It’s a nice idea but really, why bother David Wallace Wells in the NY Times asks us to imagine what would have happened with the dialog around the origins of the pandemic if we could just all get along. It’s true that on a different planet we could imagine such a thing. Unfortunately we live on a planet where the right wing is batshit insane so reasonable dialog is impossible. Steve M makes the point well: But we can’t “imagine that none of this was presented … in partisan or nationalistic terms.” We can’t “imagine that Donald Trump had not been president and that nobody used the term ‘bioweapon'” — or, more memorably, the phrase “China virus,” a name Trump first endorsed on March 11, 2020, when COVID was barely a presence in much of the United States, and then used repeatedly in speeches and on Twitter. Right-wingers poisoned our COVID discourse from the start, the way they poison our discourse on so many other issues. Writing about our COVID debates as if they can be imagined without right-wing demagoguery is like talking about the real estate market in East Palestine, Ohio, as if the train derailment never happened. The housing stock is wonderful! The schools are first rate! Yes, but there are deadly toxins in the air, water, and soil. The derailment determines what we talk about when we talk about East Palestine, just as right-wing demagoguery sets the terms for how we talk about … well, pretty much anything these days. Instead of saying that “we” — meaning right-thinking…