I just have to wonder at the utterly bankrupt Andrew Sullivan’s latest moralizing essay, and its first paragraph:

“There is no wealth but life,” the great critic John Ruskin once wrote. You can hear that faith in the words of Andrew Cuomo, whose Catholic upbringing still clearly reverberates in his soul. “If it’s the public health versus the economy, the only choice is public health,” Cuomo tweeted. “You cannot put a value on human life. You do the right thing. That’s what Pop taught us.” That’s why American soldiers never leave a fellow behind, why American doctors never abandon a patient, and why American rescuers and first responders go beyond the feasible and reach for the impossible.

A telling quote from John Ruskin, followed by die-hard Neo-Liberal governor Andrew Cuomo, as the epitome of ‘Catholic Virtue’, that ‘pop’ taught us’, a list of American Soldiers, Doctors and First Responders and their respective virtues. All of these moral actors, under the rubric of American Virtue, as an expression of exclusivity, or more pointedly of American Exceptionalism, of the Frank Capra School of American History. 

Its easy to quickly run out of patience with this moralizing fraud: he spent his moral capital on his enthusiasms for ‘The Bell Curve’ and the War in Iraq! He now makes war on those who don’t conform to his Politics: he’s the Roy Cohn of the political present, and  part of a cadre of political dullards, who write for Corporate Media. Read the rest of his essay at your own risk! 

Sincerely yours, 

Myra Breckenridge 

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/andrew-sullivan-how-to-live-with-the-coronavirus.html