By Rip Rense
Let’s see, let’s see. . .
A million point two total infections in Uncle Sam Land. Seventy-five thousand-plus brand spankin’ new corpses. With those cute rigor mortis grins and blind dry eyeballs. Hospitals little more than clearing houses for the Great Beyond. Or probably not so great. Refrigerator truck doors bursting open from overloading of cold human COVID-cured meat.
O say can you see by the rot cellulite. . .what so cynically we made. . .while Trump’s teeth were gleaming. . .Whose broad ass and psych scars were so putrid with spite. . .And the shithead’s mad glare. . .the shellac holding his hair. . .gave voice to all blight. . .and our flag was threadbare. . .
Let’s see. . .Yes, now that the Reaper is really reapin’, really groovin’, really “rockin,” as Little President Jared said our “economy” will be doing by July. . .now is the time to reopen everyfuckingthing. Hey, baby, it’s like Bush said after 9/11—“go shopping!” Reopen all those coffee joints, all those small businesses that received zero aid from the so-called federal government because it was all lapped up by the long, lascivious, lupine tongues of the rich, like skimming fat off a stew.
Yeah! Reopen the beaches, the forests, the mountains, the oceans, the deserts—right away! Amerrygun shitizens must have their playgrounds to shit in, despoil with empty beer cans, Wild Turkey bottles, styrofoam cups, used giant ribbed condoms, discarded thongs, and the glorious patriotic cornucopia of oil-based junk that will eventually make its way into the oceans and everything you eat. Hurry!
Reopen the restaurants! Set up the chairs and open the booths for the great American hiney to squeeze into so funseekers can say cool an and shovel down more fat, grease, sugar. . .in order to fart out great, glorious clouds of human methane recently proven to be a major contributor to global warming. Yes! What says pro-life more than joyfully expelled gas? Say hallelujah! Fart one for Jesus!
Reopen! Let your inspiration be the sight of President Adipose touring a “mask-making facility” in Arizona, while, I swear to Vishnu, “Live and Let Die” played in the background. At first I thought it was scintillating irony, then I remembered that Trump lumpenproleteriat played this same song at black masses while anointing their Satan with analingus and other sacred traditions. The grimacing bastard must really like the line, “What does it matter to yuh. . .When you gotta job tuh do, you gotta do it well. . .you gotta give the other fella hellllll. . .”
Go ahead, laugh: I used to actually believe that this country, no matter what monstrous errand boy for the corporatocracy was “elected,” would, in times of extreme crisis, “rally together,” as the Hallmark cardworthy cliché goes. I used to think that the so-called government would at least make the attempt, or give the appearance, of doing its job, in some hulking, half-witted way, to care for a populace in a catastrophe. Then came Katrina, which was a miracle of efficiency compared to COVID-19.
Even the words, “care for the populace,” show how deeply stupid, paralyzingly gullible, I was. Yes, it’s the guvment’s job, but since when does this or any guvment do its job? Oh, wait, gimme a ham and cheese, and hold the ham because of the goddamn poor billions of pigs slaughtered every single day to tickle Amerrygun tongue receptors—I mean, give me a ham-and-cheese, and hold the cynicism. I guess New Zealand has done rather nobly in our time, immediately banning fiend weaponry after a single mass shooting there (while the Church of the AK-47, the National Rifle Association, the Vatican for sad paranoiac white trash, continues to shill for hollow-points in the heads of kindergarteners and African-Americans out for strolls.) And Taiwan, which is the sweetest, happiest place on earth, has so intelligently handled the virus crisis that the whole deranged world should get down on its bloodied, arthritic knees in admiration and gratitude.
Instead we have Death Race 2020, hosted by your fave reality TeeVee host, Donald Schlump. Yes, he had the most difficult decision of his life to make, he said, regarding “re-opening the country.” In other words, as usual, it was all about HIM. Everything is about HIM. Everything, even death! Now that’s egomania, people. But it was no more difficult a decision for him to make than it is for a Kardashian to decide to look in a mirror. I mean when the choices are, on the one hand, money, and the other hand, the suffering and deaths of losers (his favorite term of condescension), old hippies, elderly deadweight, the sick and weak, the retired (Social Security leeches!), the occasional child. . .hey, what’s to decide? As God said in “The Green Pastures” (I highly recommend), “Let the fish-fry proceed.”
And so Trump is frying plenty of fish, probably a couple hundred thousand, at least, before this thing is over. If it ever gets over, that is. Everyone is blithely, brattily swaggering around, saying “When there is a vaccine.” When? Who says there is a when? I read a very credible report by an actual scientist—apologies to President Jared—who said that five or ten years is a reasonable gestation period for a vaccine. If there even is one! Look how long it took to get an effective treatment for AIDS, fer crissakes.
