I have no idea how I will die, but if the New York Times’s Ginia Bellafante has any say in it, the cause will surely disprove whatever beliefs shaped my existence.
“A beloved bar owner was skeptical about the virus,” Bellafante’s latest New York Times column reads. “Then he took a cruise.”
The subject of Bellafante’s piece, Bay Ridge bar owner Joe Joyce, is somewhat sympathetically described as a working-class Republican — but not one of those Republicans. We’re told to feel sympathy for him because even though he committed the mortal sin of supporting President Trump, he still liked Pete Buttigieg and wasn’t a racist xenophobe like the rest of his party.
Joyce’s fatal flaw? Watching Fox News. Never mind that the Brooklynite embarked on the cruise, aboard which he likely contracted the coronavirus, on March 1 — well before Fox’s Sean Hannity downplayed the virus in the March 8 segment referenced by Bellafante and well before New York City officials or New York Times journalists were taking any of it seriously. When Joyce left for his cruise, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Bellafante herself were still downplaying the coronavirus.
Regardless, that didn’t stop Joyce from getting the treatment reserved for drunk girls who go out alone too late at night.
“But there was a way he might have avoided the trip, his daughter speculated,” Bellafante wrote. “If Trump had gone on TV with a mask on and said, ‘Hey this is serious,’ I don’t think he would have gone.”
Which reminds me: If that psycho ex-boyfriend all my friends used to warn me about murders me, please, members of the media, turn me into a cautionary tale. If a diet rich in red meat does in fact give me a fatal coronary, don’t let my parents grieve too long without getting them on the record to assign blame.
“But there was a way she might have avoided death, Lowe’s mother speculated,” I fully expect my obituary to say. “If Trump had gone on TV and said, ‘Climate change is, in fact, not a Chinese hoax, and eating red meat will kill you all,’ I don’t think she would have died at age 24.”
Apply this standard to nearly any other cause of death, and it’s not hard to see how this is victim-blaming at its finest.
Remember that for most of February, Tom Cotton and Tucker Carlson were nearly alone in taking the coronavirus more seriously than a particularly nasty strain of the seasonal flu.
Less than two weeks before Joyce left for his cruise, the New York Times declared that in Europe, “fear spreads faster than the coronavirus itself.” CNN claimed that in the United States, “racist assaults and ignorant attacks against Asians” were “spreading faster than the coronavirus.”
Yes, Trump publicly downplayed the coronavirus when he should have known better. But basically, so did everyone else with a platform and the information to know better. Those plebeians following suit were not anti-vaxxers denying a century of settled science. They were simply following a vocal, bipartisan consensus.
But alas, Joyce’s skirt was just a little too short.
If your loved one who’s passed committed wrongthink, it’s best to keep your grieving as quiet as possible, or you may be quoted in the paper of record as part of the media’s partisan theater of death.
