Rx Against COVID Memory Fog

Senator Randy Paul (R-KY) led a star chamber hearing this week aimed at trapping Dr. Anthony Fauci into somehow committing perjury. Even if only about the color of his tie. 

So today's Graphical History Tour offers a little reminder of what the world was going through a mere six years ago.

March, 2020

We first heard of this novel virus as a problem in far-off China and aboard cruise ships. The Trump Administration responded by trying to quarantine cruise ship passengers, naming Vice President Mike Pence in charge of addressing the health threat, and calling communicable disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci out of retirement for his expertise.

March, 2020

In the days between my drawing this cartoon and its publication anywhere, hairdressers — and just about every other public service industry — were closing up their shops. The nation hunkered down, stopping first to empty store shelves of toilet paper.

April, 2020

Within the first weeks, everybody was working from home except doctors, nurses, emergency responders, and grocery store employees. Schools tried to figure out how to teach students remotely. Senior citizen homes closed their doors to visitors. Afternoon and late night chat shows shut down immediately; the halting of other television and movie production would take a while to affect viewers. Major League Baseball played to empty stadiums.

Meanwhile, bodies piled up in makeshift morgues.

March, 2020

We didn't know much about the corona virus, which was all that much scarier for everyone. What little we were learning did not inspire confidence: it could spread through the air, the body had no natural defense against it, and any vaccine or cure was yet to be found.

Donald Trump soon discovered that by going on live television to brief the nation about the pandemic, he could command the media's undivided attention. It did not matter at all whether he had the slightest idea what he was talking about; he could just make any shit up as long as it fed his bottomless ego to be on TV.

He even boasted about getting bigger ratings than the Superbowl.

March, 2020

We didn't see much any more of Vice President Pence, supposedly the nation's COVID Czar. I guess he went back to his previous job as the president's golf caddy and Ambassador to Televangelistan.

For his part, Trump promised that the pandemic would be over by Easter, then by Mothers' Day, then by Flag Day, then by summer. Operating without a medical license, he prescribed disinfectant, horse deworming medicine, and shining bright light up one's rectum — none of which treatments had any basis in scientific fact.

April, 2020

When Kim Jong Il, Supreme Leader of North Korea, disappeared from public view for several weeks, there was speculation that he might be dead (he isn't). When dark humor is all a cartoonist has to offer, well, the darker the better.

May, 2020

Despite reports of COVID tearing through church choirs before The Shutdown, it didn't take long for the religious right to complain against social distancing. Not being allowed to pack the pews severely impacted the health of brick and mortar evangelists' bank balances, so Trump told the nation to reopen all the churches.

December, 2020

2020 dragged on. Every time we thought there was an end in sight, COVID cases spiked again. 

October, 2020

After a few months, the television networks decided against giving Donald Trump free air time to tout quack cures and predict COVID's miraculous disappearance, and Trump gave up taking a daily position behind the podium where he might be asked uncomfortable questions. Dr. Fauci became the public face of the government's response to the pandemic, delivering a frank, honest, and un-sugar-coated medical advice.

July, 2020

But by summer, the trolls and conspiracy mongers of the internet, egged on by Fox Noise and the rest of right-wing media, were hard at work promoting their own hare-brained fantasies about where the virus came from. Conservatism being opposed to anything associated with promoting the common good, they complained loudly that masks and social distancing infringed on individual rights.

September, 2020

They came up with the idea of publishing "face mask exemption cards," although the things carried no legal, scientific, medical, or practical authority. One was supposed to present the card at any office or business that had a policy mandating the wearing of masks, as if the business had some obligation to honor the card.

July, 2020

Until vaccines were finally developed roughly a year after the virus was first identified, the rest of us had to manufacture our own defenses.

Q Toon: An Aaron Judgment

In an episode of a podcast called "Look Into It" hosted by conspiracy fabulist Eddie Bravo, NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers claimed that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in cahoots with the Center for Disease Control and the federal government, was responsible for exacerbating the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980's and repeated their strategy with COVID-19.

