Not an old cowhand from the Rio Grande
Daily Beast post two articles on its front page, the second of which I read first: a good interview with Soledad O'Brien about the importance of context in American political reporting.
The second featured that guy, above; a county commissioner from New Mexico. No slight on New Mexico (I love the state, it's beautiful, some of my best friends live there, etc., etc.) but quick: name three cities in New Mexico. If I spot you two, you probably can't come up with a third; certainly not a third that's a "major" city (the largest cities in NM are not much bigger than the smaller ones in Texas). This guy is supposedly in charge of "Cowboys for Trump", and just based on the fact I never rode a horse in any get up as stupid as that in the picture, I'm more of a cowboy than he is. (While I wear the boots, I don't wear the hat. I look like an accountant at a dude ranch (Ask your Grandpa! Punks!) in a cowboy hat. Can't help it. Still, I'm more of a cowboy than this jamoke.).
Notice who he's leading, too. Nobody. But he's gotten his picture made with Trump (who hasn't!) and he's threatened Democrats with death, so he's Kind-of-a-Big-Deal? Huh?
Yo, Daily Beast, where's the context?
Well, if it bleeds, it leads, right? And while this story doesn't bleed, it makes much of Couy Griffin's wish that Democrats would. Him and Adam Smith in North Carolina and the "Patriot Day" rally in Kentucky, where a handful of protestors terrorized the Governor's family in the mansion. These are bad people. They espouse hateful and terrible things. But, as O'Brien notes in her interview, "the polls support not reopening America until it’s safe." These people don't represent large swathes of the "Silent Majority" (a term that haunts our political discourse even if our political reporters are too young to remember it). Speaking of old, here's O'Brien on why she likes podcasting:
My goal is to give context and history and understanding, whereas in a morning newscast the goal is to get through it fast and knock out the most important facts. You’d never say, well, let’s go back to that day and walk through it slowly, and give it more context. It’s a completely different genre and made me really like podcasting.
A laudable goal. I'm old enough to remember when magazines were supposed to do that. And to have thought websites like "The Daily Beast" had taken over that function. They sure as hell aren't newspaper sites, or on-line outlets for information being reported 24-7 on CNN or FoxNews. So what are they? Where do we go for context?
Not to "The Daily Beast," which runs an "opinion" piece on why children should go back to school, based on the "fact" they are less likely to get coronavirus than adults. But more likely to get inflammatory organ syndrome, just as likely to die from coronavirus as adults, and just as likely to suffer blood clots which can have fatal if not debilitating results. This ain't the flu we're talkin' about. Me, I'm happy with schools being closed until further notice.
And is it just me, or is nobody noticing it's June? School's out people. Give it up. Parents and administrators and teachers have all summer to decide what to do about next fall. As for summer camps (also a subect of the article), same issue: this ain't flu we're talkin' about. What's next, the argument against a coronavirus vaccine? Will there be any context for that?
I'll retire to Bedlam.
UPDATE: Since I can't post comments (aaaargh!), I have to respond here with gratitude to the commenters below, especially the context on adult exposure to covid-19 (yes, that's a very real problem for teachers and administrators and other adults in the schools all day) and the "Cowboys for Trump" clown (reminds me of a guy who wrote angrily to the school district here about policies the school is enacting for the pandemic, and how he was a proud "voice of the voiceless," until he was called for his phone number so he could participate in a "town hall" (the district is very good about listening to parents and others in the district) and suddenly he wanted to be anonymous and left alone.), and finally the important context on one of the authors of the "reopen the schools" article.
Much enlightenment and information I simply didn't get from The Daily Beast. As I said elsewhere this morning, ain't the internet grand?
UPDATE: Since I can't post comments (aaaargh!), I have to respond here with gratitude to the commenters below, especially the context on adult exposure to covid-19 (yes, that's a very real problem for teachers and administrators and other adults in the schools all day) and the "Cowboys for Trump" clown (reminds me of a guy who wrote angrily to the school district here about policies the school is enacting for the pandemic, and how he was a proud "voice of the voiceless," until he was called for his phone number so he could participate in a "town hall" (the district is very good about listening to parents and others in the district) and suddenly he wanted to be anonymous and left alone.), and finally the important context on one of the authors of the "reopen the schools" article.
Much enlightenment and information I simply didn't get from The Daily Beast. As I said elsewhere this morning, ain't the internet grand?
In school they're more likely to bring it home to adults, not to mention THE ADULTS WHO WORK IN SCHOOLS. I have a feeling those two Dr.s who wrote that Daily Beast article have never taught in a public school and it wouldn't surprise me if neither have children in public schools or, perhaps, relatives they could name who have gone to them. So many of those who get published in even online magazines have that prep-elite private college background. My sister who may or may not have had Covid February (the three tests were inconclusive but she had the symptoms) was in the hospital for almost two weeks, having become sick the week before Feburary vacation at her public school. She's in her 60s and, if she ever goes back to school, was due to retire next year.
ReplyDeleteThe "Cowboys for Trump" have come to Santa Fe a few times. They ride horses, which is cool, except that they snarl traffic (such as it is in our little capital) and don't clean up the horse manure left behind.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, the guy's about as much a cowboy as I am. I think he used to tour with a dancing goat, kind of a Roy Rogers wanna-be. Since I work about a block from the Roundhouse (our legislature) I had to walk to a meeting on the other side during one of their demonstrations, about thirty Anglos with a speaker droning on about "They'll never take our guns away." That kind of cluelessness. The governor offered to meet with a few of them upstairs in her office, but they refused, of course.
I have to admit, I look at the Daily Beast regularly, but, yeah, it's not journalism except in a derivative sense. Same article noted that our lunatic fringe loves to shout "Sic semper tyrannis," but failed to point out that that's what John Wilkes Booth shouted after murdering Lincoln. Such a blow for freedom!
My niece just started working at a Catholic school as a pre-school teacher after years working in a day care center and as a nanny and getting her degree in child development. Her parents did a great job imparting to her good value system and common sense, and in the wealthy area in which she works tends to have more sense and concern about child-rearing than the parents, for many of whom their children are little more than status symbols.
ReplyDeleteEarlier this year her school tasked her with designing and running a summer camp for pre-schoolers, and when Covid came along she assumed that it would be canceled because you obviously can't make three year-olds social distance in a play setting or wear masks all day and there is all the potential for the camp to be an infection vector. So my niece brought her concerns to the school along with the fact that the other local summer camps have been canceled...and they really didn't care. Her much-needed teaching job in the fall is assumed to be contingent upon her doing this so she will be putting herself and her (high-risk) parents at risk while trying to manage the risk to the children or potentially lose her income.
I bring this up to highlight the fact that Jeffrey Klausner, one of the MDs in the article you linked to agitating for sending kids back to school and summer camps has been fantastically wrong when it comes to this coronavirus. In February he predicted the US would see maybe 20 to 30 cases. In late March, by the time cases were in the thousands and states were issuing shelter orders he warned against shutting down the economy. Why? Who knows? Maybe he values money more than human life. Now that the death and infection rates are many orders of magnitude higher than what he predicted he wants the economy "open" because of course he does. If he admits he was wrong who would ever listen to him again? And what more important than status and popularity? Surely not human lives.
Summing up: he's a hack who couldn't have been more wrong, apparently doesn't understand as much about the severity and transmissibility of this disease as people just reading the news, and would have consigned millions to die had we taken his advice. He's putting real people like my niece at risk and no one should listen to him.