PYROMANIACS

Yesterday, July 1, 2020, I heard one of the men in my building telling another that the Democrats (to this Trumpite/Republiscum a dirty word) are trying to cancel the Fourth of July and want to bomb Mount Rushmore. For the moment let's set aside the absurdity of his oral diarrhea and focus just on his assertions.

It is correct that our Orange Fürher has scheduled one of his rallies for Mount Rushmore in South Dakota for the Fourth of July.

It is also correct that many people, not just Democrats, see his rallies as major vectors for transmission of the CoVid-19 virus since there will be neither social distancing nor mask wearing at the event. With new infections from the novel corona virus hitting new peaks daily (48,000 new cases on July 1 alone) all opportunities for mass transmission of the disease should be curtailed.

Further, it is correct that the Orange Fürher has scheduled a fireworks spectacular for the close of his rally at Mount Rushmore. Both the National Park Service and the Forestry Service have asked that the fireworks display be eliminated because of a serious risk of forest fires. The Orange Fürher and the Republiscum Party have ignored those warnings.

If you, dear reader if you exist, ever played the game of "Telephone" when you were younger you know that information can get garbled and strangely perverted in the course of transmission. While such things do happen, this nonsense is of a particularly nasty and vicious order. The message that my Trumpite/Republiscum co-resident receives has been intentionally garbled and intentionally perverted to suit the Trumpite/Republiscum supporters and rile them up to new heights of frenzy. This imbecile in my building has no idea who is shoveling this offal onto the Internet pages he frequents. He doesn't know who funds his sources or where they are actually located. All he cares about is that they feed his bigotries and stupidity with drivel that he's predisposed to credit.

As America began burning up with rage over the murders of George Floyd and others, far too many others for far too long, the German magazine, Der Spiegle published with a cover that showed America on fire in the background through a White House window. In the foreground sat the Orange Fürher holding a lighted match. The caption to the artwork reads, "Der Feuerteufel/ Eine Präsident setzt sein Land in Brand". In English that means literally "The Fire-Devil (Pyromaniac)/ A President sets his Nation on Fire (to the Torch)".

The great and very Conservative Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote in the opinion in Schenck v. United States that "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." The scum who use any forum to foment panic by shouting the kind of idiocies that my co-resident mouths are precisely "falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing panic." The Rash Lamebrians, Ann Coulters, Sean Hannitys, Janine Pirros, Laura Ingrahams, Glenn Becks, Alex Joneses and others both in and out of Russia and China are fomenting hate and violence against those whose politics simply differs from theirs or the candidate that they prefer. They know that the gasoline they are pouring on the fire is gasoline. They are abetted in their pyromania by Mark Zuckerberg and some more well-meaning Internet entrepreneurs confused as to the scope of our Constitutionally guaranteed free speech.

Perhaps you will recall "Pizzagate" in which Alex Jones and other ultra right-wing and white supremacist web sites spent weeks promoting the farrago that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta, were running a child trafficing ring out of the basement of a Washington, D. C. pizza parlor that didn't have a basement. The result was that on December 4, 2016 a North Carolina man who, like my imbecile co-resident, credited such crap invaded the pizza parlor and briefly shot up the place before being arrested and disarmed by the police. What went unnoticed was that the businesses neighboring the pizza parlor as well as others as far afield as New York City and Austin, Texas were harassed and vandalized by the idiots taken in by this heinous lie. Members of the pizza parlors owner's family, his friends and even members of bands who'd played at the parlor received threatening phone calls and mail.

Our Constitution enshrines our right to speak our minds and make our opinions known. It does not, however, protect those who incite violence, as  our Orange Fürher and his minions on Fox News and the Internet have done. Deliberately promulgating patently false information is not protected free speech. It is rather incitement to violence. My freedom of expression is not curbed by being forced, under penalties established under law, to wear a face mask or stay at least 6 feet from other persons during an epidemic. Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, was not unjustly imprisoned when she'd infected 53 people with typhoid fever and caused 3 deaths. Public safety, that is the safety of the public at large, was endangered by her free movement. When Mary Mallon refused to give up her work as a cook, she had to lose her personal freedom to prevent more and wider infections.

Not only are the Orange Fürher and his syncophants of the Republiscum Party  pyromaniacs, the Orange Fürher himself is also a Typhoid Mary spreading the disease of phony conspiracies, lies, bigotry and hatred to thousands who share his bigotry and ignorance.

My co-resident is an imbecile and a fool. He never seeks to question anything he hears as long as it comports with his hatred and ignorance. He is not alone in that. He is far from alone in that. My very faint hope is that Abraham Lincoln was correct in saying (and he may never have said it but it's still a pretty good line), "You can fool some of the people all of the time and you can fool all of the people some of the time but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." I will stick with the attribution to Lincoln and hope against hope that enough of the voters in enough of the states will not be fooled this coming November 3rd.