It’s perverse — that headline. How could something so pathogenically hostile to human beings — a virus able to spread so easily & kill its victims — be a “good guy”? As we know from History, some human beings are worse than pathogens when it comes to killing other people. Hitler, Pol Pot, Stalin… Those are just the recent hot shots. The Catholic Church was pretty good, too, in its day. Wouldn’t want to forget about them.

Dark, Right Wing forces have found an opening across the world. Empowered by each other — and by flaws inherent in free societies — uber-conservatives have gotten shockingly close to knocking social democracies from their place as how mature cultures govern themselves. Nothing scares uber-conservatives more than the future. If they could halt evolution itself, they absolutely would.

As their name suggests, conservatives want to conserve. Uber-conservatives want to conserve in the extreme. They really do want to live in the past — in a golden age of order (where they’re 100% in control of that order) that exists only in their minds. The uber-conservatives in America are SO terrified, it turns out, that they were even willing to risk the punishment that could result from attempting a soft coup d’etat.

So far, the Republicans have avoided punishment for their betrayal. When you’re that good at being corrupt, you’re also good at knowing how to keep from getting caught. They now stand squarely outside The Rule Of Law. Squarely outside of oversight. Squarely outside of punishment.

Or so they think…

In HG Wells’ “War Of The Worlds”, Martians take over Earth. They make very short work of our armies and armaments. They subdue us quickly and it looks like humans are in for a long patch of “terrible”. But then the Martians begin to die. Almost overnight, their incredible victory vanishes — and all because the Martians couldn’t handle earthly PATHOGENS.

Quick note to you anti-vaxxers — yes, it’s fiction, but the concept holds for any organism vulnerable to other organisms. Europeans didn’t subdue the native peoples’ of America, their pathogens did. If the Martians had done just a little more homework about the planet they were going to invade, perhaps they would have learned about — and planned for — earth’s pathogens.

Authoritarian China demonstrated by authoritarian government is terrible for human beings. The decision-making process is restricted to those at the very top and no one wants to be the bearer of bad news to decision-makers known for killing bearers of bad news. Every day that China dithered — afraid of offending those in power with the news that a deadly pathogen was on the loose — STALKING THEIR CITIZENS — the coronavirus spread.

Because no one was being quarantined yet, all those people who’d been exposed to the initial infection headed in different directions, potentially spreading the virus to everyone with whom they came into contact. The infection rate rose exponentially — and spread out to the four corners of everywhere else.

Now that we’ve started to actively contain the coronavirus — and find a vaccine for it — we can begin the process of actually neutralizing it as a global threat to human life. It will take time. Meanwhile — China is shut down. Considering all the goods it manufactures (on the cheap) and supplies to the rest of us, China shutting down has the very real potential to shut a giant piece of the world’s economy down.

Considering as the super-charged economy is Trump’s one positive (regardless of the fact, apparently, that the economy was already supercharged during the Obama years), should China’s economy grind to a near halt because of the coronavirus, then all the widgets China supplies won’t be available. That means the bigger product into which the widgets go — that can’t get finished now either.

As supply chains freeze or dry up — even if only for a short period of time — the impact will be ferocious — easily enough to throw our souped up economy into a profound stall. If that happens — and, with no moves left in our hand to effect the economy, Trump oversees a massive recession, even the stupidest journalist would have to give in — Trump will get blamed for being an incompetent and a traitor.

Wars are messy thing and we are most definitely in one. This is the first world wide Cyber War — World War Three, it will soon be known as. America’s election was attacked by a cyber-experienced Russian spy shop. How much control they have over this Frankenstein’s Monster — we don’t know yet.

But, we’re about to find out.

It’s perverse as hell to root for a nasty little pathogen over innocent humans. But, clearly, Big Ideas will not stop criminals from harming the rest of us. Hopefully Little single-celled organisms can rise to the challenge — and save us from ourselves.