Portfolio > A Year Out The Window


Sounds like a beautiful place in Italy. (Retiro Way #16661)

The title is a quote from former President Trump, from statements he made during a September 22, 2020 election rally as part of his argument for re-christening the novel coronavirus as the “China virus”, a racist, inflammatory remark similar in tone to others he had made from the start of the pandemic (variously referring to the SARS-CoV-2 virus as the “Chinese virus”, the “Wuhan virus,” and the “kung flu”), which may have contributed to the year’s increase in racially motivated physical assaults against Asians. When you add to the above the fact that his administration purposely downplayed the pandemic at its start, for weeks repeatedly falsely claiming it was “under control,” with Trump stating that the number of cases would “in a couple of days” be “down close to zero” and describing COVID-19 as being “like the [common] flu” (even though its much greater severity was already known, including by him) just two days before calling the pandemic a “new hoax” manufactured by Democrats; the fact that his administration actively opposed pandemic-curbing measures like increased testing followed by contact tracing, with Trump instead repeatedly arguing that increased testing “makes us look bad” and preferring instead to allow the virus to continue propagating exponentially and claiming lives; the fact that the Trump administration refused to place orders for urgent in-country N-95 mask production when the capability was offered to them early on in the pandemic — a decision that led to nationwide months-long shortages of N-95 masks for frontline healthcare workers — choosing instead to manage the scant supply by having the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention irresponsibly tweet that it “does not currently recommend the use of facemasks to help prevent novel #coronavirus” and having the Surgeon General tweet the falsehood that masks “are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus,” all this in spite of the Trump administration already knowing that the new virus’ transmission happened via airborne respiratory droplets and that masks are indeed effective in curbing said contagion type; the fact that Trump stated that for Democratic states to receive medical equipment/supplies from the federal government they would have to “treat the [Trump administration] well” or they would have to “get that gear themselves”; the fact that his administration advised against the continuation of contagion-curbing, life-saving lockdowns, with Trump falsely stating that “the worst days of the pandemic are behind us” and calling instead for premature state re-openings for the sake of the economy, as if the country’s economy were more valuable than human life; and the fact that Trump stated the country’s number of coronavirus deaths was really low if you didn’t count the deaths in “blue states” (i.e., deaths in the states that voted against him in the 2016 presidential elections are irrelevant to him), then the appropriateness of the mathematical figure in the subtitle should become evident: it is known as the first “Belphegor number” — which is also a “Belphegor Prime” and a “Republican Prime”, as well as a “Beastly Prime” for having the infamous number “666” in it — with Belphegor being one of the seven princes of Hell, along with Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Satan, among others.