You could hear the coughing from 20 metres away. A small child, barking like he’d smoked 60 cigarettes a day for the whole of his roughly eight year life, on his bicycle with his mother about 10 metres further behind apparently unconcerned that her child was not only very ill, but also outdoors, out of her control and heading straight for an elderly couple because he wanted to pet their dog.
The recent Covid-19 crisis has introduced many of us to new levels of stupid. Not just the halfwits and their kids, or the ones still heading for the beach. Or the quarterwits in supercars using locked-down London streets as a race track. Or the groups of ‘invincible’ teenagers bragging on our local TV news last night about how sharing a spliff or seven in the park was fine before all heading back to their individual family homes to infect a few more innocent victims.
‘Too many idiots, not enough villages’ as a former boss of mine might have said. It’s not as if those in charge are doing much better. Scotland’s Chief Health Advisor not following her own advice to not visit her second home in the country…twice. Our Government’s inability to see how their usual strategy of ‘promise-now, ignore-later’ is inappropriate when the poo hits the propeller and the terrifying sight of Donald Trump pointing to his hairdo telling us that all the knowledge we need to defeat C-19 is in there somewhere.
To be fair, it’s not just the UK and US governments behaving like King Canute. Many other administrations around the world – Japan being the latest – are failing to learn from what has happened in other places and adopting the exact same bad strategies.
Maybe what is needed is a proper scale of stupidity – like the Richter scale for earthquakes or Beaufort scale for wind, so we can gauge the level of fuck-wittery and respond accordingly. Maybe a scale of 1-10 where 1 is a standard politician’s response of just avoiding the question and hoping we don’t notice, to a full-blown 10 – pretty much anything Coronald McDonald (he loves his Scottish heritage) says about anything.
Actually, we may need a few more over the ten. Because as plainly daft as everything Mr T says is… the real foolish ones – the way-out-winners in the world of stoopid – are the smart-ass pundits who call him names and laugh at his obvious idiocy without realising that they are the foolish ones.
Because the more you see the US President in action, the more you realise that he’s playing everyone; the press, the opposition, the voters and even his own party. Whoever is controlling Trump and running the programme is getting many things right (in the context of their agenda, not the good of the country) and, given the Big Dog’s propensity to shout from the hip and tweet off-piste, that’s even more of an achievement.
Take just the latest example. Coronavirus is ravaging America, mostly because Donny Rotten played macho-politics and did nothing for three weeks when he could have locked down earlier. By the time America reacted the economy had tanked and the unemployment curve had gone even more exponential than the death rate. Trump and his advisors understand that America isn’t like Italy or Spain or the UK – the progress of C-19 across the USA is going to be more like how it crossed Europe. The pandemic will cross America relatively slowly, causing wheezy, pneumonic misery over a long summer. They can’t stop this or create any good news on the death curve, but right now, they can distract the voters by talking about re-opening the USA for business.
Don’t be fooled by the bozo-language. The US administration has access to the best data, the finest brains and all the information they need to make any decision they like – even the correct one if they want to. What’s important here is what they are choosing to do with that data and how they present it.
Trump’s puppeteers know that re-opening the economy early will mean hundreds of thousands more deaths, but those deaths are coming anyway so better to have them with the economy open – in an election year – than shut…right?
And the thing is, the stats suggest that many of those deaths will be among the urban poor and ethnic minorities – in other words, Democrat voters. If you were a cynical politician looking to get re-elected might you ask the question ‘How many of them need to not survive C-19 before Trump’s re-election becomes easier?’ would they think that? Could they?
So Donny comes on strong; “I am the king of America and I say when we re-open the economy.’ Cue exasperation, indignation and fury from the media, the politicians, the liberals and the pundits. He backs it up by withdrawing funding from the WHO just to make the point about how mad he is and the backlash gets even bigger.
Now he knows that he can’t lift the lockdown because US law says it’s the State Governors’ decision, not the President. But now he’s positioned himself so he’s the one looking out for the workers and the economy and it’s the Governors’ fault that it can’t be done. Trump campaigns for re-election on the basis that he would have saved the economy and continued to make America great again, but those pesky liberals wouldn’t let him.
It’s the same strategy he uses time and again. Say something crazy and dangerous, get everybody frothing and then either back off and do nothing or re-position himself brazenly so his confused detractors take the blame when the inevitable happens and things go belly-up.
The first few times we saw it, we just assumed he was an idiot, but the more it happens you realise it’s part of the game. And the pundits and the media fall for it full-on every time. So if Trump is a ten on the stupid scale, the pundits and experts failing to see what is happening are proving to be at least a 15, maybe even a 20.
Trying to beat his behaviour is like to trying to reason intellectually with a distracted eight year-old child. You can’t. The shadowy figures behind him know this and until someone in the media and Democratic party gets smart enough to look ahead in the future and understand the game, they are destined to get ever-more soundly beaten by a man who can’t even comb his own hair properly.
The democrats have had four years to find a candidate better than Hillary and the best they can come up with is the geriatric, scandal-prone white bloke who wasn’t good enough to beat her to the nomination last time. Don’t hold your breath Uncle Sam.
You’ll be disappointed to hear that I have no idea what the answer is to this – I can’t even get my faithful old terrier to do what I want.
But the point here is that the pundits and politicians (many of whom are even cleverer than a terrier) congratulating themselves on how smart they are and how dumb The McDonald is, need to work out fast that they are at the top of the stoopidity scale and do something about it before either Trump gets re-elected or he cancels the election until the pandemic passes. Which in the USA could be a very long time indeed.
And the point of this for us, middle-aged men-folk is that most of us bemusingly convince ourselves that its everyone else who’s the stupid one. If only the world were as clever as we are, everything would be fine. Except it turns out that we’re only as smart as the thought and effort we put into actually trying to understand what the other people are saying.
Because once you start doing that – questioning why someone would genuinely believe the nonsense they spout or share on social media – that you start to work out the hierarchy of stoopid and understand where your particular views might sit within it. Mostly, it turns out, mine are just below those of my terrier, which is how it turns out that I might just possibly be his pet and not the other way around.
