The Magical Ebola Mystery Tour

Yes really,

I had so hoped not to have to write about this. Yes all of you children on cable news, Ebola is scary but please get a grip. We have now experienced weeks of fear mongering by the usual suspects in media. Some just to sensationalize an exotic disease for ratings and therefore profits, but fox news has taken the opportunity to push their agenda of hate. To say nothing of the outright comic book villain level mischief attributed to our president and the government he heads by Alex Jones and the conspiracy nuts. I am interested in how the public is digesting the facts vs. misinformation and what the popular outlook is on this outbreak.

First off, I do not want to in any way downplay the seriousness of Ebola. This is not a "Don't Worry Be Happy" post, irresponsibility runs both ways. My heart goes out for anyone infected with this horrible disease. I would like to point out that the outbreak is very small and any commentary must keep this in mind. Also, how many potential epidemics have been hyped by the media in recent years? SARS, swine flu, and bird flu to name a few. I am old enough to remember the last time a new disease was taken seriously and not completely sensationalized, namely Lyme's disease. Though I do not know why that one was kept in perspective when we had just been through apocalyptic AIDS coverage. Mad Cow went the other way, real danger and potential safeguards ignored to protect the beef industry and heads-in-the-sand hamburger eaters. These outbreaks all have something in common though, we are all still here. To hear irresponsible media tell it though, we are one flight from Africa away from extinction.

And it is working. I have been monitoring chatter on the subject of Ebola (as much as one person can) in conversations both electronic and the real world. As far as I can tell, everyone has an opinion and they are all bad. First is the sentiment "I just don't trust the government to handle this." Well, this is just entry-level stuff but shows just how effective the republican party and right-wing noise machine has been in denigrating our democratic government. And the hypocrisy of these screeching, cage-crapping traitors is staggering as well. Was it not less than a decade ago that they were all about protecting the government and its republican office-holders from criticism during a national crisis? Anyway, yes, government's essential function of protecting the people is impaired when an insurgent force campaigns on, wins office on, and implements a platform of destroying government's ability to research and combat deadly diseases through privatization, budget cuts, staffing agencies with partisan hacks and incompetents, and demonizing science generally.

Beyond these real concerns though, is the outlook espoused by people who just don't trust the government to deal with the outbreak of Ebola in the US. They seem to be saying that they just cannot fathom anyone smarter then they are in a position to address the crisis. The doctors and nurses working at the CDC and NIH are not trained and experienced in health care, disease management, or disease prevention, they must be just like me. Not all staff members in this critical department are political appointees, and it just is not possible that cronies could completely take over. The hacks can do considerable damage and may make this crisis more serious than it may have been without the wrecking crew, but your average employee at the Centers for Disease Control is going to be more qualified than a bartender or roofer. There are still standards that must be met.

On the opposite side you have the double thinking conspiracy theorists. I do not have the stomach to look at any of those websites, but I get the drift just from statements like this:

Don't worry about the plague that's about to kill millions of Americans; FEMA has enough coffins and death camps for everyone. The rich will get the cure, of course. You did know there's a cure for ebola, right? Just not for us.

When one presents a fact-free assertion like this they must gloss over the concurrent belief that government is incompetent. But if I remember my Art Bell catechism correctly, conspiracy theorists accomplish this by separating the democratic, public, government with all of it's flaws and corruption from the shadow, private, government that carries out assassinations, overthrows other governments, and has "big plans" for all of us little people should we get out of line.

That last sentiment has really gotten out of hand. A deep-seated projection that pops up among conservatives every time a Democrat sits in the White House. "They are coming for our guns, they are coming for our women!" These are deeply authoritarian notions and we do not have time to annotate or even mention all of the self-pitying persecution fantasies spewed forth from the noise machine or its gullible followers except to say that this is what they would like to do to all the hated "others" that authoritarians feel both superior to and vindictive toward. Take this wonderfully eliminationist notion recently posted online:

If we just kill all with Ebola now it will save millions later....just sayin

The individual who posted this, and all the enthusiastic commentators supporting the idea forget one thing, who is going to do all of this killing exactly? The demon Obama and his "ordinary black panthers" or will we be privatizing murder? You can bet that every person concluding that killing the infected is a great way to go came away from every stupid history channel program on the Nazis feeling so superior to them and that they would never do anything like that...



