My reflections on the abject and sorry reality of the COVID-19 disaster in the US. The greatest irony reflective of the death-march collective wish of its population: the clueless, diabolical, psychopathic orange entity ensconced in DC has the so-called popularity rating going up!!

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Tennyson Redux: COVID-19 in the US

Half-a-League Onward, into the Valley of Death, Rode the 300 Million

Monish R Chatterjee

Here are today's COVID-19 mayhem numbers for the good old US of A- a runaway topper, an unbeatably "exceptional" record in the entire world.

United States
Coronavirus Cases:
1,243,483
Deaths:
72,829

And the numbers keep spiraling up. The closest 2nd place finisher, again #1 (or soon to be) in Europe, is not surprisingly the US's most "exceptional" partner in worldwide bullying (and that is to put it mildly)- the UK. Yet, they are by far distant from the good old US of A:

United Kingdom

Coronavirus Cases:
201,101
Deaths:
30,076

No competition. A country which uses a grossly disproportionate amount of the world's natural resources; spends multi-trillion dollars in absolutely obscene, unnecessary military spending, including build-up of untold lethal weapons and WMDs, mainly to use as terror (I would of course call that terrorism) in policing nation after nation; occupies well over 100 countries with military bases as part of its imperial outreach; cannot (actually will not) provide basic universal medical care for all its citizens; has millions of its young students burdened with unrepayable "educational" loans- and the list of its exceptionalism is far, far longer- has a mounting number of its unfortunate citizens claimed by a tiny virus. Irony, indeed! A number (now 72,000+) has now exceeded by far its entire loss of cannon-fodder in Vietnam, 58,000 (where they laid to waste something like 6 million innocent peasants- way across the world). And it ought to be 100% transparent to any politically illuminated population that the oligarchy which is looting this nation literally to death (both the Ds and the Rs, of course)- does not give the rear end of a rat what happens to the 90% (who are brow-beaten, propagandized by meaningless slogans, fed a constant diet of organized sports in order to completely shut down any actual free-thinking, any awakening of basic humanity, and robbed to literal annihilation). And hence the 72,000 dead are already dead in their robber-baron minds- and they could not care less if it went to a million. Once that number is reached, this well-oiled machine will move to its next modus operandi: finding scapegoats anywhere else in the world. And its sheeple-population will go right along with the newest propaganda, leading likely to another war somewhere else (with or without a pandemic)- I can almost see all this simply down this dark tunnel. Another war means even more billions and trillions for the criminal complexes running this oligarchy.

And yet there is not a nation-wide revolt in this country demanding immediate CHANGE. CHANGE, NOT STATUS QUO, NOT MODERATION, NOT THE UNIMAGINABLY EVIL "LESSER EVILISM":- CHANGE! Absolutely nothing less will do. However, I am not holding my breath.

And demonstrating how utterly fragile the "capitalist" structure is, inside out, there is all this talk about "re-opening" businesses, beaches, public places even as death lurks all around. And they are doing it!

To paraphrase Lord Tennyson: Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, into the Valley of Death, Rode the 300 Million!!

Authors Bio:

Monish R. Chatterjee received the B.Tech. (Hons) degree in Electronics and Communications Engineering from I.I.T., Kharagpur, India, in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa, in 1981 and 1985, respectively. Dr. Chatterjee was a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering at SUNY Binghamton from 1986 through 2002. Dr. Chatterjee is currently with the ECE department at the University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio. Dr. Chatterjee, who specializes in applied optics, has contributed more than 100 papers to technical conferences, and has published more than 70 papers in archival journals and conference proceedings, in addition to numerous reference articles on science. Dr. Chatterjee's most recent literary essays appear in Rabindranath Tagore: Universality and Tradition, published by FDU Press (2004); Celebrating Tagore, published by Allied Publishers (2009); and Tagore: A Timeless Mind by ICCR and the London Tagore Society (2012). He is the author of four books of translation (Kamalakanta, Profiles in Faith, Balika Badhu and Seasons of Life) from his native Bengali. In 2000, Dr. Chatterjee received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2005, Dr. Chatterjee received a Humanities Fellows award from the University of Dayton to conduct research on scientific language. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, OSA, and SPIE and a member of ASEE and Sigma Xi.