Timing is everything
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts will end nearly all of his state’s social-distancing restrictions on Monday even as the number of new coronavirus cases has trended upward over the last few months.
Cases are going up so – shrug – might as well stop trying.
The new rules will still limit the size of large indoor gatherings, such as concerts, meeting halls and theaters, but will drop all other state-imposed mandates in favor of voluntary guidelines, as other conservative states have done.
Because “conservative” now means “ignore all expert health advice and refuse to take sensible steps to damp down a lethal pandemic.” They really want to go with that?
FTFY
‘Conservative’ is a word that IMHO should always when used be set within parentheses. It commonly just refers to the accumulated wealth of the user, who may be as profilgate as they wish regarding the environment, climate, resources, biosphere and human institutions as they wish. It’s a sad state of affairs, but I fear it was ever thus.
Nebraska is a red state. The hell with them.
Congratulations, zubanel, you’ve managed to descend to the moral level of Trump and Kushner.
Even if you believe that all Trump voters deserve death, you might want to keep in mind that even “red states” have non-trivial numbers of non-Trump supporters. Including at least one person who comments here.
Thanks, Screechy! Not everyone in Nebraska is conservative. Right now, Biden/Harris signs and flags outnumber Trump flags here, though I suspect a lot of that is just because the Trump supporters are so sure they will win. My theatre buddies are all liberals. My writing group is basically liberal (though some of them are more in the moderate zone, but none like Trump).
And Nebraska, one of only two states to split their electoral vote between the parties, gave Obama one electoral vote in 2008. It was out of Omaha, which some Nebraskans claim isn’t really part of Nebraska, but there is a substantial liberal community there, and another in Lincoln. And here…we have Pride parades, Science marches, BLM protests in our town. No Women’s Marches, though. Not sure why, when some of the most conservative small towns nearby had them.
Disease ain’t so selective… it’s like when Trump inevitably cockblocks any aid to the Oregon fire disaster. He has lots of supporters here (I work with an entire plant chock full of Kyle Rittenhouses) but the majority of the state doesn’t, so fuck Oregon amirite?
That Omaha electoral college vote is in play again this year, and there’s at least one plausible EC map where it’s dispositive. Take the 2016 map, give Biden MI and WI and AZ, that gives you a 269-269 tie, which is likely a loss in the House. But that one lonely Nebraska vote would make it a squeaker 270-268 Biden win, Well, except for the fact that we’ll spend the subsequent two months discussing “faithless electors.”
Speaking of Nebraska and Omaha and not everyone, I’ve just started reading a quite interesting book about how North America is not 3 nations but 11, with different outlooks and customs rooted in their geographically/politically/religiously different origins. Nebraska, like the Dakotas and Kansas and the far west corner of Oklahama, is split between The Midlands and The Far West. American Nations by Colin Woodard.
Didn’t Abe Lincoln come from Nebraska or spend a lot of time there? And he was a Republican too. That surely counts for something, especially given that the difference between them is the same as Tweedledum vs Tweedledee (well most years, anyway.) I think FDR said that.
I support the Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, which also works well when applied to Australian history. But with an important difference.
Because the inland of the US was so well-watered, smallholders did well. This encouraged a national character in the settler population of rugged, self-made frontier individualists (eg Daniel Boone) who were idolised in town and country alike, and with whom politicians have sought to identify and be identified. (‘New Frontier’ was a label used by one of them, I forget who.)
But the interior of Australia can get dry and stay dry. Smallholders were commonly ‘battlers’ always trying to make ends meet and frequently going broke for their trouble. They commonly became figures of fun (eg Arthur Hoey Davis’ Dad and Dave) or else portrayed with stark unenviable realism (eg as in Henry Lawson, The Drover’s Wife.) By contrast with America’s, Australia’s was a big man’s frontier, and those who did really well generally had a lot of capital behind them. (One property ‘Wingadee’ not so far away from where I am now on the NW Plains of NSW, had in its heyday a 100-stand shearing shed and a staff of 8 cooks in the cookhouse, just to cater for all the shearers and other staff.)