I'm just going to drop these titles here for further consideration, they may be of some help.
And before you dismiss the last quote as just a silly notion from an average American guy with no support from the responsible governing class people, please have a glance at this story about the former GOP director of South Carolina who, in all seriousness, has a serious hankering for murdering Ebola patients.

Hate, Conspicuous Consumption, and the Pathetic Display of Epic Fail that is "rollin' coal."

Are there even words for this (hopefully short-lived) fad? If you asked some regular people at the grocery store, or a coffee shop, even at a ball game to come up with something more ridiculously counterproductive than simply making a bonfire out of dollar bills I doubt they would think of the despicable act of nihilism that is 'rollin' coal.' As many befuddled functioning human beings have pointed out, this is the phenomenon of modifying vehicles to dump lots of diesel into the engine and have it spew out of after-market (and illegal) smoke stacks as black soot. There is cutting off your own nose to spite your face, then there is rolling coal, which spites everything. And unfortunately, when these bastards hit their switches or whatever it is, they are driving forward, out of the carcinogenic cloud and are only as affected by it as people miles away. So they won't be dropping dead of pollution-related causes anytime soon. We have reached a level of hate, conspicuous consumption, and nihilism among the 15k plus members of the rolling coal cult which human stupidity is rarely capable of obtaining.

As the above links indicate, the phenomenon (meme? hobby? collective descent into madness?) definitively entered the zeitgeist over the Fourth of July holiday weekend. I admit to never having heard of it before then. I suspect that while we have lots of rednecks around here who drive pickups and hate the president, people here are just too frugal (or cheap) to waste money by spewing fuel all over the place. In my neck of the woods it is more an aggressive display of indifference as preferred protest. And Harley-Davidsons with loud tailpipes as opposed to dirty, sooty ones tend to be vehicles (no pun intended) of rebellion. And make no mistake, in their own words this is what coal rolling is about; flipping a giant middle finger at the supposed liberal environmentalist scourge that runs our country. And a larger display of misdirection for the sake of profit has not been seen since the gun manufacturers realized the incredible boost in sales possible in reaction to possible public safety legislation. It is as though every snake flag-waving hick suddenly discovered the Dead Kennedy's song California Uber Alles and mistook it for a fox news headline.

"First they came for the coal rollers..."

At the dawn of industrialized consumerism, companies inspired the well-to-do in Europe and America to buy expensive luxury apparel and accessories simply to display them in public. Conspicuous consumption was meant entirely to inspire jealousy in observers, it gave the wearer of expensive furs, jewelry, or custom-tailored suits a sense of superiority. Restaurants built window seating and hotels constructed lavishly decorated lobbies with comfortable chairs all for the benefit of the conspicuous peacocks and their displays of finery. To give this analogy a splendid Buzzfeed/Upworthy twist, YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED NEXT! A number of anarchists took issue with rich assholes flaunting useless crap in public simply as a display of status while the majority toiled in poverty and started bombing areas of downtown where the peacocks mingled. While this violence was met with a crackdown on dissent by the ruling classes, conspicuous consumption as a lifestyle faded from public view as well.

Are coal rollers the new peacocks and dandies simply displaying conspicuous consumption of diesel as a status symbol? No, of course not. The correlation exists, these rednecks are performing in public and wasting untold amounts of money but the causation is 180 degrees south, as in towards hell. The performances are recorded for display on YouTube basically to show off how badass they are to each other. But they also perceive themselves as rebels, protesting... clean air? Why, please for the love of God, can't these rebels without a cause protest President Obama's clear stand against suicide?

Conversely, and I know this is going to cause a lot of pushback, what is demonstrated here is the futility of individual action. However noble, efforts by conscientious thinking individuals to go green will accomplish little while coal rollers, chick-fil-a patrons, wal-mart shoppers are able to abuse their freedoms by working ever-harder to dirty our nest. This is a subject for another day however.