What seems red turns black
Overnight, after the rain
I keep them all safe.
(in the style of Moldbug)The last President of the United States?I liked him. They'll blame him for sureNot seeing or understanding the fatesNothing is perfect here, and the cureIs often worse than the disease --The King still pardons him of courseThe conservative knows how to pleaseThe law, even if he has forgotten forceCharles the Great they say understoodPreferring fine steel to much goldLoyalty is power and power rule, couldIt be that they taught us this, coldIn the ground that they now lie?They understood this truth too late--We all did. We have but once to dieOnce! And not one escapes his fate.
The First Symptom of Collapse
When we look at the faces of the young people when they saw that Hillary Clinton failed to obtain the necessary electoral college votes in November of 2016, we're tempted to either over or understate the significance of their reaction. Sometimes a collapse is subtle, even slow. Other times it is fast. Perhaps the historian might say: "any collapse can seem slow when you live through it."
To my mind, the pandemic response was the first significant sign of collapse. Few places in the world responded so poorly, although China's initial responses were not impressive (they did get the crownbug under control eventually.)
Certain facts are useful here. First, the average CFR of the strains is about 3%. For comparison, untreated Smallpox is 98%, Smallpox WITH vaccines is 3%; malaria is 0.3%, the 'type A' flu is 0.1%. At ten times the virulence of malaria, it's stupid not to take action.
Secondly, the long term effects of the virus are unknown, particularly in the lungs. Some indications are that some form of walking pneumonia persists even in cases that do not display noticeable symptoms. Again, not the flu.
If we look at non-collapsed societies, we can glimpse some reasonable responses. Mongolia immediately closed their border. As of this date, number of cases: about 200. No deaths. Georgia kept their churches open but otherwise was rather strict, made people wear masks, didn't allow interior spaces like churches contain too many people at once. Total cases: 900. Deaths: 14. The list goes on.
The virus is not going to 'go through everyone' - this idea is madness. The plan is to isolate those infected and let them recover so that there are as few vectors of infection for the general population as possible, to protect people from long-term damage and the society from a surge of cases. Societies that 'accepted' that it would have to 'burn through the population' are collapsed. (UK is probably the worst.)
The United States response was a comedy of errors. First, it relied on a source controlled by its geopolitical rival, who is hungry to save face, and ignored its ally Taiwan. It did not close borders, it did not shut down flights from infected areas to non-infected. This is the federal failure. Note that none of those blaming the President do so for the right reason.
On the State level, a number of States reacted 'too late' and 'too hard'. While this is common of the "fox" ruler, who relies on cunning to rule, to not know how to apply force, these are tragically farcical. The errors are countless, but among them are mass-release of prisoners, banning HCQ, placing crownbug patients in nursing homes, being inconsistent about shutdowns (i.e. shutting down rent payments but not property taxes,) not providing a timeline so that people who need to plan based on concrete time scales cannot, reversing themselves on certain preventative measures, and so on. Additionally, localities in most places seemed to be helpless to do anything and rather almost depended upon their superiors to even take action. Collapse.
The worst error was the endemic attitude in the CDC against mask-usage, going back several years. But that's not all, the press, supposedly a bastion of a free society, spent the first two months of the year calling anyone concerned about the crownbug 'racist', spent two more months calling anyone who now doubted their about-face 'grandma killers' and then the last month or so trying to explain how it's ok to have mass gatherings to protest racism but not to go to church.
Medicine was no better, as we noted CDC's attitude towards mask-usage failed us; the experts couldn't agree on whether HCQ was advisable or not, they pitched their tents on a very expensive drug called remdesvir, and in general failed to innovate and it is very unlikely we will see a vaccine. They also were wrong when they claimed a coronavirus can't mutate quickly, when in fact it appears that the quick mutation of coronaviruses was what the Chinese were studying in the lab from which this bug emerged!
Conservative media decided that because the press thought it would be good to lock everyone down, that they obviously were doing so to take away people's freedom. Never considered was that most of the egregious lockdown failures occurred in 'blue' states and cities. If indeed the left was interested in removing freedom in this way, it was their own freedom. Lack of intelligent and useful response, to the point of maintaining the frame that the crownbug is either a hoax (does not exist) or is just the flu. Collapse.
Worst of all is conservatives complaining about economic damage that will ... likely hit mostly blue areas, because these were those who did the most severe and mis-directed shutting down. Of course, some conservatives do live in blue areas; perhaps this should be a bright flashing warning sign for them to move. Like leftists suddenly 'caring' about everyone's grandma (most of whom are probably 'racist') we find conservatives suddenly 'caring' about everyone's economy. Neither of these discourses is useful in terms of a functioning press in a society.
Naturally we should not neglect to say that nearly everyone waited until they were compelled by law to do something proactive; whereas in times past Americans may have been abreast of developments and ready to help or work together to help stem the tide. People seem to have had the motto of 'if you care about anyone else, you deserve to die.' Others had the motto of, 'if you disobey the experts (that I like), you deserve to die.' Nowhere is society found.
The only sense in which Americans were 'all in this together' is that of the Titanic