“It's One Person” 200,000 Times
It’s sort of about politics. But it’s more about human lives.
[I have a bad habit of burying the lede, which in this case is a video. Scroll down for it if you’re the skimming type.]
Look, I wasn’t planning on getting political in this newsletter, and I certainly didn’t expect to get political in the second issue. I probably won’t get political here again for a while, so if you can’t stomach it then wait until next week when the newsletter will be about robots and comics (for real!). But this week, I’m afraid it’s political.
See, this week the COVID-19 death toll in the United States is likely to reach 200,000 people (if it hasn’t already). And this follows a week where it was revealed that Donald Trump knew how deadly the coronavirus was and chose to “play it down” rather than be honest with the American people, which surely would have saved lives.
Last week was also the anniversary of 9/11. Like a few million others who were in New York on that day in 2001, I have my 9/11 story. And every year on the anniversary I’ve always felt gutted by the memories of the day 3,000 people died from a terrorist attack. But this year I felt different. I didn’t feel nearly as gutted. Because what are 3,000 lives compared to 200,000 and growing that have died from coronavirus?
So I wasn’t as sad about 9/11 this year, and I’m angry about that. I’m angry that this stupid virus has made something as huge as a terrorist attack feel small. And I’m angry that unlike the terrorist attack, we are doing this to ourselves by refusing to protect one another through the simplest of actions, and by politicizing the most obvious things we should all be behind if we’re going to get through this.
So. I made a video.
Donald Trump said in January that he wasn’t worried about a pandemic at all because everything is under control and “it’s one person.” Well, I took that quote — “one person” — and repeated it 200,000 times, once for every American who has died from COVID-19 since then. Making this video was cathartic.
Here’s some tidbits about the video:
I originally had him repeat “It’s one person” but I cut it down to just the phrase “one person” because the repetition of the s sound in “It’s” was very unpleasant.
It would take almost 32 hours to hear Donald Trump say “one person” 200,000 times, but YouTube limits videos to 12 hours. So I had to do most of the video with Trump saying “one person” four at a time to fit. It turns out that I could have actually done them three at a time and still fit, but I realized that too late.
The repeated phrase “one person” is 17 frames long.
Most of the time, he’s on screen in quadruplicate so the on-screen counter increments four times while he’s saying “one person”. If I were smart I would have cut the phrase down by one frame so the soundbite was only 16 frames long. That would have made the counter much easier to make, since it divides equally into 4. As it is, every fourth number stays up an extra frame to keep things in sync. I guess it’s like a leap-year. Leap-frame?
That thumbnail is ugly, I know. But it’s a deliberate choice to reflect the ugliness of the content. And the font is Arial because Trump doesn’t deserve a better font.
Thanks for reading. Next week will be lighter, I promise. Did I mention that next week’s issue has robots and comics? In the meantime, please share the video, and share the newsletter!
See you next week!
David