John Nance Garner died in 1966 at the venerable age of 98 having spent eight of his years as vice president of the United States.
Garner held that office from 1933 to 1941 during the first two terms of the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, having agreed to accept nomination for it to drop his own presidential candidacy at the 1932 Democratic National Convention when FDR found himself short of the two-thirds delegate majority then needed to gain the presidential nomination.
We know from the daily drumbeat of information about the Coronavirs that fully 25% of cases in the world are right here, in the United States and that 25% of the deaths to date across the globe are in the United States.
But look behind these numbers to another number contained within them and the depth of the failure in our country beggars the imagination.
Let’s look at that number.
There are 7.6 billion people in the world.
The population of the United States is 330 million, third-largest after India and China.
In the United States, again 330 million population, over 3.4 million people, .01% of the people (one percent) have been found with Coronavirus.
In the entire rest of the world with a population comprised by the other 7.3 billion people, 9.6 million people, .00125 (one-eighth of one percent) have been found with the virus.
That makes its incidence in this country eight times higher – 8 times higher than in the entire rest of the world – than on the rest of planet Earth.
Absorb that. There are 8 times as many cases per capita of Coronavirus in this country as there is in the other 194 other nations in the world combined.
Whose fault is this?
Surely the fault of very, very, many millions of stupid, recalcitrant, angry Americans – by observation overwhelmingly white Americans, people who seem to think nobody’s life matters, no one’s life is worth wearing a facemask.
But, above all, this is the fault of the American president, his historically corrupt, incompetent, malfeasant administration, and of the political party glued to him like a fly to flypaper.
What does this mean, almost certainly mean?
What does having 8 times the incidence of cases as the rest of the world mean as long as it goes on, continues unchanged? And it has not changed an iota since this started.
It means no one is going back to school, any school.
It means restaurants are not in our foreseeable future, or theater, or movies, or spectator sports or most sports at all — or even going to the dentist.
It means the U.S. economy will continue to sputter, lose jobs, shed commercial real estate values, have less and little certainty with markets that reel up, down, this way, that on every rumor.
It means the rest of the developed world will look away, look at us with pity, horror, anger, gloating, but look elsewhere for leadership we cannot offer.
It means more isolation, separation from family and friends, ongoing, unchanging disruption to life, social interaction.
It means masks are a permanent part of our wardrobes.
It means for the foreseeable future we have a new normal, this – this is our normal.
It means this cannot begin to change unless we change presidents, obtain a competent government, and give it at least six months perhaps even a year to restore common sense, efficiency, consistency, and ability in our national governance.
Just like you, I hope this is a wrong estimate.
But the evidence is in the numbers – numbers that show a coronavirus case incidence 8 times that in the rest of the world.
That is not a cry from Cassandra.
It is an incontrovertible mathematical fact that diagnoses us right now as a nation sickening with coronavirus while sickened every day by a malevolent, malfeasant government.
On the same day that it issued two rulings concerning presidential legal immunity in cases involving Donald Trump – one in his favor, the other not – the U.S. Supreme Court also handed down the latest in a two-century history of cases determining the rights of Native Americans and defining and refining their legal status as independent but dependent nations in the United States of America.
In a case from Oklahoma, where five exiled Indian nations maintain their trial standing — tribes exiled in the 1830s from Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana –the high court effectively ruled that the eastern half of that state is tribal reservation land.
Peeling the Onion 