The Dystopia You Always Feared is Already Here
Submitted for your approval: in the year 2020, the world is caught in the grip of a pandemic that forces people to stay inside their homes, businesses to shutter their doors, and hundreds of thousands to become seriously — sometimes fatally — ill. The medical community advises people to isolate themselves and eschew public gatherings whenever possible. However, after a week or so of instituting these policies, a sort of madness sweeps over the moneyed class, as they see their stocks plummet and the spigot of unrelenting capital momentarily pause.
And so they begin to scheme and dream and wonder aloud, what if we propose that more people — not all, but some, mind you — return to work? Yes, some people may die needlessly — many people, in all likelihood — but the economy must be preserved at all costs…
Unfortunately for us, this isn’t a “Twilight Zone” episode, despite all appearances to the contrary. Nothing in the scenario described above is hyperbolic. Before you begin to challenge me on this notion, check out Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show last night. Because I’d rather ingest a drum of chloroquine phosphate than provide a link to that bow-tied racist’s show, I invite you to google search the clip yourselves. But here’s the salient quote you should take away from it: “No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’ And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
This is, of course, sheer madness. As Patrick himself notes, he’s a senior citizen over the age of 65 and thus squarely in the high risk demographic for severe illness from coronavirus. What’s more, he is implicitly suggesting to the older Texas voters who elected him to office that they are expendable in the name of “keeping the America that all America loves.”
Of course, such casual cruelty is nothing new to Patrick or the state government which he represents, and in fact continues unabated as they take advantage of the very crisis that they simultaneously diminish. But what is new, or at least relatively unprecedented, is the bluntness of the message. In previous years, politicians, particularly Republicans, sugarcoated the rhetorical impact of programs that targeted the poor and middle class by using neutral-sounding phrases like “trickle-down economics” or what-have-you.
But after a temporary cessation in Business As Usual, many conservative politicians and pundits, not to mention the plutocrats they represent, have openly mused about a grotesque calculus that sacrifices lives in exchange for a healthy stock market. As I remarked on Twitter recently, these lines of illogic read like rejected lines of dialogue from “The Hunger Games.” Indeed, science fiction dystopias might be the only analogue we have to our current situation, except not even Philip K. Dick high on a herculean amount of drugs could have imagined the absurd lengths we go to in the year 2020 in order to achieve such a society.
