The Coronavirus Conflicts

There’s this feature that ran in Mad Magazine called Spy Vs. Spy.  Each wordless installment was a disingenuous dance of deceit and danger as two spies, each drawn the same way but with one dressed in black and one in white, sought to out do each other.  If there was any larger ideology at work here, it wasn’t clear in Spy Vs. Spy. The job of each spy was merely to stop the other spy. Whatever gain was made for a government or a nation was largely irrelevant. All that matter to was that one spy stopped the other.

This dynamic played out once in an episode of M*A*S*H. Col. Flagg shows up at the 4077^th looking for something. He’s not sure what but he’ll know when he finds it. He knows something is up because there’s another agent snooping around the compound. That operative is sure something is up because Col. Flagg is snooping around the same compound.  That both men are ostensibly supposed to be on the same side is beside the point. Each is determined to stop the other and get to whatever shenanigans are going on at the 4077^th first.  The only shenanigans going on at the 4077^th involve Hawkeye, Trapper John and Radar setting up fake files to point both men to Frank Burns as they confront Burns as a communist…no, a fascist….no, a communist…no, a fascist.

I feel like I’m trapped in a game of Spy Vs. Spy during this coronavirus pandemic. Never mind the larger issues of containing or stopping the spread of COVID-19, make sure people don’t get sick and if they do, make sure the sick get treatment and those men and women on the front lines helping the sick have sufficient resources to provide aid. 

There are people playing a game that has nothing to do with what really needs to be done. They're just jockeying to score partisan political points.   

 Take for instance this piece of relative good news: the projections for people dying from COVID-19 may be less than previously expected.  

One sensible takeaway from this development is that social distancing initiatives are working.  The less people interact, the less the diseases spreads, thus the number of people who actually catch the virus decreases and therefore the number of  people who die from the virus will likewise decrease.

Or there’s this train of thought: the scientists do not know what they’re doing, the predicted number of deaths was wrong all along and the whole coronavirus thing was an oversell designed to wreck the economy and hurt Donald Trump’s chances for re-election. 

There are people, out there fighting a war to stop a pandemic.

Others are fighting a war for partisan political gain.

For all the poor schmucks stuck in the middle, dying and trying not to die, the political side of the equation is an after thought.

To those fighting a war for partisan political gain, playing out there game of Spy Vs. Spy, those who are dying and trying not to die are merely collateral damage to what is to them a bigger and more important cause, the elevation of Donald Trump and how to screw the Democrats.

There are, one might think, better things to do.

Stay safe, stay healthy and remember to be good to one another.