In Brian Kemp's Georgia, college football matters more than our neighbors' health
Source: The Guardian
In Brian Kemp's Georgia, college football matters more than our neighbors' health
The governor closed the state too slowly, reopened it too quickly and has no interest in science or the facts
David Ferguson
@TRexstasy
Thu 9 Jul 2020 10.30 BST
In the 1986 film The Mosquito Coast, Harrison Ford plays an eccentric inventor who rejects the USs shallow consumer culture. He brings his family to the Central American jungle to live off the grid and establish what he believes will be a better way of life. It goes about as well as the canoeing trip in Deliverance.
Circumstances go from bad to worse to catastrophic, Fords character, the patriarch, becoming increasingly erratic and unhinged. At one point he tells his family that the US has been destroyed in a nuclear attack in order to stop them from trying to escape and return home. Its a bit like what would happen if Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness had dragged his family along for the ride upriver.
Ive found myself thinking about the film again and again as a citizen of Governor Brian Kemps Georgia during the Covid-19 pandemic.
What do you do when youre strapped into the backseat of a speeding car and Dad is driving drunk? Thats what it has felt like watching Kemp whose election in November 2018 is widely attributed to voter suppression and other acts of electoral chicanery lurch from one boneheaded move to another.
He closed the state too slowly, reopened it too quickly and has eagerly beclowned himself before the world by showing his utter ignorance about science and public health. Now coronavirus cases are surging out of control and the states already straining healthcare system is bracing for disaster like passengers in a car that has skidded across the highway median and into oncoming traffic.
At no point has science or any interest in the facts driven the governors policy decisions. Now, as the Republican party belatedly caves to the necessity of wearing face coverings in public, Kemp has joined the pro-mask chorus but only because otherwise there might not be a college football season.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/09/brian-kemp
gademocrat7
(10,643 posts)He toes the trump line at our peril.
underpants
(182,580 posts)Mosquito Coast
CurtEastPoint
(18,612 posts)with his GD name on it and I shoot DOUBLE BIRDS every time I drive by. I hate this GDMFSOB.
CottonBear
(21,596 posts)I am sure that KKKEMP was behind the recent order by the University System of Georgia to declare mask wearing optional as the rule on all university and college campuses and properties.
Athens-Clarke County, KKKEMPs hometown, now has a mask mandate, but idiotic college students and young people are going about partying and shopping and eating out like there is no pandemic. It is horrific behavior, which will result in a massive COVID19 infection outbreak when UGA and local public schools reopen in August and all 35,000 UGA students return to town. Infection numbers are rapidly rising and ICUs, at the two hospitals, are nearing maximum capacity.
LonePirate
(13,407 posts)Training camps and practice schedules usually start soon but those events seem foolish, if not stupid and criminally negligent, at present.
eppur_se_muova
(36,246 posts)It's all in there.