TODD KINCANNON EMERGES (AGAIN!) FROM THE PRIMEVAL MIRE

As a native Sandlapper wearied by the constant laugh-out-loud, shaking-my-head humiliation my beloved home state must oft endure per the absurdities uttered by Republican office-holders and functionaries, I wish I could say that Todd Kincannon was being satirical when he offered his prescriptive advice for how the government should respond in the instance of a person testing positive for the Ebola virus.

Alas, I can’t.

I wish I could excuse his suggestions as being those of a man who had run out of Thorazine and couldn’t get a refill because the twice-daily shipments of everybody’s favorite anti-psychotic pharmaceutical product had been diverted from Columbia to Washington, where they are stockpiling it in preparation for the return of Republican lawmakers following the November mid-terms.

Alas, I can’t.

When he suggested protocols of “napalming villages [infected with the virus] from the air,” “immediate humane execution [of those testing positive for the virus] and sanitization of the whole area [by the use of napalm],” and “humanely ‘putting people down,’” he was being, along with mortifying and shameless and [feel free to fill the blank with your favorite pejorative modifier], serious. After all, he reasoned, “Sometimes you gotta put Old Yeller down.”

Questioned as to whether he understood that, uh, “napalming villages” would mean the killing of non-infected innocents---I know, I know, the person asking the question is as asinine as the person to whom the question was addressed, but stay with me!---he resorted to ‘rithmetic to make his point: “How many new infections are there per victim? If the number is more than 1, euthanize at 50/50. That’s just math.”

He has apparently not decided at whom the finger of responsibility for the Ebola outbreak should be pointed. His first assumption was, of course, that President Obama was to blame: “We elected a Kenyan as president. Now nobody has a job and there’s an Ebola outbreak in Dallas. These things are not coincidental.” But, after what I am sure were a few days spent on his knees in fervent prayer and soul-searching meditation, he had a change of heart and took to Twitter in order to finger a new villain: “The people of Africa are to blame…They could stop eating each other…”

Alas…

There is nothing surprising about any of what Mr. Kincannon has to say as to resolving the outbreak of Ebola, his prescriptions being little different from and no more mortifying or shameless than any number of past prescriptions he has offered for a variety of what he considers social “aberrations” and cultural “ills.”

Two examples should suffice:

He does not relate the undeveloped, tortured plight of both Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa in any way to centuries of oppressive, exploitative, dehumanizing colonial rule by entitled white Europeans. Instead, he sees such suffering as resulting from the end of that horrific colonial rule by entitled white Europeans: “Native Africans should be the Cherokee casino-runners of Africa, not the primary inhabitants. But the Brits got squeamish.”

His advice per rendering Muslim terrorists---which he sees everywhere---unable to perpetrate violence on American soil? “We need to do to the Muslims what our forefathers did to the savages that infested America prior to Christopher Columbus…A civilized people must never be afraid to charge through the savages and shoot all the males over the age of 12.”

As I said, Alas!

All is not lost, however, in the Palmetto State.

I do find a kernel of hope in the fact that Mr. Kincannon actually called for “humane” executions, “humane” not being a modifier he has previously used relative to “executions” of any sort. That he has potentially evolved from an acceptance of the “inhumane” to a preference for the “humane” relative to the mechanics by which the state kills people signals real personal progress for a guy who still struggles to stand upright upon emerging from the primeval slime and has yet to master the usage of those pesky opposable digits.

It is also a sign of hope that South Carolina Republicans---institutionalized and not---have, at least publicly, almost universally distanced themselves from his remarks. Almost. Universally. At. Least. Publicly.

Perhaps best and most hopeful of all, local pharmacies say they are expecting new supplies of Thorazine tomorrow, which justifies my cautious optimism that, when Mr. Kincannon is back on his meds, he will take a break from perpetuating the notion that our state actually comprises the last remnant of the original primeval muck---the evolutionary soup!---from which creepy crawlers first emerged. Or, that South Carolina, rather than being the gracious land which is home to “the Grandees of God’s Little Acre,” is the actual location of what readers have wrongly assumed for three generations was just a construction of Maurice Sendak’s vivid imagination---you know, the island “Where the Wild Things Are.”