re: #187 Targetpractice

I told a friend once that the reason nobody’s taking COVID seriously is because decades of Hollywood sensationalism has made it impossible for us to take a plague seriously unless it looks like something out of the movies. We want the full Contagion experience, where people are just dropping dead in front of our eyes or we’re seeing piles of bodies being dumped into long pits in the ground. Hell, even in the new version of The Stand, they went from the stereotypical 90s depiction of illness (bloodshot eyes, thick snot running from the nose, sallow skin) and amped it up by giving everybody dying of Captain Trips goiters the size of softballs. The only way anybody was going to rethink their position on COVID from it being “No worse than the flu” is if catching it meant they were coughing up buckets of blood as their skin rotted off before their very eyes.

There were tons of deniers in 1918 and in the fifties.