This meme came across my feed the other day. It reminds me of the Cake or Death sketch that Eddie Izzard does.
I found myself in an interesting position. Knowing the person who posted it, I guessed (although they never answered my inquiry) they perceive Biden to be the chicken. As a libertarian, I have people on both sides of the aisle in my feed and I’m certain people on the other team from the poster would just as easily call Trump the chicken. Being uncertain to whom the person referred, I inquired:
Who’s who in this particular scenario? You‘ve got a senile, pedophile, racist who massively increased the industrial prison complex vs a narcissistic womanizing can’t keep his mouth shut baby, both of whom have sexual allegations against them.
Both of them are uniquely terrible.
I don’t think it’s clear at all.
I was met with a response that, in retrospect, shouldn’t have surprised me but did in the moment:
Don't think about it in terms of their individual morality. Think about how many people will be affected in what ways. Trump's incompetent handling of covid19 has cost 200K lives, the health and economic well-being of tens of millions, and it's only getting started. [... long paragraph about how Trump being racist has encouraged people to be more racist...] Under Obama, the country got marginally better in some ways (healthcare coverage, EPA standards) and marginally worse in others (banks became even more concentrated and no-one paid a price for the 2008 crash). Under Trump everything has gotten worse. And if he wins it will continue getting worse. So choose the chicken, please. Choose Biden.
There’s simply no reality in which anyone is going to convince me that Trump handled this incompetently. I’m in California where Herr Newsom and Frau Breed have prohibited me from opening the doors of my business for the last five months and counting. My business is my life, my passion, and my legacy. My work has social distancing built into it and the fact that people who do what I do — I run dance classes and one apparently is supposed to put my work in the category of “fitness studio” — are not allowed to offer that service which is something that helps keep people healthy and sane is absolutely at odds with everything that we should be looking at as people for our own health and well-being.
Meanwhile, the overregulation and authoritarian overreach by predominantly Democratic leaders around the country — mostly governors — has caused more economic issues than anything Trump has done.
It’s a virus. There’s no way government can regulate a virus. It occurs to me that people don’t seem to understand that. And it’s clear with everything that’s been going on that the so-called leaders aren’t clear amongst themselves what works and what doesn’t work and they never have been. That makes sense when you consider the scientific method where you try things, learn from what didn’t work, then you try other things, and repeat the cycle until you figure out what does works. We’re guinea pigs in this experiment of life. And that’s fine. It’s really not that big a deal. This thing has only killed 0.008% of the population.
Put differently, in seven months, we haven’t lost to covid as many people in the population of the world as we lose in a week.
Put differently, even in the midst of a so-called deadly pandemic, we are gaining more life in the population of the planet than we are losing each day to the tune of thousands of people.
Put differently, on the graph of population growth through time, this won’t even be a blip.
Meanwhile we’re cowering in fear over it. It’s an utterly entitled view if you ask me. 500 years ago you’d still be working your fields even if your neighbor or mother or father was dropping dead. How luxuriously we have it that we can sit here and argue on the Internet about the incompetence of leaders who have nothing to do with controlling it. Meanwhile, whilst we try to foist our collective discomfort on the politicians, scientists are talking about covid being here for years to come. Does shutting down the world for years make any sense to anyone?
For my part, I don’t agree with the assertion that Trump being racist encourages other people to be racist. I think Trump is an uncaring misanthropic human who doesn’t know how to love the way most of the rest of us do. I can find no evidence over the many years that he has been in the media (which precedes his presidency) of him ever doing anything I would consider loving. His approach to the world seems to be based on tactical and strategic investments that further his experience and gain in life. Nothing in that occurs as loving to me except to himself. To suggest he’s racist would imply that he hates people specifically based on race. I think he simply hates people. And, because he is openly full of disdain and doesn’t hide it like most would, it’s suddenly become OK to counter the ridiculousness that is the PC culture that has overwhelmed us in this country in the last 5 to 8 years.
Don’t get me wrong, I find him to be gross. But I find woke culture to be far, far worse. As gross as he is, even with the power that he has, I know people who might have been people I would’ve called friends, who have engaged in far grosser activity. Of course, perhaps it’s gross to me because it’s personal and I know them.
Still, as I see it, Trump is probably the biggest presence openly standing against woke-ism in our country and that is what I believe empowers people to be more expressed in ways others interpret as racist. But these days, racist is a slur that is foist upon some really strange things including, but not limited to, the term master bedroom, earthquake signs, cycling, and apparently even bringing watermelon to work for your co-workers as a gift.
I am sick of cancel culture, slurs, and people being silenced for having an opinion that dissents from the one the main stream narrative pushes. How can we possibly come to a place of greater understanding with other people if we are unwilling to have a genuine dialectic in which we exchange ideas even if they’re ones that we don’t like? There is no space for us to come together as a species if we continue to act this way because woke culture is not about togetherness at all. It is, at its core, about division. Everything about woke culture and identity politics breaks people into groups and that has been what is tearing the country apart, not Trump.
Emphatically and empirically there’s no reasonable way to assert “everything has gotten worse under Trump.” The clearest example to my mind: look at the stock market from him getting into office until covid. In fact, despite years of attacks from media, the Mueller report, and the impeachment proceedings, it took covid to bring the stock market down to just under the level it was at when it peaked under Obama‘s reign and even after that big old tumble the market is now higher than during Obama’s presidency.
I will say this person got one thing right: calling Biden the chicken is perfect. Given his complicity in the drone strikes that killed innocent people under Obama he seems like a chickenhawk who pretends to be a so-called liberal while he believes things that show how tone deaf and against the population he is, such as not supporting the legalization of cannabis when the majority of the population does. To my mind, this shows he doesn’t represent the very people he now wants to elect him. Truly, chicken is perfect for a senile old man who chose his running mate because he’s racist and sexist.