Free to Pray, Free to Spray?

By JOHN YOUNG

It’s a busy season at Trump’s Pardon Workshop. nnSo many felonious enablers, so little time.

Add to them MAGA loony-pants Raymond Deskins, 61, of Sterling, Va.

Deskins, wearing a Trump-headed floaty around his sumo-sized waist, huffed and puffed on two women protesting outside the president’s Virginia Golf Course.

The Loudon County Sheriff’s Office has charged him with assault.

What? For breathing?

That’s exactly right. Unfortunately it’s only a misdemeanor.

I wish the authorities where I live in Colorado would prosecute a man on similar grounds. The offender in question was among an anti-mask, pro-Trump group gathered at the Larimer County Courthouse posing and preening for the viewing enjoyment of those hand-delivering their mail-in ballots.

As voters in masks did their citizenly duties, one red-clad protester consciously turned and coughed on them. He was having a grand time. He should be eating jail food.

Someone behind the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., should be wearing diagonal stripes. An analysis of the event’s contagion found it spread to 20 states and infected at least 300 people.

Of course, those numbers are from early November. In COVID terms, a month is a year.

Right now the Dakotas are among the most heavily impacted states. The Sturgis Rally surely has the silver medal for root causes, the gold cinched by Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.

Republicans continue to demonstrate that they are mostly fine with the death and destruction from this pandemic.

Observe the ruling by a Supreme Court newly weighted toward the religious right against restrictions on houses of worship in New York.

If any institution should be able to get through this disruptive moment, it is a church. What the hell did God make Zoom for, anyway?

None other than the Jehovah’s Witnesses have pronounced that keeping parishioners safe, and saving strangers in ways other than front-door encounters, is what the Lord commands.

Instead of knocking on doors, the Witnesses are sending letters and making phone calls. Annoying, yes. Contagious, no.

“As people who care for other people and especially their well-being, you can’t be spreading something else than the good news,” one Witness leader told the Denver Post.

This brings us to Donald Trump and his continued criminal negligence about the pandemic. As of this writing, 45 people in Trump’s orbit — including him, his wife, two of his sons, his chief of staff, and the presumed humanoid known as Kellyanne “Alternative Facts” Conway, has got it.

(As carpenter Gepetto exclaimed when Pinocchio came to life, catching the germ makes Kellyanne “a real girl!”)

None of this matters to Trump. None of the people sickened by his super-spreader events. None of the families left to mourn and to deal with long-term health effects of the virus.

Reportedly he will host in-house holiday gatherings in the White House.

Here we go a-dropletting among the leaves so green.

Here we go a-dropletting, our germs cannot be seen.

In Thanksgiving comments, as if we asked for them, Trump effectively urged Americans to ignore CDC recommendations and gather in traditional ways.

Par for the (golf) course for a hypocrite who exhibits the piety of a fire hydrant, Trump tossed in “houses of worship” for those gatherings. Why should he care? Churches only are for exterior photo-ops — once pepper balls have cleared protesters.

So for now we are left with a leader who flouts the evidence, and supporters who think it’s a game.

Back during the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed 50 million worldwide and 657,000 at home, some cities imposed no-spitting ordinances and signs appeared on streetcars warning, “Spit means death.”

Today as before, it’s not hard to find people who spread lies and promulgate stupidity about a killer contagion. They don’t give a spit.

John Young is a longtime Texas newspaperman who now lives in Fort Collins, Colo. Email jyoungcolumn@gmail.com. See johnyoungcolumn.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2021

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