A duly constituted state of these United States appoints to a position of responsibility for health-related measures during a pandemic a person who dismisses what he calls “the so-called pandemic” as a vast communist plot AND IF ANYONE AGREES TO BE VACCINATED FOR SO-CALLED COVID THEIR DNA WILL BE REPROGRAMMED TO MAKE THEM A ROBOT OF THEIR CHINESE AND RUSSIAN MASTERS.

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Is Igor Shepherd a doctor? No evidence of that online. He says he picked up something he’s calling a medical degree during his young dark evil days in the Russki military but did anyone in Wyoming check on that? Did anyone in Wyoming check on whether Igor is insane?

Igor is Donald Trump’s Little Edie Beale, a strumpette on the psycho circuit who barks about global conspiracies to debrain your immune system. And someone in our sickest state (in 2016: second highest suicide rate; first in gun deaths; worst traffic fatality rate; highest divorce rate) decided to appoint Igor to an important covid-related committee. They decided to put Typhoid Mary in charge of typhoid-relief activities.

Wyoming has hurriedly shoved Igor under the buffalo chips and won’t talk about it. The End.

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Which makes Igor a very small story amid the much larger story of Big Edie, currently spraying territorial urine all over the faces of our Supreme Court Justices.

But UD thinks Little Edie is a sort of wedge into the Big Edie story. UD thinks the restless mental emptiness of America’s wide open spaces, the rageful giveashittery of portions of our hinterlands, takes you in one of two directions, both utterly captured by Trump. One we know from the Sybil, via TS Eliot’s epigraph to The Waste Land: apothanein thelo. I want to die. Suicide, guns, alcohol amid snowdrifts late at night, helmetless motorcycling… There’s no easier place to off yourself than the heart of the heart of Trump country, and they like it that way because quite a few of them want to die. Donald Trump’s maskless droplets-languishing is fuck yeah.

The other direction? Instead of killing yourself, you kill other people. Like Wyoming’s Igor, you’re a rock-hard paranoid who knows that sooner or later the communists led by Kamala Harris (Trump: “She’s a monster.”) are going to attach your negative posilator to your positive negalator and deactivate your synaptic narcoscopies and all hell will break loose. Get them before they get you.