Is it Eric "Nazi" Garcetti or just Mayor Garcetti — Los Angeles and COVID

08 August 2020

What would you do in his shoes?

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garzetti announced a few days ago that he would have the City shut off water and electricity to homes that host large parties in defiance of the City's ban on them for SARS-CoV-2 public health reasons.

Off the cuff, one would think that such an action evades lawfully required due process and is, therefore, illegal. Especially so, given that these are residences where, presumably, families with children live.

On the other hand, isn't the Mayor's shut-off idea laudably violence and delay-avoiding?

First, the partyers would miss an opportunity to physically tangle with enforcement-attempting cops.

Second, summons-initiated judicial processes run so slowly that many more virus-spreading parties could be held, before a judicial solution was reached.

Points to Garcetti?

Not a simple question, is it?

I raise this topic today because I have been critical of many American authorities' excessive willingness to imprison people at home and away from their businesses. Intelligently nuanced epidemiological management and economic protection need to be part of the COVID pandemic solution.

On the other hand, given that the US is intentionally flying blind during COVID, Mayor Garcetti does not have a lot of epidemiological evidence to shape his Office's decisions upon.

It probably seems reasonable to him (and to others) that mobs of unmasked, shouting, drooling and drunken folk would boost SARS-CoV-2's ability to aerosol around and crawl into people.

And it is not just the partying people who are affected. What happens when that drunk-drooling mob goes back to its own homes and places of business?

The overall mob-partying, infection-spreading result would probably worsen the already medically stressful Southern California hospital situation. This still being so, even if only a proportionately small subset of the human population is actually vulnerable to this often-enough deadly and maiming virus.

One can empathize with the Mayor's shortness of patience with defiantly gathering COVID folk.

On the other side of the due process issue

If government can create an emergency — out of its own refusal to prevent and prepare for pandemics — does it make sense that it subsequently be allowed to violate Constitutional principles, so as to (purportedly) deal with its own incompetence?

Recall that with SARS-CoV-2, American government (at all levels) has refused to epidemiologically investigate the true nature of the epidemic's actual spread. Authorities have made no genuine effort to detect actual rates of morbidity and mortality.

In sum, we do not really know what is going on, or how serious it is.

If you are tired of reading my many blurbs about this don't-know-nothin' issue — see Vox's take:

Brian Resnick, “It’s like we’re flying blind”: The US has a Covid-19 data problem, Vox (05 August 2020)

Is American character part of the problem?

I am reminded of vaccine-coinventor Dr. Paul Offit's statement from 31 July:

We don't think like a society. We think as individuals. I think that's what distinguishes us from a lot of these European countries.

We are so individualistic that we basically consider [it] our right to catch and transmit a potentially fatal infection.

To prickly people like Americans . . .

. . . being forced to think about our actions' impact upon Community feels like totalitarian oppression.

So, where does the exercise of public health reasonableness become Nazi predilection?

A viable answer would intelligently balance personal and societal values. Unfortunately, Americans are among the world's laziest, most short-sighted and least realistic analysts of both.

The moral? — There are no especially agreeable answers

I hinted (in the past) that Mayor Garcetti had occasionally demonstrated an unnuanced and Nazi-like COVID mind.

That said, on today's partying issue, he is (some people might think) taking a rationally defensible approach to citizen defiance, provided that preserving Public Health is his goal.

Nevertheless, my own perspective still classifies Mayor Garcetti as someone with too prominently displayed totalitarian tendencies.

Consider, in evaluating this, that there exists no accountability for anything (or anyone) in American government, or its associated National Security State.

Levels of government have known (for decades) that a pandemic (like this one) would be coming our way. Those authorities never did anything to prevent and prepare.

Claiming now that unruly citizens need their water and electricity un-Constitutionally shut off, so as to deal with COVID, seems an exact reversal of where accountability and consequences should fall.

Recall, also, that we remain colossally ignorant of the virus's true epidemiology because we intentionally have not looked for it.

We are swimming in uncertainty and misdirection entirely because the US is an arguably failed state.

Therefore, unlawfully threatening Liberty, so as to correct a problem that Government itself created and magnified is difficult to defend.

PeteFree.com

Is it Eric "Nazi" Garcetti or just Mayor Garcetti — Los Angeles and COVID