I don't care to link to the February 23 podcast itself, which is behind a paywall anyway; but this little germ from the three-hour episode escaped the lab last week and went viral on Xitter:

"The blueprint was created in the '80's: create a pandemic, you know, with a virus that's goin' wild. Right? Only — he was given — Fauci was given, like, over $350 million dollars to research this, come up with drug that was new or repurposed to handle the AIDS pandemic, and all they came up with was AZT. And if you do any smidge of research — and I know, I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor, I'm not an immunologist, whatever the fuck — I can read, though, right? — right — I can look things up and I can learn just like any normal person, you know, I can do my own research, which is so vilified, you know, to even question authority — but that was the game plan back then: create an environment where only one thing works. Back then, AZT. Now, rembisivir, remdesivir, until we get a vaccine. Which, by the way, Anthony Fauci had stake in rembirvi vaccine."

Rodgers was repeating false claims by independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. that the CDC suppressed all sorts of supposed cures in order that favored yet fatal medical treatments would hold a monopoly on the HIV/AIDS/COVID market. These claims have been debunked by PolitiFact (and if you're into doing your own research, there are dozens of sources cited at the end of that post).

Dan Wilson, senior associate scientist at Janssen and host of the YouTube show “Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson,” said Kennedy’s retelling of the AZT history was “dead wrong.”

Kennedy and Rodgers were “repeating a form of HIV/AIDS denialism, where antiretroviral drugs are said to be ineffective against progression of the virus,” Wilson said. In reality, he said, AZT “was the first time that doctors could do something to help people who (were) wasting away and dying painful deaths.”

Now, I'm all in favor of doing one's own research. It's incumbent upon any responsible editorial cartoonist to check into the veracity of things before whipping off a cartoon about whatever one just heard from a talking head on TV or read in some piece of Xeet on Xitter.

But one must be aware that the internet is programmed to give you confirmation bias. If you google "aliens built pyramids," you will get hundreds of links to articles positing that aliens built the pyramids. (Well, of course they did. Having spent decades traveling light years to visit the only flat planet in the universe, what else were they to do?)

But returning to the topic at hand: As a devoted Green Bay Packers fan, I'm saddened to see Aaron Rodgers follow the Brett Favre playbook of going to the Jets only to becoming a huge embarrassment to everyone who ever rooted for him. The guy is, or at least has been, a bright, intelligent fellow; remember how he whipped Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary's and astronaut Mark Kelly's butts on Jeopardy! in spite of getting the Final Jeopardy clue about Harley Davidson wrong? You can't credit that to clicker reflexes alone!

That was nine years ago, however; and perhaps it's true that he has been knocked to the turf a couple times since then.

But over his years with the NFL, he has gotten pretty full of himself. In his last years with the Packers, he didn't deign to pre-season practice with the rest of the team, meaning that new receivers and running backs spent half a season getting used to his habits and rhythms. And it showed.

Please, Lord, let Jordan Love model himself after Bart Starr instead.

AYBOTYWFYA

Most of my Graphical History Tours of vintage cartoons take us back a hundred years, occasionally fifty. When I dig through my own work, we go back forty, thirty, twenty, and ten years.

But the Big Question facing us today is this: Are You Better Off Than You Were Four Years Ago?

In no presidential election year since FDR has the answer to that question been so stark.

Perhaps you remember March of 2020.

I have very personal reasons for continuing to be upset by the advent of COVID-19: after cancelling regular visits to my parents out of concern about potentially exposing them to the virus, I soon reversed that decision when Mom's cancer returned, and she chose to forgo further treatment.

Waiting in vain for the outside world's crisis to end, we had to postpone her funeral for month after month after she passed.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2020

There are a million other such stories out there, but now you know where I was coming from.