That frontier brought forth legendary immigrant explorers like Bourke and Wills and its share of individualists, but it also gave Australia mass trade unionism big-time, and the Australian Labor Party; historically the highest expression of Australian democracy (until it was gutted by self-seeking politicians.)
America had its unions and industrial conflicts galore, but it has never brought forth a labour party.
No, Illinois. Lincoln was born in Kentucky and his family moved to Illinois. You probably think Nebraska because of Lincoln the city, where the state university is.
Much of the inland US is not well watered AT ALL – it’s a desert. The land promoters dubbed it “the plains” to disguise the fact that it’s a fucking desert. It was a mistake to settle it, and it’s going horribly wrong. I recently read an excellent book on the subject, Cadillac Desert, and posted about it at some point.
OB: Noted.
Omar, not even all of Nebraska is well watered. Omaha and Lincoln get decent precipitation, but by the time you get out here, it is too dry to support the type of agriculture we do, so we suck lots of water out of the aquifer. By the time you get to western Nebraska, it’s semiarid steppe.
I spent most of my youth wondering why people left the east coast for such a dry, dusty area…I knew why I did. I was 10. I had no choice when my parents decided to move from Maine to Oklahoma. I had to go along because, well, most 10 year olds are not allowed to live independently. And I probably wasn’t quite ready yet, though I was always mature for my age. (Which basically means, I might have acted like an 11 year old?)
My students always think we’re doing so great because we have so few species on the endangered species list; the reality is, agriculture extincted a lot of them before we started counting.
I really don’t like living here, but I can say one thing that I am proud of: this is the only state that has never had a religious exemption for parents who don’t take their kids to the doctor and the kids die. No civil exemption, no criminal exemption. And that is the work of one Ernie Chambers, who has the capacity to infuriate me as much as he delights me.
We are also the state that gave the world Malcolm X, Henry Fonda, and William Jennings Bryan. You decide which, if any, we should be proud of.
iknklast:
You can be proud of them all, IMHO, though Malcolm X had the hardest row to hoe and, like Martin Luther King, knew he was a marked man..
William Jennings Bryan was, like the others, a creature of his time, and on the face of it would swell the chest of the rational American to the least extent.. There is that old saying that there are only two certainties in this life: death and taxes. I would incline to add a third: currency speculation, the latest manifestation of which is the bitcoin bubble. As with all of them, some poor benighted fool at the end and as the dust settles is always left holding the bag.
Bryan certainly had the gift of the gab, and knew how to work a crowd.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
Well all he needed was a medal after all…
Let’s not forget Willa Cather!
There’s also Dick Cavett.
About William Jennings Bryan…this one time he was a dinner guest at my mother’s parents’ house. My grandfather was a small town newspaper editor and a Chautauqua lecturer and active in Democratic politics – I don’t know which of those motivated Bryan to pop up; maybe it was all of them. Anyway, all I know about it is that my grandmother despised him and found him a very vulgar obnoxious guest. Hur hur.
Around here it is totally impossible to forget Willa Cather; she came from the next town to the south of me. They have a Willa Cather museum, and all sorts of Willa Cather themed things. Every school child will read Willa Cather…and drink Kool-Aid, which also came from Nebraska. That’s the town I live in, so we have a Kool-Aid museum. I am told the reuben sandwich also originated here, and if so, I am definitely thumbs up to them, but I do have some doubt.
I did not know Dick Cavett was from Nebraska. Johnny Carson went to school here, and gave an enormous sum of money to the UNL Drama Department, which has allowed them to build a theatre that is not as grand as their new football stadium, but puts out more “wins” – IMHO.
Nebraska: seedbed of talk show hosts.
Talk-show hosts are to Nebraska as corn is to Kansas, I would venture to say.
So the Nebraska Cornhuskers should be renamed the Nebraska Convohosters, I gather?
Sackbut, I think they should go back to their original name: the Bugeaters.