similar American PR campaigns over pollution and wearing seatbelts and other such stories filled with lies. My understanding of the two-faced campaign for masking goes to President Trump’s obsessive campaign to re-start the US economy regardless of the tens of thousands of new COVID 19 cases coming along every day. Maybe I’ll find the appropriate graphics to explain these campaigns. I’m working on a long piece about why we’re keeping things open despite the human cost. But it’s pretty simple in concept.

‘Muricans are Stoopid.