At first, Vice President Mike Pence was put in charge of the U.S. government response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Center for Disease Control's Dr.  Fauci, well-known in the LGBTQ+ community as one of the early responders to the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980's, became familiar to millions of Americans as a leading authority on how "novel viruses" spread and what is involved in creating a vaccine.

for Q Syndicate, March 2020

By the time this cartoon appeared anywhere, hair salons were already shutting down. As were schools, houses of worship, movie theatres, bars, restaurants, bowling alleys, late night talk shows, and — at the height of the presidential primaries — campaign rallies and polling places.

So too was Q Syndicate. Its client publications, dependent on advertising from businesses that were shutting down, suspended publishing, meaning there was nobody to whom to sell my cartoons. 

Turning now to the sports page:

March Madness (the NCAA basketball version) was cancelled five days before the games were scheduled to start. Major League Baseball cut the pre-season short and put the regular season on indefinite hold. (When the MLB season finally opened in July, games were played at first to empty stands and later to cardboard cut-outs.)

Daily newspapers had no news for the sports section other than speculating what teams might have won or lost if they hadn't sent everybody home. I don't know how ESPN, Fox Sports, and all the Tennis/Golf/Soccer/NASCAR/Poker channels managed to fill 24 hours of air time every day; even the ten minutes allotted to sports in every local TV news program seemed a lot to compose.

But they managed to do so anyway.

In spite of having no publisher, I kept drawing cartoons, if only to keep in practice.

And to vent. Venting was vital. It still is.

Gun nuts weren't the only people stockpiling.

Anticipating a breakdown of the nation's supply chain, Americans stocked up on whatever was rumored to be on the verge of short supply — a self-fulfilling prophecy. It started with toilet paper and quickly moved on to bottled water, hand sanitizer, PPE masks, flour, yeast, and even bicycles.

Vice President Pence more or less disappeared from view once Donald Trump started taking the podium at the nearly daily announcements to the media and the nation on the pandemic. The problem with that, of course, is that Trump seems to believe that anything he wants to be the truth can be true if he but says it aloud.

So he stated firmly that the pandemic would be over in time for Easter. "Like a miracle."

Reporters would then ask questions of the health experts standing beside him, who had to come up with ways of telling the nation that the President didn't know what he was talking about without saying that the President didn't know what he was talking about.

What mattered more to Donald Trump was that, while he was starved of the adulation of adoring crowds at campaign rallies, he could crow on Twitter that his press conferences were "a ratings hit" with "'Monday Night Football' numbers."

The pandemic was not under control by Easter. People who still had jobs were still working from home. People whose jobs disappeared couldn't go out in search of new employment. Assisted living facilities closed their doors to all visitors. Soon only hospital emergency rooms were busy. And morgues...

We all remember it, don't we?

Don't we?

Q Toon: Barer of Good News

What can I say?

The coronacrisis has been with us for over eight months. We have known since the outset that wearing face masks in public cuts down the virus's opportunity to spread.

We have also had a president who thinks he's smarter than all the people who have actual education and experience in virology. Who knew since January that COVID-19 is more serious than the flu, but didn't want to panic the stock markets. (He doesn't give a rat's ass about panicking the American public. He has been spreading panic about everything from Mexican immigrants to transgender Americans for over four years.)

We also have a sizeable portion of the populace who revel in their own ignorance, getting all their information from Qrackpots on the internet, AM radio, and Fox News. People who have developed a contempt for the greater society, seeing all social programs as evil socialism. People who think tearing down the Great Society will Make America Great Again.

And who have convinced themselves, egged on by His Crapulence, that having to wear a mask just because there's a deadly disease on the loose is exactly the kind of totalitarian tyranny that their pilgrim ancestors overthrew British Czar George Stalin III and his redcoats to prevent. They look to Dear Misleader's example and are convinced that if they do happen to catch COVID, they can just hop Air Force 1 over to Walter Reed for a couple days and then get right home again in time for Sunday's Game of the Week.

