The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that as absurd as it is, it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational as in the movie.
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lol, awesome reference and great example! Contagion came out around the same time and it also paints a much more flattering picture of US institutional response to a deadly pandemic [everything is fully remote, people do not have to work / national guard doing essential food distribution].
people accept a vaccine like its nothing and then everything is fine again. like as hopeless as that movie felt at the start of the pandemic, it feels way more optimistic now
in credit to the movie, they did have the Jude Law character spreading misinformation to make money from his conspiracy freaks. but absolutely agree: the movie feels optimistic compared to reality, despite it being essentially a procedural horror movie. like in the movie, the conspiracy crank was investigated, arrested, and charged with fraud.
can you imagine if we went actually after wealthy assholes for that?
but the dude was spreading misinfo and wearing a hazmat suit, that's what is so funny.
Crazy how rapidly those institutions have decayed. I genuinely believe Bush would’ve done something about covid in a way none of his successors could have, would have, or had any desire to. It would’ve been the US army handing out care packages to “at risk seniors” or something insufficient that coincidentally included a huge payout to black water in the funding bill, but there was will for the state to actually do something back then. I think Iraq showed that the only power the state has left is to kill en masse so that will has been dashed and dissipated. Now we only expect idiocy at best or malevolence at worst
Bush Jr's horrible response to Katrina is the ur example of the modern US government's inaction during a crisis, so I'm gonna disagree that he would have done anything with a pandemic. The institutional capacity to do something was eroded under earlier administrations, and with each new crisis we're seeing the response fall to a new low.
I think Katrina is the opposite example. It's the example of government action failing and being insufficient coupled with the nightmares unleashed by hitting every problem with the military hammer or even worse using mercenaries instead. Bush would've acted on covid and used it to unleash the patriot act v2. Now the federal government just says "that's on y'all lol" anytime a hurricane destroys the gulf or some other disaster arises. That's why I think Bush was the last president that would've acted on covid. Not because he's a unique individual but because he burnt that bridge himself and no one after him had the legitimacy to actually act on something like that. Certainly not succeed though. The US absolutely did not have the capacity to face the challenge of covid successfully like China did. But maybe you're right, maybe the structure was already too eroded by 2000 for any action to happen.
Obama's response to the swine flu was basically "wash yo hands nasty ass" and that was really it. It's amazing we dodge that fucking Ebola outbreak and it didn't get significantly worse here, but ebola has LOWER transmissibility because it is so lethal.
I think you make a good point. I was a kid during Bush Jr so my memory/analysis could be too presentist. We won't know because it's impossible to go back in time and check though.
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