Revealing tatters.

Wednesday, April 29th, 2020

The sustained winds of a hurricane can claw at the rooftops of even well-built houses, tearing away layers and peeling back insulation and exposing the flaws, shortcuts, and inequities hidden within.

Ah, that’s the best I can do. Block that metaphor!

Let me try again, in plainer words: feels like I’m living life in a once-proud democracy where the sustained impact of the Coronavirus crisis has exposed some very raw and fragile societal and economic edges.

We have a conservative idiot (Ben Shapiro, nah, he doesn’t deserve a link) saying “If somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19…If grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81, that’s tragic and it’s terrible, also the life expectancy in the United States is 80.”

Which, as someone in Twitterland pointed out, is pretty Logan’s Run. The tragicness of death is…it turns out, relative! It’s ranked by these dystopian idiots by their age, and while they’re at it, by class, race, gender, what have you.

We have a, what, libertarian-ish gazillionaire Elon Musk tweeting “FREE AMERICA NOW.” Yeah, the citizen of South Africa, Elon Musk.

We have the very wealthy treating their nannies as relocatable and reconfigurable household appliances. Deploy unit B5 to the Hamptons immediately!

The president of the University of Georgia says they “are anticipating a resumption of in-person instruction for the Fall Semester beginning in August 2020 for all [University System of Georgia] institutions,” but hey, it’s a fluid situation. Good choice of words.

But in good news, a beta version of the iPhone operating system will make it faster to use a passcode to unlock your phone while wearing a mask.