And if their carelessness infects others around them, tough. Don't say they never gave you nothin'.

Q Toon: Hallelujah Virus

At his press conference on May 22, Donald Berzelius Trump declared, "I’m identifying houses of worship—churches, synagogues and mosques—as essential places that provide essential services," and threatened to — somehow — "override" any governor who refused to exempt houses of worship from stay-at-home measures.

Every congregation I know of has discussed having parishioners space each family six feet apart from the other families when their church reopens, which sounds fine in theory. In practice, somebody is going to have to give up the pew their family has sat in since 1925. Someone is bound to leave in a huff.

Neither Lutheran church where I work plans to return to in-person worship services for at least a month, and are still discussing what worship will look like whenever we do. A suggestion at one is to limit attendance by having families take turns which weeks they come in to worship, and having people carry their own hymnals back and forth from church to home. The other expects to avoid congregational singing altogether, among other changes.

Local churches that have reopened include more conservative Missouri and Wisconsin synod Lutheran congregations; fundamentalist, charismatic, and independent denominations have also been eager to bring their congregations back together. It will be a few weeks before we learn how successfully they all manage to safeguard their members' health.

I suspect that the crowds jostling each other in the Lake of the Ozarks pool over the weekend and the party animals crowding the bars in Wisconsin  — QED —  are more at risk than congregations that avoid singing, sharing communion, having coffee hour, laying on of hands, passing the peace, passing the plate — oh, that's going to hurt! But few congregations are likely to settle for just a psalm, a sermon, and skedaddle every Sunday, so the omens aren't promising.

Two California churches that defied state and local health guidelines to hold special Mothers' Day worship services appear two weeks later to be linked to spikes in COVID-19 cases in their respective counties. Assembly of God in Redwood Valley has seen nine cases among parishioners who attended its May 10 service. Local authorities in Butte County are hesitant to blame their spike in the virus to the Palermo Bible Family Church service attended by over 180 persons, but

"We are seeing a pretty dramatic increase in cases," Dr. Andy Miller, the county public health officer, said Friday. "We thought we would see an uptick in cases when we started to open up, but in the last two days, we have seen seven new cases in Oroville alone."

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HBO's Avenue Five is a satire set a decade or so in the future, about a luxury tourist spaceship that gets knocked a little off course. (Stay with me here; I'm coming back to my main topic shortly.) As a result, the ship may take years to get everybody back home, and the passengers are upset. It then turns out that the captain and crew are merely actors employed for show, and eventually several passengers become convinced that the whole cruise is a fake and that they're not in outer space at all.

A bunch of them rush the airlock and out into space where they are instantly freeze dried, in full view of the rest of the passengers. A dozen or so passengers remain unconvinced that leaving the ship is fatal; they, too, rush the airlock and become desiccated ice sculptures floating in space.

When I saw that episode, I thought, well, that's absolutely ridiculous. Nobody is that stupid. It couldn't possibly happen.

Now that we've seen how many hard-core covidiots we have in this country, I know that it definitely would.

Q Toon: Oh, You Thought THAT Question Was Nasty

In this time of a global health crisis, I would really like not to draw cartoons critical of the President of the United States.

Really I would.

But he simply refuses to stop saying foolish, spiteful, and false things at those daily press conferences that the mainstream television and cable networks are obliged to broadcast live and uncensored. One moment, he's reading a prepared statement outlining the current scope and nature of the spread of the coronavirus and measures taken to control it. The next, he's telling everyone to cluster together in church on Easter Sunday as if "Death Takes a Holiday" were a real phenomenon.

Or he's snapping at a reporter who tossed him a softball question.

[NBC's Peter Alexander asked,] "What do you say to Americans watching you right now who are scared" of the coronavirus outbreak?
"I’d say you are a terrible reporter," Trump responded. "I think that’s a very nasty question, and I think that’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people."
"The American people are looking for answers and hope, and you're doing sensationalism, the same with NBC and Comcast — I don't call it Comcast, I call it Con-cast — for whom you work."

