One year. One death per minute.

Today there were a lot (at least on NPR) of news stories about the one year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic – the day the World Health Organization declared it to be pandemic, the day the NBA first canceled a game, the day things started to shut down. Michigan’s first case was a year ago yesterday and the first anniversary of a general shutdown in the state is next week. A year ago tomorrow was my first post on the pandemic. Today’s post is the 168th time I’ve written about it in this year and my coronavirus tag is now the 18th most used tag out of the 782 tags I’ve used in the last 13 years (I display only 242 of them on the blog’s pages). During the first week of March a year ago I spent several days with my niece and family near Louisville. At the time the news talked about cases in Seattle and New York and my niece looked at maps on how close it was to her in Kentucky. She and her husband decided to keep two weeks of food in stock and they made out a shopping list. I returned home March 8th. I did my usual things on March 9th, 10th, and 11th. A couple days later my church canceled worship services and all in-person meetings. And the lockdown was on. Mark Sumner of Daily Kos discussed an article in the New York Times that is about the state of the pandemic, the status of the vaccination effort, and that much of the credit should go to ... the nasty guy. Sumner explained the state of the government’s response to the pandemic before and after Biden took over to show the NYT article was just wrong. Dartagnan of the Kos community delved into what the NYT article said. He concluded:

To recap: The Times published a blatantly misleading article designed to create a phony “equivalence” between the Biden and Trump administrations’ efforts on vaccine production. The lead reporter on that story omits a key piece of contradictory information—which she herself previously reported—and relies solely on the unverified claims of a piqued and disgraced Trump administration official, who in fact was responsible for deliberately delaying the ultimate distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine to millions of Americans. This is journalistic malpractice by The New York Times, pure and simple.

The huge virus relief package was reapproved by the House, confirming the changes the Senate made. This time one Democrat voted against it. Biden is to sign it tomorrow, two days before some of the provisions in the previous bill expire. Laura Clawson of Kos again lists the major parts of the bill. David Rothkopf tweeted:

Impossible not to note that sometime today we passed 525,600 deaths in the past year. One per minute.

David Neiwert of Kos (from a post of about two weeks ago) examined the tactic of “waving the bloody shirt.” The tactic by this name goes back to Reconstruction, though I’m sure it is much older. Allen Higgens was a former Northener and a school superintendent in Monroe, Mississippi. In March of 1871 he was beaten by the Klan for teaching black people. The shirt that was bloodied in the beating was, according to stories, waved in the House in Washington as Rep. Benjamin Butler ranted about the evils of the Klan. Butler did give the speech, but didn’t actually wave the shirt. Butler’s rant was soon reinterpreted. The problem wasn’t that Higgens was beaten. The problem was that Butler was trying to score political points for saying something about it. Stephen Bidiansky, in his book, The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomatox,

The bloody shirt captured the inversion of truth that would characterize the distorted memories of Reconstruction that the nation would hold for generations after. The way it made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence; the way it suggested that the real story was never the atrocities white Southerners committed but only the attempt by their political enemies to make political hay out of it. The mere suggestion that a partisan motive was behind the telling of these tales was enough to satisfy most white Southerners that the events never happened, or were exaggerated, or even that they had been conspiratorially engineered by the victims themselves to gain sympathy or political advantage.

Neiwert continued:

The use of this rhetorical manipulation—which is fundamentally underhanded, deceptive, and abusive—by conservatives, especially those who wish to whitewash the reality of far-right violence, has never ceased.

Neiwert then discussed how this rhetorical inversion has been used since the 1920s, including the ways it has been used in the last decade, in the last three months around the Big Lie and insurrection, and will continue to be used. Neiwert concluded:

All this gives us an idea what to expect for the foreseeable future out of the mouths of Republicans. The narrative will evolve into something like this: * The Jan. 6 insurrection was understandable and indeed needed and a patriotic act because good Americans thought the election was being stolen. * The Democrats who want to shame those good folks for their patriotism should be ashamed. * Besides, they’re the ones trying to divide the country with all their identity politics and pronouns and Black Lives Matter stuff and violent antifa thugs. Antifa and BLM are the violent ones, not MAGA folks. Count on something like that becoming the running storyline on Fox News over the next few months, and the basis of Republicans’ rationalization for their support for the disinformation and seditionist rhetoric that led to the insurrection. It’s how the “waving the bloody shirt” retort has always, always worked: turn reality on its head, reverse the victims and the perpetrators, then feign outrage. And until Americans wake up and realize they’re being gaslighted, it probably always will.