Minor notes and petty observations from New York in the time of Donald Trump's Great American Plague

Thanks to Donald Trump, America is so great again that we've gone
straight back to the 17th Century.

Hart's Island, a possession of New York City, is a bleak, Godforsaken clump of rocks, mud, tumbledown buildings, weeds, untended and wind-twisted trees, and graves in Long Island Sound, just off the coast of the Bronx. It has been the last resting place of the unknown, the unfortunate, and the uncelebrated since about 1868, when the City of New York purchased it from a private owner as a dumping ground for unwanted human bodies. 

Now the dead on Hart's Island can expect quite a bit of fresh company, thanks to COVID-19. Early this week, New York had 40,000 cases of the disease, and since the numbers were compounding like investments in a runaway stock market, it is almost certainly considerably higher by now. Some of those infected New Yorkers have begun to die in such extraordinary numbers (considerably more, as of this writing, than perished on 9/11) that not only are the hospital morgues full, but so are the some of the refrigerated trailer trucks that were sent to handle the overflow. 

Bring out your dead — 
and toss 'em in the truck

So now FEMA is reportedly sending 85 more refrigerated trucks to hold the frozen stiffs. (I dare to make light of this because I am a New Yorker of a high risk age with a high risk medical condition to boot. It's quite possibly my own funeral, and I'll write the gags for it if I want to.)

However this is New York. Parking is a problem, even if your vehicle is a truck with 40 frozen human bodies in it. So now prisoners from nearby Riker's Island, the city's prison complex, have been recruited for $6 an hour, hardly more than a third of the city's minimum wage, to dig giant ditches for a "temporary mass internment." 

The ironies compound like the victim count of the epidemic. Yes, the city explains, the prisoners will be paid peanuts. But as a bonus, they'll get their very own personal protective equipment. Which might afford them an opportunity to survive the plague in crowded prison conditions. So dragooning prisoners to dig graves for substandard wages so they'll stand a better chance of staying alive is a good thing, right?

And don't expect the "temporary mass internment" to stay temporary. If we can't even find the parents of immigrant kids who we ripped out of those parents' arms, who  do you think will be contacted, and by whom, to reclaim dead relatives, after the relatives have been buried in a long ditch on Riker's Island? People got sick. They died. Now we're literally ditching them.

Where the hell is Charles Dickens now that we need him?

Do I blame Trump?
Damn right, I do!

A searing indictment of Donald Trump and his co-conspiring thieves, bumblers, self-dealers and incompetents appeared online at the New Yorker's website yesterday. Written by Susan B. Glasser, it's enough to make you want to pick up a torch and a pitchfork and march on the White House.

It's instructive to read the entire thing, but if you cannot take time to do that, I commend at least the last paragraph to you.

Watching the Trump carnival from afar, the former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt summed up the week’s events, and those of the many painful weeks to come: “This is the first great crisis of the post-American world,” he wrote on Twitter. “The UN Security Council is nowhere to be seen, G20 is in the hands of the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and the White House has trumpeted America First and Everyone Alone for years. Only the virus is globalized.”

So much for the greatness of America under Donald Trump.

A nightmare for
our times

I've commented before that the Trump Administration is like a terrible nightmare from which the nation seems unable to awaken. But even nightmares have their lighter moments.

In one of mine, last night, I had a box seat to the day's guillotine executions in Yankee Stadium. It wasn't a major day. They were only doing some low-level Trump cabinet officials and a few Republican Senators. Sitting in the next box was Madame Defarge. Yes, that Madame Defarge. And yes, she was knitting.

I engaged her in conversation, hoping to practice my French, but it turned out she spoke fluent English.

"What are those things you're knitting?" I asked her, pointing to one of the little tricolor, red, white and blue rectangles she had made.

"Face masks for my grandchildren," she told me. "The paper ones tear. And these can be laundered."

See? Even terrifying dreams can have some pragmatic content.

Better Business Bureau
flunks Trumpy friend

From the pages of Vanity Fair Magazine:

At his Monday briefing—in addition to insisting that his hair is real and inviting MyPillow founder Mike Lindell to urge the importance of prayer—Trump insisted that the current production of ventilators will so outweigh U.S. demand that the country could send the excess to hard-hit European countries. “As we outpace what we need, we’re going to be sending them to Italy, we’re going to be sending them to France, we’re going to be sending them to Spain, where they have tremendous problems, and other countries as we can,” Trump said. “But the fact that we’re doing so many so quickly is a tribute to our great companies.” The president also suggested that the shortage of personal protection equipment for U.S. health care workers was also on its way out, as he promised to send “approximately $100 million worth of things, of surgical and medical and hospital things to Italy.”

Somehow, I think Lindell smells a profit opportunity in all those shipments of "surgical and medical and hospital things to Italy." Americans are still dying in droves in American hospitals, in American cities, while Trump promises to ship the stuff we need out of the country. 

Maybe he could ship the stuff on the nearly-useless Navy hospital ship he sent to New York Harbor. It has been refusing to accept COVID-19 patients, and so far has only accepted 20 patients of any kind. If you're walking the streets of New York, I'd be careful if I were you. You might get impressed and taken aboard for "treatment" just to make Trump look good.

But Mike Lindell. As long as Mike stuck his head up in support of Trump's incompetence, I figured I'd go check out all those rumors I've heard that Lindell has lots of unhappy customers of his own. So I went to the Better Business Bureau web page. And guess what?

"BURNSVILLE, Minn. - The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has revoked the accreditation of Minnesota-based MyPillow, lowering its rating to an F based on a pattern of complaints by consumers."

You'll find many of the sleazy details here.