Or he's denying that he had anything to do with his own disbanding of the National Security Council's global health unit — and whining that reporters aren't praising him for his travel ban on Chinese citizens. To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; to Trump, every problem calls for keeping the foreigners out.

But worse are his outright lies and fabrications. No, Mr. Trump, the coronavirus isn't going to disappear "like a miracle" by April or by Easter. President Obama didn't dither when the H1N1 pandemic broke out. Tests for the virus have not been available to everyone who wants one. Google didn't have a coronavirus testing web site ready to roll out nationwide.

And if you have “always known this is a real—this is a pandemic. I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic … I’ve always viewed it as very serious,” you did a very convincing job of acting otherwise.

✍

I have been notified that Q Syndicate is suspending operations through the month of April. The coronavirus crisis has hit small, independent publications hard: most of them rely exclusively on advertising revenue to keep publishing, and most of their regular advertisers have nothing to advertise except "We're closed."

I will keep posting cartoons here when I can, although the schedule will undoubtedly become more irregular until this is over.

Q Toon: Doctors' Orders

As soon as Vice President Pence's task force on Novel Coronavirus-19 was announced, we learned that its chief mission was to control any information that might come out of it. Their meetings are closed to the public, and the health experts on the task force are not permitted to discuss anything with the media without prior clearance from above.

President Trump has suddenly gone all Pollyanna on us, promising a vaccine any day now and that we can all keep on just keeping on, no big whup, as long as we build his big ugly wall against Mexico and keep all the cruise ships out at sea. 96.6% of us will be just fine.

History tells us that it's not as simple as that.

When the influenza epidemic of 1918 infected a quarter of the U.S. population, killing tens of millions of people, seemingly small choices made the difference between life and death.
As the disease was spreading, Wilmer Krusen, Philadelphia’s health commissioner, allowed a huge parade to take place on September 28th; some 200,000 people marched. In the following days and weeks, the bodies piled up in the city’s morgues. By the end of the season, 12,000 residents had died.
In St. Louis, a public health commissioner named Max Starkloff decided to shut the city down. Ignoring the objections of influential businessmen, he closed the city’s schools, bars, cinemas, and sporting events. Thanks to his bold and unpopular actions, the per capita fatality rate in St. Louis was half that of Philadelphia. (In total roughly 1,700 people died from influenza in St Louis.)
In the coming days, thousands of people across the country will face the choice between becoming a Wilmer Krusen or a Max Starkloff.

We've already seen cancellation of this year's tennis tournament at Indian Wells, California, and limiting of the Tokyo Marathon to elite runners. The National Basketball Association has suspended its season until further notice. Other sports events are playing in empty stadiums.

Presidential candidates are being pressured to stop holding campaign rallies (where the standing-room-only crowds typically wait for hours before the candidate shows up). This shouldn't be a problem for Tulsi Gabbard; but deprived of the cheers of his adoring fans, Trump's withdrawal symptoms are going to be ugly.

Italy is on lockdown, the Louvre was closed for a few days, Coachella has been postponed to November, Major St. Patrick's Day parades and D.C.'s Gridiron Dinner have been cancelled, and luxury cruise ships are turning into floating prisons.

When our late-night TV hosts start delivering their monologues and interview celebrities in empty studios next week, will anyone laugh at home? Should the Republican and Democratic National Conventions be held by teleconference?

This will affect everyday life too. We've been through this before: gay men had to change our sex practices with the advent of AIDS. Society was forced to change its tolerance of ubiquitous tobacco smoking once the connection of second-hand smoke to cancer became undeniable. But we're not talking about managing the spread of a disease by breaking one habit.

How will this pandemic will impact public schools, houses of worship, nursing homes, mass transit, shopping centers, and restaurants? It has slashed gas prices, but what is it doing to your (or your parents') retirement plan?

Can you make it through the next ten minutes without touching your face?