The Dog in the Cockpit

If you know me at all, or if you remember any of the things I wrote back when I did this more frequently,  you will know I’m no great fan of Donald Trump. I didn’t like him before he was the president, and I like him an awful lot less now that he is the president. That being said, I think it’s wrong, counterproductive and quite frankly unfair to blame him for the disastrous response to the coronavirus, and we as a society won’t be able to solve the problems facing our country until we get on the same page about this.

I get why people want to blame him. President Trump disbanded the National Security Council’s pandemic response task force, and he purged his administration of knowledgeable experts and replaced them with incompetent cronies, he downplayed the threat of the virus during crucial early weeks of its spread, he’s repeated misinformation and politicized common-sense public health steps like mask wearing, he told people to inject bleach, and is a generally evil, malicious person. But blaming Trump for a six-figure death toll is like blaming a Labrador retriever for crashing a 747 into the side of a mountain and killing everybody onboard. I mean, sure, in a literal sense the dog is the one responsible for all the death and the suffering – but then, a dog is so self-evidently unqualified to be piloting an airplane that you have to start asking some tough questions of the people who decided it would be a good idea to let the dog give it a shot in the first place.

If, in April of 2015, somebody came up to me and said “Hey, if Donald Trump were president, do you think he’d do a good job guiding the country through a major catastrophe?”, I would not have had to think for very long before I said “No.” And I wouldn’t have been alone, because at that point in time roughly two-thirds of the American public had an unfavorable view of Donald Trump. Absolutely nothing in Donald Trump’s public, private or business life up until that point suggested that he was even marginally competent or qualified to do anything other than bankrupt casinos and make cameo appearances at pro wrestling events. And absolutely nothing he said or did during his subsequent presidential campaign suggested that he was going to be anything but the same cruelly incompetent rape clown he’d been for the last 40 years.

There was no bait and switch, no false advertising. It’s not like the Labrador put on a little pilot’s uniform, or stacked up on top of a couple of other dogs in a trenchcoat wearing a nametag that said “HUMAN J. PILOTMAN.” No, he was chasing his tail and licking his asshole and rolling in raccoon shit right up until the passengers decided to put him in the cockpit.

“Yeah he’s a dog, but a dog is gonna shake things up.”

“I’m not saying I agree with EVERYTHING the dog does, but you’ve gotta admit he’s got some good ideas.”

“I acknowledge that this dog does not have the opposable thumbs necessary to operate the flight instruments nor the self-awareness to understand the risks and responsibilities of piloting a plane full of passengers. However, many people on TV who like the dog have told me that letting the dog fly the plane will make my 401k grow by 5% annually rather than 2%, so doing this actually makes me smarter than you, libtard.”

The people who assessed all their choices and decided to put this man in charge deserve some of the blame for what’s happening right now. But even that, I think, is unfair, because Trump voters are victims in their own right. They, like everyone else in this country, are victims of conservative ideology, which has been rotting brains all over our political spectrum for at least 40 years now.

Ronald Reagan was the source of a lot of notable quotes, like "If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so," and “To see those monkeys from those African countries, damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!”, but the one that feels especially relevant today is the quote from his first inaugural address in 1981, which charted the ideological course of not just his administration but every presidential administration for the decades to come:

“Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”

The government, through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, used to build and maintain hundreds of thousands of subsidized apartments for people who couldn’t afford to pay their rent. That, to Reagan, was a Problem, so he dramatically cut funding to the program, as did Bush, Clinton, and the next Bush, to the point that by the early 2000s the agency responsible for helping people not be homeless had been cut by 60%. Interestingly enough, the number of people living on the streets has grown steadily ever since, regardless of how well the economy was performing, and is now at an all time high.  

The government, through the Department of Health and Human Services, used to fund a wide variety of public health and nutrition programs for needy families. That, to Reagan, was a Problem, so he cut the HHS budget by 25%. As a result, 600,000 people got kicked off Medicaid, a million children lost access to reduced-price school lunches, 600 hospitals closed over the next 10 years, and the average life expectancy for Black Americans decreased. Subsequent administrations continued these policies, and now, interestingly enough, we’re trying to manage a pandemic with public health infrastructure so severely understaffed and underfunded that many public health agencies still use paper filing systems, maintained by employees who make so little that they often qualify for food stamps.

The government, through the Internal Revenue Service, used to collect a 70% tax from the incomes of America’s highest earners. That, to Reagan, was a Problem, and by the time he left office the wealthiest residents of the wealthiest nation in the history of the world paid a 28% income tax. When given a chance to correct this injustice, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama responded by increasing the top rate to… 39.6%, which any mathematician will tell you is substantially less than 70%. Now, interestingly enough, our infrastructure is crumbling, our public institutions are chronically underfunded, and the United States is home to more billionaires than any other country.

The government, through the Federal Communication Commission’s “fairness doctrine” policy, used to mandate that news broadcasters present contrasting viewpoints in order to ensure honest, equitable and balanced reporting on controversial issues. That, to Reagan, was a Problem, so he had his handpicked FCC commissioners repeal the fairness doctrine and vetoed Congressional attempts to reinstate it. Now, interestingly enough, some of the most watched news programs in the country are hosted by white supremacists who peddle outright lies and conspiracy theories in support of an authoritarian president.

Conservative ideology is responsible for a set of policies that have repeatedly failed in their stated goals and have instead made one segment of one generation wealthy and comfortable while ushering in several decades of income inequality, institutional racism, endless war, environmental disaster and General Suffering for pretty much everybody else on Earth. Conservative policies, passed with bipartisan support, are why we live in a country where healthcare is dependent on your employment status, where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, where 40% of people in the richest country in the world can’t afford a $400 emergency. These policies made the United States uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus, and the biggest difference between Donald Trump and Marco Rubio or Mitt Romney or Scott Walker or Ted Cruz or Jeb! or John Kasich or literally any other member of the Republican Party is that they would have implemented more of these policies, more effectively.

So when I see heartfelt video testimonials from lifelong Republicans talking about how Donald Trump is such a disgrace and doesn’t represent what their party stands for, when I see the architects of the Iraq War, the Florida recount and a presidential impeachment over a blowjob funding glossy TV ads about how Donald Trump has poisoned our democracy, I am seized by an all-consuming desire to climb the nearest mountain and scream like Franka Potente in Run Lola Run until the heat death of the universe.  

Morgues are filling up right now because of these ghouls and their death cult ideology. They were absolutely aided and abetted by a couple generations of chickenshit Democratic leaders who decided to play along rather than offer a competing vision of a powerful, active government that actually does stuff to help people. But the brunt of the blame lies with the conservative movement and its tens of millions of footsoldiers who, in pursuit of tax cuts, set in motion four decades of pain and suffering that hollowed out our country and created the sort of economic misery necessary for a populist authoritarian klutz to take power.

So I’m here to tell you that if you voted for Mitt Romney, or John McCain, or George W., or Bob Dole, or George H. W., or Reagan, or any Republican senator or congressman or governor who was running in whatever state you live in, your vote for Joe Biden won’t erase the tiny but significant role you played in building the plague-ridden fascist dystopia we live in today.

Don’t get me wrong – I couldn’t be more thrilled that you’re abandoning the Republican Party. But if you’re only abandoning it until the Republican nominee is somebody who speaks in complete sentences, mouths vague platitudes about the environment, and continues to support tax cuts, union busting, corporate deregulation, government austerity and a right-wing pro-life judiciary, you clearly have no problem with a dog flying the plane – you just want a different breed with slightly better housetraining.