cult-like ignorance
TRUMP AND THE CORONAVIRUS DEATH WALTZ
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing. He was recently named one of
the century's 50 most significant contributors to the debate
on education.
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YOUR
COMMENTSTrump’s lies, his disparagement of science
and scientists, his claim that non-political civil servants
are part of the deep state, his lack of credibility, his penchant
for political opportunism over the needs of the nation, his
pathological embrace of hyperbole, his delight in creating confusion,
and his mistaking loyalty for public service puts the nation
in grave danger in light of the growing pandemic. He has gutted
the health services, slashed much needed revenue for public
goods through tax giveaways to the ultra-rich, ousted, Tim Ziemer,
one of the most trusted leaders in public health, and appointed
a religious fanatic Mike Pence, to head the attack on the corona
virus crisis. This is a politician who defunded Planned Parenthood,
and once claimed that smoking does not kill people. Pence is
not merely incompetent, given the policies he sanctioned during
the opioid and HIV crisis while he was governor, he is also
a walking testimony to the rise of religious fanaticism and
fundamentalism and its move from the margins to the centers
of power.
Trump
has played down the urgency of the pandemic, blamed the media
for distorting its seriousness, and believes that brown people
are more of a threat to national security than real threats
such as a pandemic and climate change. As a neoliberal on steroids,
he is more concerned about the stock market than human lives.
He trades in conspiracy theories, is addicted to brain dead
propaganda outlets such as Fox News, and rewards full blown
racist such as Rush Limbaugh with the Medal of Freedom, which
in this case should be renamed the Medal of Stupidity. After
all, Limbaugh did claim that the news about the virus is false
and is being spread by the alleged deep state in order to sabotage
Trump’s re-election. Evidence for such a charge was based
on the claim that Dr Nancy Messonnier, who has worked for the
CDC for 25 years, is the sister of former attorney general,
Rod Rosenstein. Someone should revoke Limbaugh’s high
school diploma. Trump and his ultra-nationalist, racist loyalists
cannot fathom that transnational problems demand transnational
solutions as is made clear in his flat earth denial of global
warming.
This
criminogenic administration poses a serious threat to the nation
and the globe. If there is anything to learn from an earlier
time about governments wedded to ignorance, racism, anti-intellectualism,
racial cleansing, and the glorification of ultra-nationalism,
it is now. Trump and his merry band of incompetent lackeys are
symbols of a necropolitics that is wedded to destruction, violence,
greed, falsehoods, and the needs of capital. Terminal idiocy,
cult like absolutism, bottomless ignorance, and unbridled arrogance
and narcissism have given rise to a form of neoliberal fascism
and a culture of cruelty unlike anything we have seen since
the 1930s. This is what neo fascism looks like when it ignores
social needs for the demands of cravenly loyalty and the accumulation
of power and profits. Trump is a menace and danger to the world
not just the United States. Obsessed with loyalty, he hates
competing centers of power, ravages public health services in
favour of his free market, privatization, and deregulation while
putting unqualified political hacks such as White House economic
advisor Larry Kudlow in important positions of leadership. Ludlow
recently claimed that the spread of the virus was almost airtight
contained in spite of growing evidence to the contrary.
Nazi
Germany once showed us what the end of humanity looked like.
Trump and his followers have revived that threat. Trading on
a culture of fear, lies, false promises, massive anxiety, and
the demand for unconditioned loyalty, Trump thus far has managed
to keep his neoliberal fascist administration, afloat, in spite
of his repeated acts of domestic terrorism—violence waged
against the populations he is supposed to represent. The coming
crisis may prove his undoing. Let’s hope one by-product
of this crisis is what Walter Benjamin once called “profane
illumination” leading to massive collective resistance.
One place to begin might be to take seriously Bertolt Brecht’s
argument that it is impossible to condemn fascism without condemning
capitalism. According to Brecht, “But how can anyone tell
the truth about Fascism, unless he is willing to speak out against
capitalism, which brings it forth?” In the shadow of this
pandemic virus, we are witnessing the slow violence of capitalism
and its resort to the defunding of the welfare state, government
services, the regulatory state, and the public good. Under such
circumstances, fascism sets the stage for increasing acts of
barbarism that develop and accumulate into forms of political
corruption, endless crisis, and the production of an eco-system
of ignorance that is death dealing.
