AMERICAN STUDIES

GEORGE ELIASON—I used to build decontamination chambers and work in hazardous environments, hence I’m familiar with hazmat protocols, including locked high radiation situations. People working in hazardous environments do so confidently because of the knowledge ensuring they can perceive their world without fear and the simple steps they take, to keep both them and their families safe. If you perceive the world the same way, you take the fear of the unknown out of the equation and are taking all the proactive steps that are possible.

MoA—Unruly individualism—as seen in college kids— and deeply-entrenched religiosity may complicate and worsen matters in America. The media report that, “Two weeks ago, amid the coronavirus pandemic, about 70 students from the University of Texas at Austin partied in Mexico on spring break. The students, all in their 20s, flew on a chartered plane to Cabo San Lucas, and some returned on separate commercial flights to Texas.
Now, 44 of them have tested positive for the virus and are self-isolating. More students were monitored and tested on Wednesday, university officials said, after 28 initial positive tests…Students at the University of Tampa, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and other colleges have tested positive after returning from spring break trips to Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and elsewhere.”

DAVID WALSH—What preoccupied official “radical,” academic and even artistic circles, however, in the months and years preceding the present crisis was the increasingly unhinged and selfish politics of race, gender and sexuality. Countless articles, books and pronouncements of various kinds informed the public that the “defining issue of our time” was, for example, “white privilege,” reparations for slavery, the #MeToo campaign or sexual harassment—or, for that matter, baleful “Russian interference” in the great American democratic project.

MoA—hen John Burn-Murdoch created that daily updated chart he did not anticipate that any country would have more than a 100,000 total cases. That was a reasonable assumption as China, with 1.4 billion inhabitants, stopped the epidemic with less than 85.000 total cases even when it was surprised by the outbreak. As of now the U.S. has 164.435 known cases. It will reach a total number of several dozens of millions and will have several hundreds of thousands of dead caused by the covid-19 disease.

ERIC ZUESSE—Just like happened in 2016 when Democratic Party voters who were predominantly Blacks and/or seniors swallowed the propaganda-line from the billionaire-controlled ‘news’-media against the electability of Sanders, those voters have done it yet again and thus are re-electing Trump by having passed over the only candidate who could have beaten him: Sanders.