But in what Bush used to call the Unitashtase, the land of “Where the fuck is my beer, bitch?” it’s just an expectation, an infant’s demand for rattle. Where’s my vaccine, goddamn it? I got baseball and football tuh watch! I got women tuh screw! Do I even have to cite the deeply repulsive comments by the Koch money-backed so-called protestors who complained about not being able to get their fucking mani-pedis, and roots colored? Those people should be renditioned to a leper colony off Sri Lanka, dosed with acid, and chained naked to outhouses they are charged to keep clean. That might—might—give them a more charitable, empathetic perspective. But probably not.
What is more poetic, more lyrical, more dazzlingly All-American perfect than the fact that a Seattle Native American health center asked for some “personal protective equipment,” and instead received. . .body bags? While the goddamned Los Angeles Lakers got $4.6 million in “small business” aid (which it promptly returned, deeply embarrassed), and something called the Fiesta Restaurant Group (which employs 10,000 people) got $189 million, with $365 million of the total $349 billion in aid going to publicly traded companies.
Oh, and not to forget the $17 billion dollars in “fees”—yes, fees—that banks charged for giving out small business loans under the “Payroll Protection Program.” How much more blatant must criminality be before someone calls it criminality? And on and criminal on.
“There’ll be more death,” proudly announces Chief Executioner Trump to NBC—he who ignored all warnings of the coming pandemic—including those made to him repeatedly in intelligence reports last November—and continued psychotically calling it a “hoax” into March. Yeah, guess all those dead Chinese people were a hoax! Translation: Trumpy is now officially a mass murderer, which maybe gives him half a hard-on with which to defile and abuse his poor airhead golddigger wife. After all, little Donnie can now claim a place with the big boys: Adolf, Pol Pot, Stalin, Idi, his adopted succubus, Kim Jong Un, and the rest. He’s a piker by comparison, of course, but he has proven that he is badass enough to kill, baby, kill, in the name of the Father, the Scum, and the Filthy Lucre. (Prediction: “re-opening” will double deaths and infections by end of June.)
Of course, this remorseless troglodyte, who looks like a fat toad that just swallowed garden poison, this fatuous oaf with the tanning-bed burn and serial killer signature, this self-adoring slob who makes Madonna seem prim, this fiend with bile in his veins instead of blood. . .is in a dead panic over losing the election to, as he put it, “fuckin’ Joe Biden.” I admit that would indeed be one humiliating prospect, and one that I wish on him with all my being; it’s the silver bullet for this lycanthrope. And to that end comes his latest fascist move—appointing a close friend as Postmaster General. Say goodbye to voting by mail, kiddies!
At last we come to the saints and angels, I mean doctors and nurses. Yes, the doctors, too—especially Lorna Breen of New York Presbyterian-Allen Hospital, who committed suicide after watching hundreds in her care die in stark terror as their lungs turned to rock. But the nurses—the old nurses who went back to work, knowing it was probable suicide, and the young women who embody the largely deceased human (and, once upon a time, American) ideal of. . .helping someone, well, let me just quote a couple. Here is D’Neill Schmall, who works in NYC. She could barely speak through sobs:
“I’m tired of calling families and telling them that news.. . .choking, weeping, taking deep breaths I cried the whole way home in the Uber tonight and the driver was like, maa’m are you okay. . .and I don’t think people understand how stressful this job is. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world, but it’s so stressful. I wish people could just give us a break. Everyone is trying hard. Everyone is trying hard.”
Or the unnamed Michigan nurse who so righteously posted this:
“I would have no problem if you fools worried about your ‘freedom’ all went out and got COVID. If only you could sign a form stating that you revoke your right to have medical treatment based on your cavalier antics and refusal to abide by CDC and medical professionals’ advice. If you were the only people who got infected during your escapades to protest tyranny, great. But that’s sadly not how this works.”
When I think of the vermin protestors—make that vermin under the fingernails of vermin—screaming into the faces of nurses going to work that they are “viruses,” I desperately, against my basic instincts, wish that they find themselves gasping for air, petrified, their last thoughts about how vicious and rotten they were. The picture delights me. And when I think of President Fistula actually arguing with a nurse on National Nurse Day when she spoke the plain truth that nurses still cannot get sufficient masks and gloves, well. . .
Every death, every person crippled for life, every bit of suffering, every bit of damage to physical health, mental health, every dead child, every maimed fitness trainer, every father of three saying goodbye to his family over an iPhone. . .is due to one virus, and one virus alone. And that’s the one in the Whitey House.
Re-open America? Sing it with me now:
Take me out to the ballllgame, take me out to the crowwwd, buy me some COVID-type virus snack, it’s quite likely I’ll never come back, and it’s root root root for the money, if it don’t win it’s a shame. . .And it’s one, two, three breaths you’re out. . .at the olllld balllll game. . .
(copyright 2020 Rip Rense, The Rip Post, all rights reserved.)
RIP RENSE, who contributed this article to ThisCantBeHappening!, is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author. His work, including his many books, can be found at The Rip Post.